These posts make me ask question out of interest: how many people here are creating snapshots of their system between updates? Whether it's before major updates or on a more granular basis, and is it using Snapper, Timeshift or other methods. Up until the last few months my use of Linux has been server based and I'd create a snapshot before performing a major upgrade. Ie. Fedora 40 to 41. But since I've shifted over to using Linux as a desktop OS, I've been using Snapper or Timeshift on my desktop machines, and doing hourly snapshots just in case a minor update screws something up or I do something retarded that warrants a rollback.
Funnily enough, I had (rsync because ext4) snapshots set up via Timeshift on Linux Mint but they ultimately ended up being useless because I fully migrated over to Fedora 43 Cinnamon after building my new PC and transferring everything important over via NFS. The cadence I had it set on was once every 3 days, but that was before I realised it didn't restore my home directory. I've got some massive SSDs in this new PC; btrfs snapshots should be really easy and I'd have the space for frequent snapshots unlike with Mint where I had a much older SSD with an ever-diminishing 500GB of storage. I was gonna wait until like March or April before Fedora 44 drops so I could get the Btrfs snapshots set up. Ideally with my home directory included.
Before fully jumping back to Linux in September 2024, I was
horrible at maintaining backups. I literally distro-hopped on impulse, purging my hard drive multiple times to satisfy curiosity, and then I realised "Oh fuck, I deleted my math homework," or "Damn it, I lost that meme video I saved in the group chat" or "Oh... right... I deleted my temporary registration for my car"
after the fact. Even when I started doing backups in 2024, my disks were way too damn small for any meaningful snapshots, and rsync's great but those btrfs snapshots are allegedly excellent.
Even non linux users aren't really fans of them from what I've seen
Adobe's always been a fucking shitty company to deal with. Even during the late 2000s, Adobe was loathed for absurdly expensive license costs for Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Acrobat, and so on circa CS4. If you ever used Photoshop in any serious capacity, you never paid for an Adobe license out of pocket. You either got your job with a pirated copy and kept your mouth shut about it, or your work PC already came with it preinstalled due to corporate volume licensing. If you actually paid for an Adobe license out of pocket as a home consumer, you were basically a laughingstock. Unlike paying for WinRAR, there was never any honour in paying for Adobe. WinRAR never stops working after the 40 days are up, paying for WinRAR costs almost nothing if you have a job, and it's actually an endearing meme. Adobe's a multi-billion dollar company that makes huge profits despite being so predatory, and this was circa CS4-CS5 during the 2008 financial crisis, everyone was tightening belts, yet somehow Adobe could still have the nerve to charge like $500 for Photoshop.
The problem with Adobe nowadays is that they've dialled their predatory anti-consumer practices up to 11. Microsoft has tons of acrimony nowadays because of forced AI integration and their decades-long history of anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, but Adobe beat Microsoft to the curve at least a decade earlier because of the transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. Oh, you were a moron who paid $500 for a Photoshop CS4 disc at Staples almost 20 years ago? Guess what? As of 2021, the CS4 activation servers were fucking
shut down so you can't even install CS4 despite spending 500 in 2008 dollars, so you lost even more money on it adjusted for inflation. The worst part is, even with that knowledge, there's no incentive to migrate from Photoshop to a different program because warez are omnipresent on Windows.
There ain't any worthwhile alternatives to Photoshop. Paint.NET doesn't even count because it's basically just MS Paint + layers, blurs, and extensions. GIMP can come within 80% of Photoshop, but the UX is fucking awful no matter what version you run and all the equivalent tools are objectively worse (i.e. lasso/path tool <<< pen tool). Photopea is almost good enough, but it frequently comes up short in edge cases, and its pricing is fucking awful too. Not Adobe tier awful, but unforgivably bad when trying to create a Photoshop alternative. Video editing at least has a tangible use case because of DaVinci Resolve and Kdenlive; image manipulation doesn't have anything that comes close.
