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Honestly, as a pro digital artist, the two habits I found most useful to teach myself were "regularly zoom out to 100% so I don't get lost in needless detail" a

Honestly, as a pro digital artist, the two habits I found most useful to teach myself were "regularly zoom out to 100% so I don't get lost in needless detail" and "save every time I feel like taking a break". Windows' behavior here is inexcusable but there are a ton of other things that can happen - art software crashes, power interruptions, drink spills, kids/cats poking, etc. Switching to Linux won't save her from these. Seriously. I've been doing digital art for money since 2000. I've lost work. I've learnt to consider anything unsaved as potentially something I could lose any minute. The sooner your wife learns this, the happier she will be as a digital artist. (And set her up with automatic backups while you're teaching her this. "Oops I deleted half my sketch by accident ten saves ago" is wonderful to recover from.)

daly 10y ago
It is not the state of the PROGRAM, it's the "state of the DESKTOP". You have your art tool running, a browser with a dozen open windows, a couple PDFs open, a chat window with the art group, and all of the other open applications. POOF. Gone. It's like someone came to your office and "cleaned off your desk". Some of us rely on where things are as part of our "external memory". Do you remember which 3 PDFs (aka books) you were looking at last night? The image might not be lost but WHERE you were working on the image, the state of your toolbox, what brush you were using, what color you had picked, etc. are mostly all in your head and reflected on the desktop. That said, it is truly ARROGANT to reboot someone else's computer without permission. Next time you go to work, walk around and reboot everyone's computer while they are working. See how that goes.
- egypturnash 10y ago
  I've gotten very very spoilt by OSX trying very hard to retain information about what was open when you reboot, I suppose. At any moment I've got like four or five different desktops set up with various numbers of windows related to the task I'm doing on that desktop, and those will all come back if I reboot. I still find the "save early, save often" habit very worthwhile. Hell, maybe I'm also spoilt by the fact that Illustrator defaults to re-loading a file with the view sized and centered exactly the same way it was when you last saved it. Even with all these things making life easy for me, I'm still saying that "don't walk away from your art app with anything you'd be sad to lose unsaved" is a habit worth having. I am not defending Windows rebooting and ignoring unsaved changes in the least. That is inexcusable.
digi_owl 10y ago
Reminds me of something from Woz about always doing backups.

daly 10y ago

It is not the state of the PROGRAM, it's the "state of the DESKTOP". You have your art tool running, a browser with a dozen open windows, a couple PDFs open, a chat window with the art group, and all of the other open applications. POOF. Gone. It's like someone came to your office and "cleaned off your desk". Some of us rely on where things are as part of our "external memory". Do you remember which 3 PDFs (aka books) you were looking at last night? The image might not be lost but WHERE you were working on the image, the state of your toolbox, what brush you were using, what color you had picked, etc. are mostly all in your head and reflected on the desktop. That said, it is truly ARROGANT to reboot someone else's computer without permission. Next time you go to work, walk around and reboot everyone's computer while they are working. See how that goes.

egypturnash 10y ago
I've gotten very very spoilt by OSX trying very hard to retain information about what was open when you reboot, I suppose. At any moment I've got like four or five different desktops set up with various numbers of windows related to the task I'm doing on that desktop, and those will all come back if I reboot. I still find the "save early, save often" habit very worthwhile. Hell, maybe I'm also spoilt by the fact that Illustrator defaults to re-loading a file with the view sized and centered exactly the same way it was when you last saved it. Even with all these things making life easy for me, I'm still saying that "don't walk away from your art app with anything you'd be sad to lose unsaved" is a habit worth having. I am not defending Windows rebooting and ignoring unsaved changes in the least. That is inexcusable.

digi_owl 10y ago

Reminds me of something from Woz about always doing backups.