alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. “Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software”
Community note: Free software is in many cases more convenient than their proprietary alternatives. Proprietary software quickly becomes very inconvenient if you dislike how it works, if you don’t want to be a product, or if it has ads (like in your operating system? That’s pretty inconvenient, Microsoft).
Free software: Usually works right away
Proprietary software: Usually licensed. Need to purchase a license. Payment keeps failing. You finally get activation key. Software fails to activate. You contact support. They insist it works. After a few days it finally works. A few years later the software gets discontinued. Software cannot contact activation server as it doesn’t exist anymore. Software is now absolutely unusable.
50% of the time it works mostly some of the time.
My experience with open source software is that it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the proprietary options when I need it and then 10 years later the community has rewritten it to become far superior and I always mean to go back and try it but no longer need it.
Blender I’m looking at you.
Ok but seriously, Blender has being going like crazy ever since the 2.7 release. It is insane to me what this software can do today, while being FOSS
Yup. It went from “this is a horribly thought out way to move in a 3D scene and I can’t rebind the key bindings” to something pretty industry relevant in a short period of time.
Holy shit yes, this has happened so many times to me
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Actual malware, too. Even if you uninstall it, so many different bits are left over that still happily run in the background and might report god knows what back to base
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Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
I have so much passionate hate for Adobe, if their headquarters ever burn down, everyone who knows me will think I did it
Then you aren’t picking it because it’s free. You’re picking it because you prefer it.
Why not both?
Sometimes you can have both. Sometimes you can’t.
You’d be crazy to suggest that GIMP is a more convenient option than Photoshop. You would not be crazy to suggest the same of Audacity.
MuseScore is a particularly interesting case. I’d have said that it’s more on the GIMP side of things previously, where you’d only use it if you couldn’t afford Sibelius or Dorico because it’s a seriously inferior product (an ironically painful thing to say, because even they are extremely flawed in their own ways). But then in response to a pretty scathing and humorous review, they hired the person responsible for that critique to head up a redesign, and today MuseScore is excellent.
Obviously that’s true. I don’t use any of the two, since I rarely edit images and inkscape can be abused for when I do.
However, for me using PhotoShop would be pretty inconvenient. I can install GIMP with two? clicks on any machine and instantly use it. For PhotoShop I don’t even have a device which has an OS on which it could run. Being unable to exercise the freedoms which free software gives me is pretty inconvenient, if I would like to at some point. Especially if I wanted to share the software with other people.
But I understand your point: if PhotoShop would be extremely more convenient for a task I need to regularly do, then it’s possible I’d use it. There cannot be a right life amidst wrongs, so a pragmatic approach feels more sustainable to me than dogmatism.Personally I find GIMP’s design so poor that I would literally rather find a torrent and download Photoshop than try to do what I need in GIMP.
I’m not currently daily-driving Linux, but back when I was I’d have rathered torrent Windows and run Photoshop in a VM than put up with GIMP. That’s how inconvenient GIMP is and how much better PS is.
Out of curiosity, what kind of work did you do with PS/GIMP?
Nothing professional. I’m a hobbyist Photographer. Most of my editing is in a DAM but I do occasionally break out PS. The most complicated thing I’ve done was creating a map (both faux-satellite and faux-handrawn) of my RPG world.
For me, free software is most often competing against pirated pro software, so free software’s “free as in beer” component loses its advantage, and instead it becomes about the convenience of just downloading and running (as opposed to the inconvenience of pirating) versus the convenience of more-polished software (versus the inconvenience of often-poorly-designed software), with money not factoring into it. And with installing being a tiny fraction of the time interacting with the software, I choose the more-polished option every time. (And for me, the availability of this software is a big part of the reason I don’t daily-drive Linux any more.)
It’s what makes Audacity and new-MuseScore so great. They’re not inferior-but-free options. They’re genuinely great software in their own right.
I think Krita needs to be forked for an actual image manipulation software. I dont want Krita to veer from illustration, but IMO its a great base.
Obligatory Krita plug. Still can’t draw for shit and know Blender like 20x better but unlike GIMP Krita actually makes sense, I can find stuff, generally it doesn’t get in the way of being a canvas.
it’s way more convenient because i can just install it from repos, and don’t have to pay out the ass every month for the privilege to use it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
a pretty scathing and humorous review
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
i paid $50 for an affinity photo license, it worked great but now they want me to buy v2 for another $50
I agree on a personal level. FOSS software is much more convenient for my usecase of writing papers/typsetting notes, some automation, writing a program that works for me, and browsing/videos.
On the level of someone working in academia, it can be incredibly inconvenient if not outright impossible to implement. I can manage if I come across a bug in some FOSS software in my personal usage. An enterprise encountering an error with some utility whose support forum is a discord server: completely unacceptable. The entire printing service being offline because CUPS is temperamental: completely unacceptable.
Enterprises are the core customers of these inconvenient pieces of software with subscription based models.
Stuff being free is hella convenient to me :D
On that note, are you free this evening?
Free in a “you can own me without paying anything” sense but not free in an “I’m busy” sense
free as in beer but not free as in freedom 😘
rare FOSS rizz
free software rizz is how you get the hot girls
There really isn’t much good FOSS software in the CAD/Engineering world. I’ve tried the 2D and 3D solutions that I’ve beena able to find and they are missing way too many features or the learning curve is crazy steep. If anyone knows of good CAD software let me know, I’d love to try it.
I wonder if it’s because of patent-trolling crap, like Adobe’s case.
(Adobe runs patents on individual good-design features, like “having x option available on the right-click menu”, forcing competitors to have that same option buried in some other dropdown menu somewhere, or have the same option split in multiple steps, in order to avoid being sued…)
AutoCAD’s company has done other sleazy copyright-related shit, so I wonder if something similar is going on, just like Photoshop alternatives being shit.
It’s probably a mix of that and how CAD/Engineering software is a complicated niche market. It’s not as ubiquitous as something like an office suite or even a phot editor like GIMP. I don’t have anything to back that up other than a hunch.
Oh wow that’s actually evil. Imagine having such shit software that the only thing keeping competition away is having a literal monopoly on your features.
:)
Yeah.
How’s that even patentable? If it actually is, then whichever game dev decided to use WASD to walk missed out on something.
Because huge legal teams make sure to find the right loopholes.
Here’s a good 10 minutes of some of the more disgusting offenders.
Quick and tasty video by a great YouTuber (Uniquenameosaurus, my beloved)
I second that. I work mostly with Catia and I’ve been searching forever for a Foss and Linux compatible replacement to a point I was seriously thinking about creating one from scratch.
I do a lot of 2D civil drawings for underground utility construction and I haven’t found anything that does what I need. Also the selection is pretty much limited to Windows. The CAD programs on Mac seem to be limited compared to their Windows brethren.
It’s a damn shame, too, because the commercial software in the sector is abusively overpriced, and there’s just nothing to be done about it (unless somebody can get antitrust regulators to pay attention, which hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not holding my breath for it).
It’s not like the FOSS options out there aren’t fundamentally capable of doing the job, either – it’s just that they almost universally seem to have been designed by people who think of GUIs as a concession to the normies, and don’t understand typical or expected design workflows. I’d love to be able to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion for hobby projects, but just creating a sketch in the former is like fighting through molasses compared to the process in Fusion. A bit of focus on UI instead of under the hood features would go along way towards making these programs viable competitors – look at how Blender’s perception changed amongst professionals after it ditched its idiosyncratic pre-2.7 UI, for instance.
Don’t even get me started on BIM software… Ridiculous subscription pricing, barely a bug fix to be found, and feature requests ignored for a decade or more! The last release of Revit’s headline new feature was (drumroll, please…) A dark UI mode. Good to see Autodesk put my employer’s seven-figure subscription payments to good use. 😑
You are right about the current state of CAD/Engineering software being a mess. Crazy subscription models and no real innovation. Buggy software everywhere.AutoCad crashes at least 3 times a day or does weird stuff like the ribbon and menus disappearing. I’d love to find something that worked as an alternative.
What CAD software doesn’t have a crazy steep learning curve?
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😎 Debian. If I weren’t into VR, I would have literally no reason to use any proprietary software on my computer besides the bootloader (which I would of course also like to replace). I’ll get an index soon, as I’ve heard it runs on Linux, so that’ll be very cool.
wouldnt you still need steam to use the index? steam is sadly propriatary
Nope! The HTC headset hardware has an open API, so you can use OpenHMD (http://www.openhmd.net/) instead of Steam if you want.
woagh tahts awesome. g99d to kjow for the future
So the HTC Vive works with FOSS software but the index doesn’t? Oh man… I mean, if I’m gonna play VR games, those are gonna be mostly proprietary either way, but oof.
I tried to get my cv1(Original oculus rift) up and running with OPEN HAD but it is so complicated to me, it feels more like some completely standalone software which one needs to understand the entire codebase to even use it… And positional tracking also doesn’t work yet, so ya can just look around
Statistically you use an Oculus headset. Someone is currently working on a minimal runtime called Oculus Ameliorated that doesn’t have the shitty Dash performance overhead. It’s currently in Patreon-only alpha. Here’s her Discord.
As someone else mentioned, Steam is still proprietary, but at least getting rid of the resource heavy Meta runtime for their headsets is something to look forward to.
Ooh that sounds interesting. I’ll check out that patreon. For now I’ll just continue using steams proprietary solution tho…
I feel the need to clarify based on the phrasing of your response. Oculus Ameliorated doesn’t replace SteamVR. It replaces the Oculus runtime so you can use SteamVR without the extra overhead.
Will this eventually become FOSS, or will this remain preparation?
No clue, but I don’t believe the plan is to keep it paywalled when it releases out of alpha/beta.
If it’s more convenient for me to obtain your software for free than it is to pay for it, guess what I’m not doing.
Obligée?
