Photopea is a great free alternative for most users and works in a browser. Though unfortunately there is no decent native alternative on Linux for Lightroom or other photo editing apps (Photolab, Affinity, etc)

For the longest time I had the opinion of “I wish I could switch to Linux but so many things just won’t work on it. and troubleshooting Linux is a nightmare.” yet now almost every day-to-day task on Linux works fine with little issue. For me the only two things keeping me chained to Windows are photo editing (no good Linux app exists and Windows versions don’t work well) and live events (using many different pro-end devices that don’t have full support for Linux) so I have Windows on a small SSD for when I have no choice but to use it yet now I happily daily drive Garuda and hope that one day I can remove that SSD entirely.

The year of the Linux Desktop might not be right now, yet it’s definitely becoming more promising if we’re seeing more and more “regular users” making the switch.

I already felt pretty bad when I had to go from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 due to missing features I wanted and no support for certain devices I used. Spent a long time trying to tame Win10’s obsession with forcing things onto me through various tweaks, registry edits, etc and I was hoping that all of the horrible things I saw in Windows 11 would never surface. It only got worse.

The frequency in which Windows 10 reverted my changes and tried to install new things on my system only increased to the point I said enough was enough and switched to Garuda this year. Now I’m happily using an OS that installs what I want and keeps quiet until I tell it to talk to me. I couldn’t be happier.

I was testing out Garuda (Arch) and Zorin (Ubuntu) when I was trying to get away from Windows back in late-May this year. Everything just seemed to run way smoother on Garuda even up to the point of certain installs just working on Garuda compared to me spending hours troubleshooting the problem on Zorin.

I’ve seen many-a-person break their SteamOS install on their Deck by disabling read-only mode and running random AUR packages though that’s sort of to be expected when you hit the “I know what I’m doing” button without actually knowing what you’re doing. Thankfully fixing the OS is rather trivial with no files lost.

Assuming you don’t need a windows only application for your workflow (admittedly this isn’t very common)

Unfortunately all of the native options for photo editing on Linux kind of suck. Even for hobbyists. Getting Windows versions to work properly on Linux is may more effort than it needs to be as well.