MudMan

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

“Unknown” goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it’s the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.

I rock an ultrawide monitor. You know how many needless pixels a bottom task bar takes up on that thing? If I wanted to stick duck tape on a third of my screen I would do that.

So I went and paid for StartAllBack immediately. Because screw that.

They cared the last few times, hence my good news comment.

MS’s revenue may be whatever it is, but Windows is definitely the crown jewel. There is no way MS would live through it cratering in home use. Not in this weather.

John Riccitelo sees your “they couldn’t possibly be this self-destructive” and raises you a golden parachute.

To be clear, all the not-so-bad alternatives in this thread are still dealbreakers for me. I do pay for one Office sub, because I need it for work, but I have Windows installs in maybe half a dozen devices and I am NOT paying subscriptions for all of those.

The real silver lining is that if they do attempt it, and they might, it wouldn’t be the first time a Windows version bombs so bad in favor of its predecessor that they have to roll things back immediately, so we have a pretty clear picture of what that would look like.

It still is, they just changed the number on a random patch when they cut the actually useful option to put the taskbar on the side of the screen.

Yes, I’ve tried Krita. Krita is great. Go Krita. Krita is a painting program, though, not a full Photoshop replacement.

As, you know, we said in the post right above this one.

I’ve tried Krita, but it’s primarily a painting tool, not really a Photoshop alternative for other tasks. It’s very solid for what it’s meant to do, though.

Yeah, it’s just that specific hole in the landscape where GIMP has become the default and nobody else is doing better despite being the part of the ecosystem that Adobe holds with the tightest grip. It’s extremely annoying.

See, it’s annoying because I do care. Like I said, I think OS is important. The culture around it determines how projects grow and are handled, and that’s a much bigger problem than “disagreeing with a dev”.

Regardless, the idea of forking forever based on petty disagreements and cultural drama is very much part of the problem, not a solution and an unsustainable pattern. It’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that because the code is accessible there is no room for feedback or criticism. The free hand of the market will not fix all problems, whether it’s with code or the economy.

No, it is not. You say that but there is zero evidence that “people” are leaving commercial software for open source software based on concerns about transparency and control. Those are positives in most people’s minds, sure, but the open source software that dominates against commercial alternatives is the one that leads on features and usability. Sometimes solely on price and free access. Those factors are at best a tertiary priority, and sometimes not even that.

That’s what I’m saying here. The online circle that considers that transparency and control are the primary reason to choose software at the expense of feature limitations or poor UX is a very small niche disproportionately focused on those issues. And performatively so, at least in highly visible places like social media and dedicated influencers.

I think open source is great. It’s important. And yes, once monetization encroaches into the feature set (see Chrome attempting to DRM the Internet) it’s crucial to have an open source alternative to bypass the loss of functionality. But the market doesn’t move to alternatives based on their open source nature, they choose the most convenient software available to do the thing they need to do. Sometimes that software is commercial, sometimes it’s free but closed source, sometimes it’s open source. That’s fine. It’s not gonna change and it doesn’t have to.

That is important because sometimes open source devs forget about that and don’t focus enough on the things that matter to consumers. And sometimes the open source community, such as it is, will excuse this or even take pride on working around it on the basis of that performative sense of belonging and righteousness. I think that’s a risk for everybody, which is the part that annoys me about it.

Yep. You either get the features but not the depth in mobile apps or the depth but not the features on GIMP.

It genuinely sucks. Because it’s not that the technology is proprietary at Adobe and can’t be replicated. Like I said, Blender holds up to the best of commercial software and it’s just as free. It’s that the GIMP guys haven’t quite found their way to that qualitative jump Blender took.

Not a graphic designer either, so I also use it for, say scanning documents and stuff like that. But I’ll be honest, if it takes more than that I’ll often just load into some mobile app meant for the edit I need to make just to avoid GIMP’s backwards UI.

Hah. Yeah, I guess it sucks having learned Photoshop before it was an outright scam, because there is no good alternative.

Let me caveat that: there’s actually great art software that’s either cheap or free and there are many basic quick photo editing apps. But broad image manipulation and in-depth photo editing? It’s GIMP or nothing, and GIMP is definitely not it.

Could have fooled me, because I have maybe half a dozen Android installs on devices that run all the same applications and are functionally identical to any manufacturer version out there without being related to them at all.

That’s my entire point, there is no major concern for most people about where their Android build is sourced as long as it runs Android apps. If the open source “world” is not dictated by being built on open source code and instead dictated by a label of purity based on the lack of proprietary, monetized or closed source portions then… yeah, that’s annoying. It’s computer veganism. I don’t begrudge your choice to engage in it, but I do demand my own freedom to eat a salad any way I want it without arguing the merits of the lard that went into fying my croutons.

If nothing else, I’d urge for caution thinking that this slice of open source fundamentalism is who open source software is primarily serving (it’s not, that’d be the users that use the software for software things) and some self-awareness about that group of users being out there.

Man, that’s a rough entry point. I’ve been waiting for GIMP to get good for decades, and I’ve accepted now it’s probably not gonna happen.

You’re such a disappointment, GIMP. Blender is right there, why can’t you be more like Blender?

I have a bunch of asterrisks to that characterization. People on Android are on an open source OS and don’t get into “the world of open source” much at all. That makes me think your narrative there is mostly true of performatively avoiding other software.

Honestly, my first time installing Linux was in a different millenium, and my personal experience is that the “world of open source” you describe comes down to sharing notes and taking pride about the rough edges and bad UX involved in the process as a badge of honor or sign of moral purity.

In my experience people using open source software that works well and integrates seamlessly cross-platform don’t go to a different world. They just… you know, install Blender and do the work they need to do. Or use Android. Or set up a NAS and use it to store their files. Or have a Rapberry Pi and use it to play games. You know, they do things.

I’m cool with open source. I’ll prefer an open source alternative when two options are equal in features and UX. I’ll be honest, though, if there is a “world of open soruce” as you define it, it seems mostly kind of annoying.

I… is that a thing that people have?

I mean, maybe I’m too old, but I don’t know of anybody in real life that actively thinks there is a “world of open source”. People mostly just use software. Software is either good or bad. It’s either monetized or it isn’t.

Maybe I come from a time where a piece of software attempting to charge a fee was seen as a cute quirk, or the extra charge if you wanted a printed manual, but yeah, this doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.