Ada

CachyOS, because I wanted something arch based due to the archi wiki and rolling releases.

My media boxes run Ubuntu, but that will change when they get rebuilt/replaced at some point, most likely to Debian

That appears to be hardware, not a distro

Are you mounting a FAT32 disk by any chance?

I’d just re-install Windows over the top of the fucked up install normally. It was a bit easier to recover from, and a bit harder to fuck up

It was similar for me, but not quite the same. The thing I hated was starting from scratch. I’m very much not a distro hopper. Back in the day, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to troubleshoot issues and get the system working again, and that kept me interested, but eventually, I’d hit a problem I couldn’t resolve, and I’d have to start again from scratch, and at that point, I’d just go back to Windows.

Now, I still get to do the same thing. If I break it, I get to learn how I broke it and try and fix it, and I find that process compelling. But because I’m using btrfs restore points now, I don’t get to the point where I have to start again from scratch. So I can work at solving it to the limit of my abilities, with confidence that if I can’t work it out, it’s not a huge issue.

That also sounds like a good way to stop learning!

The “starting over” part is what made it take so long for linux to “stick” with me.

Once it became “restore from an earlier image”, it was a game changer!

I mean, I’m impressed that someone had the time to thoroughly try out all of those distros in two months to enable a meaningful comparison!

Came here to make this joke. Was an hour too late…

Yeah, it does look great.

But in terms of tiling WMs, I have high hopes for Cosmic! It’s coming along really well (though not as pretty as Hyprland)

What is still lacking?

I’m curious, did it solve your problem?

Vanilla arch is nothing like the manually installed arch of old. It’s as easy to install and use as any other distro. I started with arch too, and my now permanent distro is arch based

The Hyprland dev is enough to make sure I never use Hyprland

I had high hopes that I could make them work that way, but no luck :\

Upscayl isn’t much use to me, because I don’t need upscaling, only noise reduction.

Aydin appears to only work on PNG files, not my RAW files

Not quite. I’m talking about high ISO images. Most of my photos are not high ISO, so most of my photos don’t need this.

For a professional, they generally don’t shoot in high ISO, because it degrades the image quality. They use external lighting, flashes, reflectors, fast lenses etc, anything and everything they can, to avoid shooting high ISO. So a pro, on a pro shoot, won’t need dedicated noise reduction software, and can use the profiles built in to apps like darktable

I take pride in capturing the image, not relying on software to recreate it the way I wish it had been shot

Unless you’re shooting flat JPGs with no photo modes enabled, and not doing any post processing, then you’re not getting that result. And even if you do that, two cameras shooting the same scene will produce different images, because the process of converting RAW sensor data to the reduced colour palette and bit depth of a JPG image, involves an algorithm deciding how best to recreate (not capture) what you saw with your eye, and no two cameras do it the same way, and neither produce a “true” capture of what you saw.

Ultimately, it’s a meaningless distinction. My camera does in body image compositing, using firmware to stack multiple frames in to a single exposure, giving you light trails, without overexposed static light sources. It uses AI subject recognition to drive its auto focus. It has a 120frame buffer than records records directly to the buffer whilst holding the shutter button half down, and then writes them all to the card when you press, effectively letting you capture moments that you would normally have missed, because human reflexes are imperfect. And the RAW software that comes with the camera literally uses AI noise reduction.

So for me to draw the line and say that AI driven noise reduction (non generative AI at that) is a problem would be a bit hypocritical of me.

As it is, the camera hardware itself does solid noise reduction on the JPGs it produces (using algorithms built in to the firmware) giving really nice results even at high ISOs. But the only way to replicate that with a RAW file, is using the camera supplied RAW software (which doesn’t work on linux), or by using a 3rd partyAI noise reduction app (which don’t work on linux). If I don’t use them, then I’m in the strange situation where my high ISO JPG preview photos look better than an end to end post processed RAW file.

If I was “embracing the flaws that my camera creates” I would be shooting in JPEG mode, using images mostly straight out of the camera, and they would be less noisy than what I can achieve with current linux tools.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and using m43 (or four thirds before it) for most of that time. I know what I want from my photography, and I know the tools that give it to me. What I want is for the image to look like the scene that I saw. I don’t care if it’s a pixel perfect match for it. I don’t care about embracing the flaws that a camera introduces, flaws that don’t exist when viewed through the human eye (reduced dynamic range, sensor noise etc), out of some sense of “purity”. Purity that was lost the moment I pressed the shutter on a digital camera that has to encode the image in software to make it visible.

Dedicated noise reduction software like Topaz and DxO rely on the GPU. And because of that, they don’t work on Wine or VMs (unless you have a dedicated GPU and can get GPU passthrough functioning).

I use darktable and digikam for every other step of my workflow, but that one step, I just can’t do with Linux

Unless you have very peculiar hobbies.

Or you take your photography a bit too seriously! Good noise reduction software is next to impossible to do on Linux. It’s the only reason I have a windows box in my house