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I feel much better occasionally donating money to the open source developers knowing that it’s going to the developers and not to a massive corporation where the primary focus is on marketing and not on the product. Actually, a lot more useful than Windows or Mac, because with such a large community and customizability that comes along with Linux, you can almost always quickly find a fix for your problems instead of simply sending an error report and waiting for the bug fix to never come before they move on and try to sell you an upgrade to the operating system or program. There’s a huge community base, so it’s pretty easy to find solutions to problems. With Ubuntu, it’s easy to install as a dual-boot, so you choose which operating system to use on start-up. I’m currently using Ubuntu, but there are plenty of others ( Fedora, Red Hat, Mint). If you really want to go the open source route, it might be worthwhile trying a Linux operating system. I have had issues with GIMP being unstable in Windows and have had (almost) no trouble running any of these in Linux.
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Linux rant – feel free to skip: All of these tools are avilable for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
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