I always make fun of this with the coworker that I'm training.
"See, the PDF is malformed and crashes the program. But that's normal, this program costs only €700 per year. When it happens, use this free program to open it, and there's no problem"
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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I feel like people will give a pass to the shitty elements of Microsoft Office, etc. but then harp on the tiniest issues with open-source software.
Kind of reminds me of a recent election...
It's just like for Windows , but we're so used to the software that we've learned to work around.
When you switch, you are met with productivity loss and learning new quirks, which makes the experience less than stellar.
In today's context, for the vast majority of people, if it isn't easy to use, they won't use it because pretty much every app and software has become plug and play (except niche software that looks like windows 3.1)
A company I worked for has had such a bad experience with the Microsoft business suite that they actively avoid using any MS products at all costs. They started offboarding a year ago and they STILL haven't managed to get rid of everything
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That's because the "all star team of designers and engineers" spent 80% of their time in meetings to keep management up to date with the progress of the project, listen to yet another wild ass idea from marketing and because they adopted a new and fashionable Software Development Processes without understanding the principles behind it so have a daily 1h standup.
Scrum master: alarm goes off oh.. well, guys, this stand up's been going so long our next one started so let's just slide on into it..
Senior Dev: dies
Honestly many times it's better. Shoutout VLC, KDE, Linux, qBittorrent, Librewolf, Handbrake, Tenacity, CHIRP, Flipper Zero, and too many more to mention by name.
Ublock
An app developed by hobbyists who, if not passionate about it, at least care enough to spend their time developing and contributing to it, even if it's free
vs.
An all-star team of designers and engineers who are bogged down in corporate bureaucracy and do the absolute minimum to maintain their positions, while saving energy to do things that they actually enjoy. Like, oftentimes, it is developing the aforementioned free apps.
slightly worse
Five years later
only slightly better
Five years after that
Incompatible with my walled garden OS of crap
I find the tiny amount of jank comforting
It's like a subtle reminder that you aren't being exploited by a big corporation.
seriously, really helps learn troubleshooting too, not just throw and error number at you and close.
not just throw and error number at you and close
Lol every Microsoft error I've seen in the last few years has been of the "Oops! Something went wrong!" variety. I would kill for a fucking error number.
I saw this one recently in a car: "Error: USB input." Okay, so what am I supposed to do now?
Not like it matters, even when google finds a promising link, Microsoft has invariably moved or deleted the article, but instead of just telling you it's gone, you get the windows 11 landing page...
Fucking Apple going down that route too.
“ can’t be ejected as it’s in use”
It fucking ain’t. I’ve force quit all the fucking apps you shithead. The only way to safely eject is to shut down.
My macbook is circa 2012 and many years ago my CD drive just completely vanished from Finder. No indication that it exists anywhere, so no hope of ejecting the old CD that's stuck in there now, and of course I can't stick a fresh CD in. My kingdom for a fucking physical eject button.
I remember trying to use a Mac back in the early '90s. There was no disk eject button and the power button was this big knob sitting right next to the disk drive exactly where a rational person would expect there to be an eject button, so I kept accidentally powering off the computer whenever I wanted to eject a disk. Took me some time to accept the incredibly intuitive dragging the drive icon onto the fucking trash can to eject.
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The all-star team works to develop software that works perfectly and will supplant all open source competition. Once they become dominant they can switch focus to monetizing literally every aspect of its functions and through enshitification destroy everything that made it great. But hey, what are ya gonna do?
Blender is fantastic
GIMP needs a total overhaul by designers. The image processing is fine, plugin ecosystem is good too, but the interface needs to be updated to include concepts that have changed.
For example you can’t add an outline around text, it’s very much a raster editor with layers, when most workflows benefit from vector concepts.
GIMP can't draw 2d shapes. What's that all about? It almost motivated my inexperienced ass to work out how to add it myself..
Gimp is great for when you need photoshop, but aren't doing it as your job, and don't want to sail the seven seas.
Also, Fwiw when I want to outline text in gimp i select a text path, make a new layer, select from path, expand the selected area 2px, then fill (oh and move the layer behind the text layer). Unike in photoshop where theres like... one step, iirc.
Yeah I agree, I used to use it when I was a student who couldn’t afford photoshop and I was able to create some awesome graphics.
Once I got used to photoshop (I used it from CS2 to CS5) I couldn’t get back into GIMP. The hot keys and mental model were just so much better in PS and PS clones.
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GIMP needs a total overhaul by designers.
Isn't that what GIMP 3.0 is going for? It's not out yet, but it is a big overhaul.
I’m not sure, but that’s exciting if so
GIMP UI as is hasn’t changed much in 20 years.
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No, regrettably there won't be a major UI overhaul as part of GIMP 3, it's very much under-the-hood improvements. From what I've seen, the maintainers are very open to a UI overhaul, but they don't have the right contributors to do it in a significant way.
That said, functionality like text outlines aren't really a UI/UX feature in the main.
Krita is also fantastic and better than most closed source drawing software
KiCAD is also getting almost as good as some of the closed source ECAD software and is definitely good enough for small companies not doing flex designs. It is by far the best hobbyist-targeted ECAD
Libre office is perfect now for small companies. It is only missing a couple of small office features. Maybe PowerPoint power users would have a hard time making morph animations
Bitwarden is pretty much the best-in-class password manager for companies too
OBS is the gold standard for streaming
VLC is also the gold standard for media players
Bitwarden is the only one that has SaaS backing and the rest is volunteer driven, but with different funding models.
I hope by 2030 KiCAD and FreeCAD will be much more prolific in the professional space for small companies.
And now Bitwarden is also proprietary...
Oh, that is great news! I didn't notice that they had backed down again.
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It's usually actually the other way around in my experience
Anything that has the label "pro" or "enterprise" suuuuuucks, is badly designed, full of bugs.. take the open source app, and it just works
There’s just so much more opportunity for feedback, use case stories, and a variety of perspectives in open source development.
Good enterprise development does all those things as well, but there is always a bigger barrier to the user when you have to design behind a curtain.
I'm pretty sure it's not lack of user feedback. It's MBAs deciding the user is wrong and unprofitable, therefore better add more tracking and ads.
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By not requiring an account to use, it's already ten million times better.
By respecting my ownership and not making me jump through flaming hoops for compatibility with everything else, it's already a billion times better!
I can't even tell you how absurdly mad I get when I run into an 'anti-feature' that's literally only preventing me from doing something the company wants to keep as their own special power.
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corporations can create good applications and tooling, they also create toxic dark pattern applications
open source devs can create air tight software or they can make some dingus word alternatives that just doesn't work at all
I love open source but there are certainly some bad programs out there (for free though)
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If open source is so great, why did Truecrypt get shutdown?
-Sincerely, Your friendly neighborhood FBI agent.
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Saying millions of dollars like that's a lot of money to spend developing an app. Meta has literally hundreds of devs just working on WhatsApp. You'll burn through around a million dollars in one year with about six devs when you factor in all the costs.
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Is it? I pretty much only use open source stuff and all other proprietary alternatives I know are shitty
Open source CAD software is basically useless. As someone who has tried every few years to use open source alternatives for personal projects, I always end up paying for an AutoCAD or Fusion 360 license.
My professional background has always been higher end software like Siemens NX, Solidworks, Inventor, & AutoCAD.
LibreCAD is the closest I ever got to something that seemed useful for 2D. I hate FreeCAD, QCAD, BRL-CAD, etc. Many open source projects waste so much time to do simple tasks and buck standard methodologies for their own spin on how they think you should design.
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