Floyd L. Davidson
Also be aware that with Linux if you become proficient at writing shell scripts there is just no end of ways to improve productivity. The ImageMagick tools are fabulous for editing. And there are many ways a shell script can speed up your workflow. For example, I preview my images, as JPEGs, with a very customized version of XV which can sort them into various directories. The JPEG images I don't want to convert with UFRAW go into one special directory, and then a shell script moves the RAW files to the same directories where the JPEG is now at. Then I run UFRAW and it never loads a file I don't want to process. Plus when I want to run the batch on all of them, I use a script that does odd things like automatically setting wavelet noise reduction depending on the ISO it was shot at, and it determines how many CPU cores are available and proceeds to keep each CPU busy with a different process (which with as many as 12 cores can make a huge difference in how fast a few hundred RAW files can be converted to TIFF files).

nospam
if that isn't proof that linux users do things in the most difficult and most convoluted way possible, i don't know what is.

Floyd L. Davidson
Difficult? Perhaps for you. But it allows a faster and more effective workflow. Even if you don't understand why.

Every time I need some complex task done repeatedly, and especially if the intervals between occasions when it is done are long enough that I am not likely to remember exactly how to get it perfect... I write a script.

One example might give you an idea. A few years ago I developed a "menu flyer" for a local restaurant. Today there are a number other things, mostly signs and an annual calendar, that get printed using the same logos and so on, but the main product is still the menu. There is the flyer, there is a webpage (check out the menu at http://samandlees.com), a 12 page spiral bound table menu and a 12 page folder menu. Try doing that with a Windows system and make it so that changing the price or description of a "Sam & Lee's Burger" requires editing just one file and then typing "make" to update every version. Oh, and you can't use a "cookie cutter" software package template either, because when the owner tells you they want a specific change to the format it is never a menu choice and it also isn't optional!

Between the Tex typesetting code, bash shell scripts and Makefiles, it's now right at 10,000 lines of code.