Remote View

1mo ago

checkmate

147 comments

slightly worse
Five years later
only slightly better
Five years after that
Incompatible with my walled garden OS of crap

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
- It's probably because they know nobody's listening to their complaints about Microsoft.

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 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.
  
  I'd rather use photopea a quadruple time before installing GIMP.
  Hell I even use Ps CS2 at work because Adobe unlocked the activation (and Adobe removed the page from the archive. org with the unlock keys) for free.
  Great enough for the few graphics I want to do and at home I use properly sailed goods.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  I'll have to check out kicad for woodworking projects
  
  And now Bitwarden is also proprietary...
- You can easily add an outline around text in gimp once you learn the process.
  Give me a minutes, I'll type it out.
  
  I know it's doable, but it's just one of those things which is much easier in other editors, and it's a pretty common feature for quick edits like making memes
  
  Sorry, work got in the way.
  To do this, select the text layer.
  Right click, click Alpha to selection.
  Voila, you have a text shaped selection mask.
- I am a very irregular user, but last few times I checked there were much better options to Gimp for people like me. Photopea is where I turn to, but I think there are others. Works from the browser, functions similarly enough that you can find help and tutorials very easily, pretty light.
  I'm sure it's different for heavier users, but a lot of the really heavy users will probably prefer the paid tool anyway, as their use makes the price tag less of an issue. So the target for something like gimp might just have dwindled into something too small to get the momentum back. No?
- 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..
- I'm trying blender every some years, last time the UX was super crappy as usual, like it's impossible to make a 2cm cube. Have it changed lately?
  
  I mean the UI of every 3d software is crap until you get used to it.
  Blender relies on keyboard shortcuts, so follow some tutorials to learn what the shortcuts are. It's not intuitive at all but it does become efficient once you learn them.
  
  Blender is perhaps the most impressive success story of the FOSS world. It has changed drastically the last few years and is keeping at it at breakneck pace
  
  I don’t use it often so I have to go through YouTube tutorials to recall things.
  You can definitely make a 2cm cube by just typing “2cm” into the dimensions.
  The interface is like vim though, it’s a modal editor and learning/using the hot keys is essential.
  To do the cube thing: The whole process would be something like press “c” to open the create interface, select cube, scroll down the properties on the right hand menu and input your dimensions. I think you can also access them in the top right of the viewer.
  I’m probably wrong on my hot keys since I have used it in two years or so.
  
  Unfortunately, Blender accidentally clicked for me after enough use, so now I get confused when I try to use anything else.

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.
- But, this seems to imply that there is no jank in software made by big corporation.
  
  Corporate jank has a different flavour to open-source jank.
  Corporate jank is like *Download the adobe download update manager in order to download updates for your adobe update manager now free of charge! Just don't forget to activate your adobe download update manager activation license in the adobe activation license activator software"
  Open-source jank is like Yeah, it's broken unless you install this specific package or there are three and a half different states that the "brush" tool can have, and the "half" is what you want most of the time or these 5000 lines of logs are not important and can be ignored, except once in a blue moon where a really important critical notice is hidden somewhere in the middle or why are you using the official installer, nobody uses the official installer! Just get it from your package manager!

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.
- Corporate apps do tend to have game breaking bugs fixed sooner, while some open source apps just don't

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.
  
  Support your local neighborhood capitalism.
  Embrace an anti-feature today!

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

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"
- 700 EUROS!?!?

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.

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

If open source is so great, why did Truecrypt get shutdown?
-Sincerely, Your friendly neighborhood FBI agent.
- I can think of very few examples where the paid version is better, usually the reason the masses use the paid version is billion dollar marketing campaigns and adopted standards.
  More relevant perhaps, corporations are not incentivized to make a good app they are incentivized to be just better than the free version so that enough people don’t switch that the free version becomes the default version, keeping open source code perpetually one step behind because they can always dump 10 billion dollars into improving a minor annoyance as long as it keeps their product the standard de facto product.
  
  I like to point out Home Assistant, it's FOSS and better than anything else. Nothing else comes close not even Google home and they are a trillion dollar company.
  
  Lol I think you meant to reply to the main thread...
- I actually thought it was them who got that software shut down but maybe I’m misremembering

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)
- It's the dark patterns for me. I recently switched from Plex to Jellyfin for my media server and it was night and day. My server was front and center on the client with absolutely zero bs in Jellyfin, while in Plex it's been buried and shuffled in with a mountain of garbage ad supported content I never wanted

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.
- more like 3-4 devs
  
  More like one dev - when you include managers, client reps, UX and UI folks, QA etc.

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.
  
  Opensource works best when there's demand and a lot of people mostly developers want that software. For CAD it's just that not much people need it and those who need it are rarely also developers.
  
  I've been using Blender and Freecad which has a bit of a learning curve. Heck, I'm still learning
- (Android) Calendars.
  fossify calendar is somewhat great, but it doesn't have support for tasks (except in its own calendars that can't be synced)
  And don't get me started on CalDav and trying to selfhost it. Baikal, Radicale.
  Actually I think CalDav is the source of all of our problems. At least everyone I know won't touch it with a 2-meter pole.
  And the reason why proprietary Calendars are so much better.
  
  From your post I'm not 100% sure what your problem is, but if it is synchronisation with the host you can try DAVx⁵ for that. It's also on the Play Store but costs money there, on F-Droid it's free. It's able to synch Nextcloud tasks.
  
  Oh I use proton calendar, which is kind of open source but idk if the server is.

Which proprietary app is better than the open source version?
- Adobe may be a shit company but Photoshop's user interface is far better than GIMP
  
  Photoshop has a nice looking UI but there are some very subtle but really useful things GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. For example when drawing with the Rectangle/Ellipse tool GIMP doesn't immediately lock in the selection but gives me handles I can use to perfectly fine tune the selection down to the pixel, especially for the ellipse tool. I don't get that level of control over the marquee tool in Photoshop.
  I can also freely scroll and zoom while using the lasso tool in GIMP and it can go between free draw lasso and poly draw lasso by clicking and dragging or just clicking to establish new lasso nodes. And I can just undo any of those nodes by hitting backspace.
  The only tool I really miss in GIMP is the magnetic lasso but needing to drag the cursor all the way to the edge of the screen just to scroll somewhere else on an image makes the tool so much worse.
  
  I don't think that's nearly enough to make it better.
- MS office is arguably the best office suite in terms of features. The overall user experience is awful though.
  
  Yeah, typical Microsoft.
  
  I'm terms of features? Their features are useless because they can't play nice with others, which is the point of a document.
- CAD
  
  Yeah okay. Damn.
  
  Agreed, I run Brics CAD on my linux box.
  I only chose Brics CAD over AutoCAD/Draftsight because they have a NATIVE linux version. This is for 2D CAD work only.
  I haven't had a need for the 3D stuff yet.
- I used Joplin everyday for half a year but switched to Obsidian after that. They both essentially do the same, but I found the latter to be more adaptable to my needs and paradoxically easier to modify.
  Don't get me wrong, the open source one in still great. Served me well while I was using it.
- Steam
  Ableton
  Google Maps
- MasterCAM blows absolutely every open-source solution out of the water. It isn't even a competition. In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy their really expensive and restrictive license, because in the end you save a near immeasurable amount of time in modeling, drafting, programming, and production. The fee CAD programs that can even support a postprocessing operation (becoming closer to a real CAM solution) are really bad at it and the toolpaths are far from ideal.
  
  That sounds really specific.
- Lighroom is better than Darktable: Better UI, more stable, more "AI" tools. This is the reason why I am using windows too.

The profit motive is why they throw so much money at it. I like FOSS better too but these differences can't easily be separated.

It probably isn't.

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?

Wtf are you guys talking about, like desktop apps are the end all be all of computing. 98 percent of codebases contain open source. There's like 5000 open source libraries in your iphone. For most things there just are no proprietary alternatives. It is the state of the art, ubiquitous in everything from medical equipment to satellites and TVs. The digital economy runs open source, with an estimated worth of 8.8 trillion dollars.
- How much is funding though?

I really try to like these Apps.
But the OpenStreetMap's App sucks. I can't do a U-Turn on the Autobahn. And no, I won't break through a closed Exit. Is there any way to make it that it find a new alternative route when I "miss" or simply can't take the Exit?
- I prefer OSMand over Organic Maps, because it has much more features, just the map renderer isn't as pretty.
  But I mostly use it for pedestrian and bike navigation. But I think car navigation works very well as well.
  Also, if the map data isn't so great in your region, you can try playing StreetComplete and help improve it yourself.
  OSM is the Wikipedia of map data, and offers likely the most detailed map that we have.
  
  I will try that! Thank you!
  
  For me the UI was just almost unusable. While the features are very nice and mostly unmatched, there is just no way to find them. Also it really killed the battery of my phone. While hiking it was fine, but for real time turn by turn navigations my phone died in about 2h compared to 4 or so on other apps
- Use Organic Maps
  
  Thats the App I use. .__. Is that not the offical OSM App?

There is like no advertisement at all. I don't know what to consume anymore, heck, who I am

hobbyists
Not so sure about that plural...

It’s a double-edged sword. The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people. Without leadership or centralization of open-source, there will always be too many distros to choose from. Obviously, centralization of open-source software is self-negating, and not a realistic idea.
- Blender Foundation I think has perfectly balanced the quality that comes from a centrally managed project with the community and adaptability of its open source nature and the support of the community.
  They have a managed hub where a lot of fantastic community plug-ins reside but just as many high quality plug-ins are hosted elsewhere. They also do their best to bring in exceptional talent from the community officially into the Foundation like the hiring of the old Animation Nodes plug-in creator to work on Grometry Nodes and revamp all the other node based workflows in Blender.
  
  If that model were applied to Linux distros, I bet we’d see a larger adoption of the OS.
- The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people.
  Most advanced software has a learning curve. People who have invested a bunch of time and energy learning Walled Garden OS will find other Walled Garden apps easier to use than folks who grew up in the open-source wilds.
  That is a big reason why big OS companies (Microsoft most notoriously) practically give their software away to college kids and junior developers. Gates was even quoted saying something to the effect of "I'd prefer software pirates steal Microsoft Windows today than use a competitor tomorrow"

147 comments