PhotoLab on Linux?

DxO PhotoLab Windows topics
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A little less consistent in the UI (which I have no problem living with in exchange for not continually changing config as Apple likes to do), but Windows 10 and 11 have been no less solid than my Macs. Certainly not terrible unless you have little tolerance for anything that isn’t a Mac. :slightly_smiling_face:

They both work just fine these days, with their own pros and cons. I have more issues with PhotoLab than with either Mac or Windows, and mostly different issues given how out of sync the two versions are.

I dunno about consistent, unless you stick to a single distro and window manager, and even then there can be a lot of random change from release to release. (Which is no less the case with macOS really, or applications like PhotoLab, unfortunately.)

I’ve been using Linux since kernel version 0.99 (I think it was) and am well-versed in config files and more, but these days it’s as painless as anything unless you have esoteric hardware, although laptops can still be a bit hit and miss. I wouldn’t send some non-technical person down that path, but they can be equally stumped by Mac/Win.

I think the base Mac Mini is great value (extra anything on Mac is ridiculously priced), but I get more flexibility out of the Windows boxes I’ve built, don’t have to discard the entire machine if something fails (as has been the case with two Apple laptops) and can repurpose them for Linux or FreeBSD once they become too long in the tooth for Apple/Microsoft, or too feeble for DxO.

It’s certainly been a mess with PL9 of late, but installing NVIDIA drivers on for my Windows box is as difficult as installing any application on either Mac or Win; that is, not difficult at all.

The problem is with DxO selling software with features that are clearly not yet ready for prime time, regardless of whose fault that is. I have zero interest in the new AI masks, but gave them a try on both Mac and Win (with my existing/latest drivers), noted that they didn’t work very well (especially on Win), and then carried on testing existing functionality to see what DxO had broken this time. For me, I see no reason to spend money on PL9 in its current state. The removal or PRIME really irks me for one, as long as DeepPRIME 3 isn’t a drop-in replacement.

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Absolutely, and this is the way I do it.

When setting up a new Windows installation (or at any time afterwards) go ahead and use the default admin account that is automatically created to get Windows installed. After Windows is up and running “unlink” the default account from One Drive (look it up… it’s easy).

Then create two new local accounts. While creating each account be sure to click on the link that says you don’t know the MS logins for that new account… and that will create a local account with the fewest direct ties to MS.

Create one admin account with admin privileges and then another user account with no admin privileges. Switch to one of the new accounts and unlink it from One Drive, then uninstall the One Drive app from that account. Then switch to the other account, unlink it from One Drive, and uninstall the One Drive app from that account.

The last step is to get rid of the default account that Windows initially created. Switch to your new local admin account and delete the original default account… and now you have a computer with two new squeaky clean local accounts with the fewest possible ties to MS you can get without disconnecting from the internet.

Be sure to do the One Drive unlink operation as described above or else it will keep coming back and reinstalling itself no matter how many times you delete it!

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So… the vast majority of computers in use today, then.

You can put Linux on a Mac, too. Very easy on Intel ones, but I believe the Apple Silicon ones are now practical as well.

NVidia drivers purely so you can see your screen. I guess additional hardware is not so common these days, but I used to have all sorts of driver issues back in my Windows days. Pre-Win10, though.

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Well it would not have been for me. The reason is that a key software for me like iMatch DAM is just not available for Mac. That’s why an industry guy like me never will settle with Mac. There is no substitute for iMatch DAM as I see it right now.

The same goes for many many industry cases today. There are lots of nische markets on Windows too but a nische market on an OS-platform that has a market share of 70% is far bigger than on 5-10% (depending on how we count). It isn´t all that easy to neglect that because it is a decisive fact.

Mac is fine if you can stay within Apple’s fence. If you can’t that fence will instantly turn into a straight jacket.

But even I have wondered sometimes about the Microsoft way of doing things. Just take this “dubble click-action” Windows introduced. I have seen people on courses I gave in the nineties that repeatedly failed to double click (the right way) because they just clicket to slow despite they were told to “double click”. It took some practise for many to find the right pace.

So that isn’t all that natural and educational and the worst was maybe an OS where you had to click a “Start”-button to stop it :slight_smile: After many years they finally got the message and replaced that “Start-button” with the “Windows-button” we have now. When they released the first version that had that “Start-button” world wide they played the Rolling Stones song lyrics “Start me up”. That was as close Microsoft ever got got to a “One button interface”.

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Yep I’m replying right now using Asahi Linux on my M1 Mac.

Things pretty much work. There’s still a few hurdles, like the microphone and thunderbolt support. But the Asahi team works surprisingly hard to get all these issues sorted as fast as they can.

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Why isn´t a microphone working?

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Whoops I misspoke.

Mic does not work for some devices, but it does work on my M1 MBP.

I never actually tried the mic because I hardly ever make any calls on my laptop.

Here’s the full list of supported features:

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It is very common these days that me and many others communicate with AI via microphones. For example the translation of speach to text in Open AI is very good and simplifies and speed up the dialog a lot. It saves me a lot of time so this is really essential for many today. There is a lot of reasoning going on these days.

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I’m intrigued about this fence. On an iPhone or iPad, I get it. The fence is pretty high. On a Mac you can turn off almost every protection (but why would you) and even without doing that, I routinely use several dozen significant apps of my choosing, a ton of little utilitiies and open source software and write my own scripts, drawing from all the Linux knowledge available.

If you have very specific hardware or software requirements that don’t work, then I get it. But there is also software I use on Mac that simply doesn’t exist on Windows. Not to mention the software I don’t have to install because it comes with the OS.

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And when you run out ideas with scripts and the command line, you’ve also got Xcode, which is Apple’s programming environment, giving the ability to write your own apps from the ground up.

You mean all these… Apps included on your Mac – Apple Support (UK)
Includes little tools that you didn’t even know you needed, like the colour meter, for measuring pixel colour values. Image Capture, which transfers files directly from your camera and can even scan stuff. Preview, which allows the editing and annotation of PDF and image files, resizing and image file conversion, etc, etc, etc.

But, to me, the most important app has to be Time Machine, which is continually doing incremental backups every time I change a file, swiftly followed by the Spotlight search engine, which can find files on hundreds of criteria, including EXIF metadata and exposure settings. For photographic use, the only thing I felt it necessary to write myself was a keywording and star rating app, which makes use of the Spotlight search database, to index my images. Finder can even create automatically updating “smart folders” based on search criteria, so I can have a folder that automatically keeps track of e.g. all images with a particular keyword - a bit like Projects on steroids.

Maybe why Apple charges more for their computers. You get so much more than just a bare bones computer. And, no, I am not paid by Apple.

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At a cursory glance, it seems to be just a GUI that spins up a Windows VM as an OCI container. This is similar to other attempts to just make assessing Windows applications from a VM of sorts more user-friendly. However, the issues of virtualization remains that most consumer-grade discrete GPUs do NOT support SR-IOV and so only way to get the best graphical performance (besides emulating with a powerful CPU) is using a GPU that supports it (currently as of writing, there is some new iGPUs and Intel Arc Pro B series, unless you’re looking at old datacentre cards).

Nevertheless, I have reservations about the performance, especially exporting tasks because at least on PL8, on all AMD hardware, it does virtually all compute on CPU and does not touch my AMD 7900XTX. (So perhaps it doesn’t really matter because PL8 for me on Windows doesn’t even hardware accelerate anything.)

Also, I have attempted getting PL8 started up through Wine and as expected, still some technical hurdles.

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WinBoat works quite well, I use it mostly for very dedicated software with minimal interactions (like Garmin Connect to upgrade maps on my watch, updating device firmwares, …), by rerouting connected USB devices to the Windows container.

However the main issue here is that the program windows you see in the host system are compressed video streams from inside the container: I wouldn’t recommend it at all for 2D editing as it would be like editing through Remote Desktop or TeamViewer.

On top of that, GPU passthrough is not yet implemented into WinBoat so the program speed would really be low if it even starts at all (and you can forget all the AI stuff I think), and unless you have two GPUs to use that could also be an issue.

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Thank you for that clarification. I won’t suggest WinBoat again.