Linux talk ?

I have been running Linux since 1999. When I started digital, in 2001, my Coolpix 995 only produced .jpg and .tif, so it was easy to do pp with Gimp. By the time I got my D200 in 2006, I had already started using Bibble. The transition to AfterShot was easy, and they do support my D500, and they have started supporting Z bodies. Unfortunately, Corel keeps relying on deprecated libraries to make new builds of Aftershot, so for now I run it on a machine which I keep at an old version of Linux, but that has its limits. I can't keep an otherwise modern machine with an old OS on it, and drag down the rest of my environment with that. That is annoying, because they do provide updates for recent Nikon machines
On the other hand, I am able to run a VM. Which got me to try Windows 10 in a VM with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM. I am still testing Aftershot, Lightroom and Nikon NX in that sandbox. But I can say that if I am forced to run anything Windows, in the context of working Nikon RAW files, I am leaning towards Nikon NX, which is sure to support all new Nikon cameras.
Meanwhile, I am prepared to run AfterShot in a VM with my older version of Linux.

JC

I've been a fan of FastStone for many years. Running under WINE there were always a couple of minor hitches.
First of all, if you're in thumbnail view with a lot of pics in a folder it will not display the the thumbnails for all of them. You'll find you can click on an empty space where they should be and they'll show up in the preview window. Small Icon view or Detailed List is fine. Once upon a time - back in the days of WINE 1.x up to 2.1 it was possible to install comctl32.dll which is what was needed to make it all work properly. Sadly that no longer works.
There are also issues when running it on the MATE desktop environment. I'm not sure if it down to the compositor or something else, but if you try to use it fullscreen and then use keyboard shortcuts for editing, the whole thing just locks up. Also the edit windows are smaller that they should be and cannot be corrected.
That aside, no there's nothing quite like it for linux.

I managed VMS systems starting with the original VAX 11/780 in the early 80's all the way through to VAX 6000 series systems in the early 2000s. VMS was a great OS - it's architect Dave Cutler went on to create Windows NT using many of the same fundamental principles.

One of David's axioms "Thou shall eat your own dog food" or something to that effect. When NT got far enough along they continued on the development using NT and each weekly build was rolled and the developers had to cope with the residual problems - or, at least that's what I was told.

I worked at DEC(anada) for 4 years, part of which was a SIP consultant for a VAX 9000 install. I liked VMS and particularly the DEC documentation.

Peter

VMS was a wonderful OS and the VAX had many advantages. However, Olsen was in denial of what was happening in the 1980's as Unix workstations from Sun, Apollo, HP etc. starting popping up at 1/10 the price with almost the same performance. By then DEC was an old and stodgy company winding down from its prime. A major US defense system had replaced some critical processing systems with IEEE compliant UNIX systems and they were not producing the same answers as the VAX systems they were replacing. The processing depended on some sophisticated numerical analysis algorithms. Since I was a long term contractor/consultant with the US DOD agency in question, I got tasked to look to find out why. Well IEEE arithmetic is IEEE arithmetic. VAX and VMS was designed to use extra bits in the real computation cycle - doing the final "round off" at the end of a process. That could not be done in IEEE arithmetic as the round off was done after each calculation. The difference in the answers was the IEEE computation had significant numerical noise. The IEEE processes produced more and larger numerical errors than VAX/VMS. But the die was cast. I was next tasked to lead a team to design and develop new more robust algorithms for the processing which we did. By then the DOD had decided that DEC/Vax was not the system they were going to use going forward as they had settled on Unix. Unix was the OS of choice. We even pushed Unix into the Cray supercomputers which were running Folklore developed using IMP72 at the time. Olsen was late to the game addressing the workstation revolution of the 1980's. He also saw Unix being a fly by night academic exercise - belong at places like Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley and Bell Labs to play with rather than in real live computers. The handwriting should have been on wall after DARPA poured millions into the hardening of Unix for computer security on DARPA net. In fact he denied that workstations had any value. DEC finally came with a workstation but by then it was too little - too late. By 2000 it was almost impossible to find a VAX computer in US Defense processing systems and that ended up sending DEC into oblivion. DEC did have one last gasp with the introduction of the Alpha - but that was short lived the die had been cast. That DEC was bought by a PC company - was a sad end of a once great company.

Yup, all true - or at least as I remember it to be true. And Compaq swallowed DEC and HP swallowed Compaq.

There's an irony here: when I was using DEC VAX computers (with the same enthusiasm as other posters), their main rival for minicomputers (in the scope I was using them) was HP. But HP swallowed the company that swallowed DEC.

From a technical point of view, VAX computers had a better and more extensible architecture than HP's minis, and much better than Intel's architecture, though the latter came to rule the world.

It seems that being technically best isn't what matters. You need to be technically good enough, and commercially best (and luck helps - right place right time).

i had just been saddled with the job of director of R&D at Fairchild Camera & Instrument when it transitioned to Fairchild Weston - with the integration of Schlumberger's US defense contractor EMR (to become FW Data Systems Division of Fairchild Weston). This was the mid 1980's. One of the highest priority projects was to develop the technology for a baseline EO imagery and signals intelligence ISR system. Remote sensors in aircraft, ballons, and potentially drone and satellite removing imagery and other sensor communicated data back for processing at a central facility. We were working with Lockheed in the drone department. We had Fairchild Semi covering the image sensor end and our own data systems division covering the RF and signal processing end.

The only outstanding question was the computer architecture. DEC was stuck in the past. While the Vax was the best mini-computer of its time. Its time was coming to an end with the advent of the micro computer networked workstation/server architectures, e.g., Sun and Apollo. This networked architecture was also been pushed by the development of the DARPA/ARPA net on going. The distributed architecture where multiple work stations vs., a room full of equipment was the clear winner for a scalable baseline system for future imagery analysis systems. The same was true for signal processing systems - although it took a few more years to be realized. When we met with DEC in corporate headquarters to discuss where we were going vs. related to our requirements - it was clear that DEC was stuck in the past while Sun was opening up the future of scalable processing architectures.

What finally pushed us toward the workstation architecture was when we talked with the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) about their needs and the one thing that was obvious was a future requirement of was rapidly setting up a facility in remote locations to support defense. A room full of climate controlled VAXs that cost 5 times as much didn't quite fit in.

DEC failed to respond to Sun - and DEC made another fatal mistake. While VMS is a wonderful OS it is a closed OS and at that time the US Department of Defense was pushing open systems and network interoperability and DARPA was pushing UNIX. DEC refused to address until it was too late. The real issue with DEC was was soggy management decisions. With he mini computer DEC took on IBM and replaced the large mainframes for most applications. Then as the workstation environment came along in the mid 1980's Sun did the same thing to DEC with the workstation environment. At the same time Cray was making low end "super computers" that were UNIX based and had a much better cost to performance ratio than the VAX.

VAX and VMS were solid. I really liked the clustering technology. Multiples VAXes, Hierarchical Storage Controllers (HSC), tape drives (9 track – yikes!) – all plugged together with Cluster(?) Interconnect (CI). I could look up a process table and see all the processes across all the VAXes, not just the one I was logged onto. I think Compaq coveted that technology and was a major part of their decision to buy DEC.

There were a bunch of senior managers at DEC that saw the VAX line and especially the annual maintenance contracts and software support (SMSS) as a sacred cash cow not to be messed with. They also goofed big time with PCs, betting the house on CP/M instead of DOS and Windows.

And they couldn’t sell or market their way out of a paper bag. A brilliant bunch of engineers, but useless up against the likes of HP sales. I sat next to a sales guy (I was in software services). He received an internal email one day laying out the 10 steps for HP to win a workstation sale over DEC. He started to laugh and read it out load and as he read his voice tapered off and went quiet. “Shit” he said “I’ve had this exact play done on me!”

When everyone else was running to develop and sell distributed computing and desktop systems DEC was busy dreaming up mainframe computers – the VAX9000. Says it all.

Peter

Ran Microsoft Xenix on 80286. Ran BSD Unix on a Vax 11/760. Then AT&T Unix on 80386 dividing algorithm across 10 machines to get parallel processing. Booted the first floppy disk image posted to usenet by Linus Torvalds. Windows NT 3.0 beta. Then SunOS. Solaris on 8 CPUs with 32 GB RAM in 2001. Various Linux distributions and created embedded Debian distribution.

Used Tops20, but never VMS. Used CPM/80, concurrent CPM, OS2 Warp. Wrote PC BIOS. Never tried Office 365. Sendmail, exim, dovecot, apache2, bind9.

Now only macOS, Debian, and Android. I am retired, so no employer to make me do Windows.