Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage.
I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.
Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff.
Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.
Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.
The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop.
And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser.
But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful.
Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way.
I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things.
Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone.
And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.
Trying my best not to sound like a raving Linux zealot, but what you see as normal productivity stuff I may not have done... ever.
Converting a PDF to a png? Why? Maybe IrfanView could do that, it's what I've been using on Windows for any conversion since ACDSee went out of fashion...
I've never seen a GUI tool that works as flawlessly as pdftk. Yes, it's CLI, but it works better than anything I ever encountered.
Screenshots? You just need to find the right app, I'm not happy with the windows thing (I've been using Greenshot for a while and it's on par with whatever I use on Linux).
But yeah, my comparison is only Windows, I've never owned a mac. And maybe I'm on the completely other end of the spectrum in my perception of what "normal tasks" are.
Have you never needed to annotate/sign a PDF? On Mac OS just open Preview (the sane default for PDFs), use the annotate tools. There's even a built-in UI for "scanning" a signature via the front-facing camera, the software automatically cuts out the background so you have a signature to drop on the page. Save and the PDF is signed. Trying to do this on Linux requires moving a mountain.
In KDE:
- Double Click PDF, Opens it in PDF viewer "Okular"
- Select "Stamp" Annotation Tool
- Draw region to place stamp
- View stamp properties and click to select image source
- Select SVG file I always use that has my signature that I created using my wacom tablet.
- Adjust placement if needed
- Save file
Takes all of ~15 seconds. Don't see how that equates to moving mountains.
15 seconds and a wacom tablet. The killer part of the preview.app is that it uses the front facing camera to capture a signature, quite well if i might add.
I've only ever done this with my own signature (so, a one-time process), of which I have a scan and my workflow hasn't changed for 20 years, just the tools. as the other reply said, just inserting an image into a PDF is not a problem, and I still don't understand the use case of the camera. But in this case maybe I've had my signature available for longer than phones with cameras exist contributes to the fact?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe all the office work I've done in my life is simply different.
That’s because you’re not a “normal” office productivity user or even online creator working with just normal customers needing normal docs, files, and normal staff that you need to share normal stuff with.
I can't claim you are wrong... But I struggle with versions of those on my Mac on a regular basis, as well. Screen capture, in particular, is hilariously fickle for me. I finally got it so that it puts the image in my clipboard. Which is great, until I try to remember how to get it directly to a file. Because, I can't remember where that setting is anymore.
And I have no idea how to make a pdf on this computer. Combine multiple images? I don't even know why I would do that. Much less how.
My favorite battle recently was just trying to shutdown the machine without it starting right back up. Pretty sure that isn't possible if you have external monitor and keyboard hooked up. Which took me several shutdowns to realize.
Most of these are fairly discoverable and have been consistent for decades:
Shut down: Apple Menu > Shut Down (since ~2001)
Print to PDF: File > Print... > PDF > Save as PDF (since ~2001); some apps have an File > Export... menu item as well
Combine multiple images: Photoshop (or image editing app of your choice, e.g. Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity, Krita, etc.; since ~1990)
Screen shot: command-shift-3 (entire screen) or command-shift-4 (selection/window), (since 1990s; earlier for print screen; Mojave or later for command-shift-5); discoverable/configurable via System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Screenshots; modern macOS also pops up a thumbnail you can click on
I also clearly knew how to do a screenshot. But once you have set it to go to clipboard, command shift 4 will silently do that from now on. And I am not at all clear on how I would discover to change that.
And the pdf claim was with preview, not another app.
Worse, though, I could write a very similar rebuttal for any computer in this vein. If you know how things work, discovering is not hard.
Yes, I suspect you may be correct in suspecting your USB dongle or keyboard from sending a power-on signal. I ran into a similar confounding problem where bluetooth keyboards and trackpads in a drawer were being pressed/activated and constantly waking my laptop up when it was connected to an external monitor!
I don't fully understand the task you were trying to complete, but Preview is not an image editor so I don't think it can do what Photoshop (or other image editors) can do. It can however combine multiple PDFs into a single document by drag-and-drop, and this is documented in Preview > Help.
I was trying to say something that is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "it's easy once you know how to do it" or even "it's easy to find once you know where to look" – specifically, the Mac UI was originally intended to be fairly discoverable by exploration (and relatively clearly documented), and although some of this has been lost due to iOS-ification, much of it still is:
1. Menu items such as Shut Down are easily discoverable (but in your case it didn't work, perhaps due to an external keyboard turning the system on.)
2. Export to PDF is very discoverable, but isn't universal; print to PDF is discoverable, and is documented in macOS Help, but is perhaps more subtle than it should be because it's in the Print... dialog. I suspect its location there is due to historical and implementation reasons rather than testing users who are unfamiliar with the system. "Preview" after all is named as a "print preview" application rather than a "PDF viewer" app.
3. Screenshots are discoverable by searching for "screenshot" in System Preferences or macOS Help. If you forget the keyboard shortcut it's in a fairly logical place: Keyboard > Shortcuts.
4. On macOS, the Help menu is contextual based on the current active application. Overall system help, titled "macOS Help", is located in the Finder's Help menu. This is perhaps a bit subtle for Windows users who may not know what the Finder is (it's like Windows' File Explorer) and might not realize that the Help menu is contextual. There are "macOS Help" entries for each of these tasks, but you need to know to look in "macOS Help".
While much of the macOS UI is still fairly logical, discoverable, documented, and consistent over many releases, that doesn't mean that a Windows (or Ubuntu) user will instantly know how to use it without learning some important design differences, or vice-versa. The good news is that once you learn them they're fairly consistent across the system.
An interesting point that you might be suggesting which I definitely agree with is that even after 40+ years of development, traditional desktop GUIs can still be greatly improved even without changing their fundamental design.
> My favorite battle recently was just trying to shutdown the machine without it starting right back up. Pretty sure that isn't possible if you have external monitor and keyboard hooked up.
Apple Menu -> Shutdown. Make sure you don't have the "restart" checkbox ticked.
Works fine on my MBP with external monitor and keyboard
Shift+Command+5 gives you the full screenshot experience, and let’s you define where to put it (Desktop, clipboard, etc.) Once you select a location, it will be the default for next time.
Preview let’s you create a PDF pretty easily?
No idea what’s going on with your restart issue tho.
Not clear how to use preview to make a pdf with multiple images. I'm guessing that is something that is easy if you have to do it often? I'd probably reach for html or word. Probably word, first.
The easiest way is to open your PDF document in Preview, turn on View > Thumbnails (if it isn't on already) and drag and drop your image document into the thumbnail pane.
You can combine entire PDF documents this way, either dragging them from a Finder window or dragging the title bar icon from an open document.
You can also drag and drop thumbnails between open PDF documents in Preview, and you can create a new document from the clipboard if needed using File > New from Clipboard. (Note if you want to drag other pages into it you will need to save it as a PDF first.)
They do by default, but you can make it start sending to clipboard. I find that a bit more convenient for many uses. Evidently, if I use the 5 version instead of 4, it gives you the option again. Not shockingly, I typically use 4...
> Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.
idk with KDE this seems to work ? I hit screen capture and spectacle shows up and saves it to images.
Can confirm this works on Plasma. There's also Flameshot[1], which is cross platform, that works really well and has pretty much every feature you could ask for in a screenshot app.
> Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf
not want to sound harsh, but imgemagick could do that 15 years ago.
I use OpenOffice Draw nowadays, but despite the fact that PDFs have become a joke of a file format, Linux is the best to handle them by far, unless someone thinks that Acrobat is anywhere near to being good (or Preview for that matter)
The issue is not the lack of good tools on Linux, just with the ones shipped with the major distros and DEs.
Quality and simple tools do exist if you look for them:
- Image viewer: feh
- Screen capture: scrot
- Dropbox: Syncthing
- Converters: Pandoc, ImageMagick
- PDF viewer: zathura
- Media player: mpv
etc.
Granted, some of them are CLI only (though they might have GUI wrappers), but desktop users with productivity as the main goal should learn to use and not fear the terminal, instead of settling for whatever their popular brand of distro decided to package for them.
I've had problems with scrot and drawing selections, so I've been using maim for a while, otherwise: yes, exactly my kit - but for IM's convert I have to search for the syntax every damn time, it really sucks.
Funny you mention that. I just got a Mac and I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to save a screenshot from the screenshot menu only to rage quit out of frustration. 2 days later I found out I have 20 screenshots from all the failed attempts saved on my desktop!
Nothing about the UI telling me how or where these things were saved. It confused me coming from Ubuntu a lot :)
For an opposing view, for productivity stuff, I really don't like the simple mac apps approach. I regularly open preview expecting it allow some simple changes, but end up disappointed and either do it via gimp or imagemagick. It's similar to Windows experience where people try to release simple apps like a tool for preview, tool for resizing, tool for optimizing compression, tool for merging images/pages, etc.
It's too much hassle when two slightly more advanced tools can cover all of those usecases.
And don't get me started on mac's screenshots which are saved in 12h time in the name, so your 1pm screenshot is before your 11am screenshot and there's no configuration option for it.
Funny that you mention resizing (Preview > Tools > Adjust size) and optimizing compression (Preview > Export > JPEG > compression slider), both tasks that Preview can do out of the box. For advanced edits I use Pixelmator Pro which has a UI that is actually usable compared to the decades-old cluster fuck that is the GIMP UI.
Sorry, I should've used a different word - you can't "expand" the image - i.e. make the size larger and keep the picture in a specific place, so that there's more space for annotation on a side. (or I'm missing the option?)
> Preview > Export > JPEG > compression slider
That's recompressing (losing the quality in the process) not optimizing compression. You can't update the compression settings on a png for example.
Yeah yeah, we know Linux isn't in the perfect state for Apple die hards. This article isn't about how nice it is to use Linux and how everyone should switch, it's about the advances the UI frameworks and hardware companies have successfully made to better cater to UI DE focused crowds.
I don't want to annotate an image with a CLI, and neither do you. And a CLI is the worst UI possible for a visual task like editing an image. Apple figured this out 38 years ago with MacPaint.
Maybe not a single image, for some ephemeral task I guess, I was more just responding to the gp:
>Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.
But I don't really know what to say: I very much do prefer the cli! Even if it takes some trial and error, finding the right script that does exactly what you want gives you a reproducible and concise record of your alterations, so if you are in a position where you need to make, say, 100 images with similar annotations, possibly from a csv file or something, you can just do it! Also, it's lightweight, it's a comprehensible process, you know exactly what you are doing, rather than in some alienated userspace where you can never be sure.
I won't argue anyone "wants to", but I know what I want I think!
Pinta [1] is a lightweight MS Paint type program with broad support and a BSD license. It just works.
but it's not the car's fault if people don't want to use keys to start them up.
anyway, there's a huge amount of GUI software to handle PDFs in Linux, I will say that Linux gives you the most options, either as free software and close source ones.
Yes, then I just think for now they are better of with one of the other two. I think its great what progress is happening on the GUI front, but I won't argue with gp that some things are a little sketchy.
But for those who do have the patience and understanding for the shell and man pages, well they can become more powerful than the other Oses combined!
That's how I feel about it as well. My every day machine is Linux but I also have to use a Macbook and a Windows machine and of the three I absolutely hate using the macbook. It feels like very design choice in MacOS was purposely chosen to annoy the hell out of me.
Regarding the screenshots, maybe using the PrtSc key is more suitable for you? PrtSc alone saves the whole screen, Alt + PrtScr the active window. You'll find the screenshot as a png file in your "Pictures" folder.
Note that ImageMagick isn't always the best tool, since ImageMagick always reconverts the image, often with lower quality. Often it's useful to have the image to go in as is, or use a loseless resizing. I use img2pdf for that with great results.
I almost can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not!
It's gotta on some level be at least apples/oranges right? You describe a process with more steps, that involves launching a GUI app to do one thing. Maybe its more intuitive, but I would argue the interface makes the user, not the other way around.
I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.
Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff.
Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.
Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.
The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop.
And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser.
But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful.
Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way.
I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things.
Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone.
And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.