alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. “Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software”
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
😎 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.
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.
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.
How’s that even patentable? If it actually is, then whichever game dev decided to use WASD to walk missed out on something.
