When OP says “layout” I think he means the old as windows 3.1 layout and workflow. It was good in the 90’s. Now it feels cumbersome and dated.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that’s the main selling point of Mint: Familiarity and stability. I settled on it for 19 years after I got tired of distro hoping. I’ve contributed financially to it every month for years.

However, it’s that cumbersome workflow which got me back into Gnome where I use only two extensions: transparent task bar and window autotile.

Gnome on a laptop flows naturally and out of the way.

Usually the problem is that new users go out of their way to fuck things up.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Most of us did that and that’s how we learned. But really, all mainstream distros are good out of the box unless you have an unusual hardware configuration. Specially now with flatpaks, appimages and Snaps.

Of course if you want to tweak and twist KDE or install extensions on Gnome or PPAs from who know where on Ubuntu or overuse the AUR in arch you need to know what you are doing.

However, it’s no different in Windows but for different reasons. The most common way to fuck windows up is to start installing software from non reputable sources. I think many of us have had to clean windows installations from friends and family when it becomes unusable.

You don’t mention the specifics of your hardware and that’s an important consideration.

I was a mint user for more than 10 years. It never crashed. It became my fail back when I moved to Fedora/Gnome. It’s very crashed, but my laptop (ThinkPad X1 carbon) supports Fedora out of the box.

People keep saying “a DE you can customize…” While I love KDE, the amount of configuration available means that’s it’s easy to screw things up.

I suggest Gnome because it has a modern workflow and it’s otherwise out of your way. Of course, you can install extensions. Just don’t go crazy because extensions may not be as stable as the core.

The GNOME workflow becomes natural after a few minutes.

I’ll need to try!

I have a finely tuned Xmonad/Xmobar but at some point I’ll need to switch to Wayland. This looks promising as a replacement.

All those “experts” lecturing you and they don’t even know about man in the middle attacks.

They don’t know that there are active bots searching for HTTP addresses to inject risky code or redirect to malicious sites.

You providing some feedback which may help OP is seen as criticism.

They had me u til “your dad installs it”

Removing the word “windows” in the last frame and also “your dad installs it for your dumb mom” to “your parents install a server. Maybe your mom does it or your dad does it. Maybe you can also help!”

Teaching “children” that technical tasks are for dady to do is so cringe.

Those two little changes and it becomes a readable story.

Once you implement Authentication/Authorization it’s fairly simple to add a new function.

I think here, the problem is not the complexity of the task, but the developer’s prioritization based on all the backlogged features.

Still, users can do this on their own. Directly on the folder, autorotating all pictures using wildcards.

You can start with what you can. What can provide the most value and iteratively improve from there.

Sometimes as a developer or even product manager, you don’t know what feature complete really means until people start using it.

Oh, by the way: https://imagemagick.org/script/formats.php

But, really, how frequently a normal user borks their system?

I’ve been using Linux for since 2004 and I can’t remember the last time (if any) that I irrecoverably borked the system.

I use arch, mint and Fedora. Repositories in those three are solid.

Yes, immutable systems have their uses. Mostly entreprise uses but for home? Only out of curiosity.

I’m just learning about the software but all the tasks you listed (crop, rotate and adjust), can be done easily with imagemagick simple one-liners.

For example: Convert in.jpg -rotate out.jpg

Or

Using the auto-orient option or using jhead.

Why is it so hard for this app to implement it?

Really? I guess everyone was 15 at some point and hadn’t heard that distro wars are useless 🤣

There is no best. Period.