I’m liking Krita and Photopea (web app), but I’m not heavy into photography. I haven’t looked for a Lightroom replacement.

It will also likely work really well, apparently. I think you just need to be careful to pick a distro that comes with NVidea drivers, like CachyOS, and it will likely just work. Test with a live USB boot.

If you have an AMD GPU and don’t care about playing games that require kernel-level access for anticheat (ew), then Linux might just work better for you than Windows, for most games.

Like, getting Minecraft installed and working with mods in CachyOS just required installing Prism Launcher from the CachyOS repos (1 easy step) then launching it. I didn’t even need to open a web browser to download an installer.

Heroic Launcher is amaze balls, too. It pulls all the free games I get on GOG, Epic, and Amazon (iirc?) into one library that looks and works like Steam’s (amazing) library. So slick. (I think it’s preinstalled in CachyOS, too.)

Not mentioned, but if there are mobo monitor connections, try those, too.

But yes, this is almost definitely a hardware problem since it’s also happening in Windows. The only other plausible option would be the hardware’s firmware, but that seems unlikely…

It could theoretically be an incredible fluke to have a software issue in both Windows and Linux… Maybe the same weird edge-case hardware interaction that’s the same between two versions of a closed-source NVidia driver? I can’t see that as plausible, though.

If OP is in a developed country, used monitors are cheap. My vertically-oriented side monitor I got for $20, and I only even paid that much because I needed one that could go vertical orientation without a monitor arm.

So do they. But then the tiny tool they built for fun Kris expanding as they add features until is useful, then really useful. And some eventually become a small, ignored, absolutely critical components in software used by millions. Too small or unsexy to stay any money, but user errors or scammers or AI slop or bugs or feature request lead to enormous volumes of email, comments, forum posts, vitriol, pressure, stress, angst, burnout, depression.

You mean the person who posted 3 hours after me?

But, clearly, a Google Home or Amazon Alexa needs cloud connectivity to function. And short of Stop Killing Games regulations forcing companies to release software to keep purchases functional after server shutdowns, there’s going to be no alternative when they shut down the servers.

But where do we draw the line?

A smart fridge should obviously keep working without cloud connectivity, since cloud features aren’t relevant to its core functionality.

A spyware house-scanning vacuum robot, on the other hand, that stores video of your entire house on web servers “to map your home” may not have the processing power to model the home based on its surveillance video recordings. So, is it reasonable, then, that these break when servers go offline?

Without any regulations, the answer is just “consumers can go fuck themselves”, which clearly isn’t a good answer.

Yeah, I installed Enterprise edition on my desktop, which allows you to cut out all the bloat and spyware. But it takes a long time to do, and I’m not sure I got everything since Windows Updates can change anything.