Thanks, muellerwolfram. This guide is excellent and dear to me as someone once stuck in the exact same position described in the opening paragraph. Indeed, flitting between operating systems was so natural that even now I instinctively want to take issue with your "dual boot sucks" but if I could use one OS for everything (and I do mean "everything", other OS emulation included) then I would, so quite simply: you are right.
For what it's worth, I chose a different route in solving my Photoshop dependence: I forced myself to learn alternatives. But I don't mean just that I learned GIMP (which I recommend, though completely sympathise with the "Regarding GIMP" section); I mean that I made it my goal to be someone who can take new software and ascertain how to do with it what I already know how to do in my "native" habitat, even if the method is convoluted or requires learning a new paradigm. This goes back to days of using elementary school computers with nothing more than MSPaint and enjoying that hit of satisfaction from performing a manual "crop": make a selection, copy it, minimise the canvas to a handful of pixels, ctrl+V, MSPaint automatically resizes the canvas to the pasted selection, BLAM it's a crop! (We've all been young, when figuring these things out for oneself is the next best thing to being a Jedi - and that said, if anyone has their own method for cropping in 2000-era MSPaint I'd love to hear it). Likewise in the "new paradigms" category, learning about Turing machines and formal data structures changed everything for me as a BASIC-minded programmer.
Since adopting this generalised view I have found it's helpful as a core principle: I can't always count on the environments I know, so learning to adapt is crucial. This applies to programming, competitions, and even romantic partners. In the infinite indulgence of our field to give everything a "cool" name, I refer to this as the "Peter Petrelli" skill.
Quite apart from arguing against using Photoshop in Ubuntu, it returns to your piece. Sometimes short of coding something up from scratch there really is only one program that does what we require to solve a specific problem, and sometimes the operating system is fixed. Knowing how to solve the equation for these variables is part of being an adaptable and valuable agent. Great article.
For what it's worth, I chose a different route in solving my Photoshop dependence: I forced myself to learn alternatives. But I don't mean just that I learned GIMP (which I recommend, though completely sympathise with the "Regarding GIMP" section); I mean that I made it my goal to be someone who can take new software and ascertain how to do with it what I already know how to do in my "native" habitat, even if the method is convoluted or requires learning a new paradigm. This goes back to days of using elementary school computers with nothing more than MSPaint and enjoying that hit of satisfaction from performing a manual "crop": make a selection, copy it, minimise the canvas to a handful of pixels, ctrl+V, MSPaint automatically resizes the canvas to the pasted selection, BLAM it's a crop! (We've all been young, when figuring these things out for oneself is the next best thing to being a Jedi - and that said, if anyone has their own method for cropping in 2000-era MSPaint I'd love to hear it). Likewise in the "new paradigms" category, learning about Turing machines and formal data structures changed everything for me as a BASIC-minded programmer.
Since adopting this generalised view I have found it's helpful as a core principle: I can't always count on the environments I know, so learning to adapt is crucial. This applies to programming, competitions, and even romantic partners. In the infinite indulgence of our field to give everything a "cool" name, I refer to this as the "Peter Petrelli" skill.
Quite apart from arguing against using Photoshop in Ubuntu, it returns to your piece. Sometimes short of coding something up from scratch there really is only one program that does what we require to solve a specific problem, and sometimes the operating system is fixed. Knowing how to solve the equation for these variables is part of being an adaptable and valuable agent. Great article.