[meme where the hero pulls the mask off the tied-up Firefox’s head, revealing Safari]

Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn’t help you if you need to edit photos, though.

KDE has neat stuff, but Compiz was the king of bling.

Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.

Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…

Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.

You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.

Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…

All of those issues are also present in proprietary software. Not sure why you think free and open source software is unique in that regard.

In my experience, FOSS generally works better than the proprietary alternative. It tends to have fewer features, but the features it does have are designed to be useful to the user rather than to collect more money from the user, and tend to be much more thoroughly debugged. My favorite example of this right now is Thunderbird versus Microsoft Outlook; the latter has plenty of bells and whistles, but trying to use it is an utterly infuriating experience.

Also, FOSS alternatives tend to be sparse in topics that most programmers don’t personally care about or don’t have access to. For example, there are a great many FOSS text editors, because every programmer needs one, whereas FOSS business accounting software is not so common, because most programmers don’t own businesses.

Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.

That’s a problem with proprietary software (i.e. proprietary apps and websites), not free and open source software (i.e. your browser, operating system, and Reddit client).

When a business refuses to do business with me because I use FOSS, I take that as an insult, and take my business elsewhere if I can. I suggest you do the same.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Not as long as we practice capitalism, no. As long as investors demand that businesses grow faster than inflation, those businesses will look for ways to take more and more of your money, forever, until they finally collapse, and then the cycle of enshittification starts anew. What you want is stability and equality, but stability and equality are anathema to someone who wants to be richer than everyone else.

What do you dislike about GnuCash?

Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.

I hadn’t heard of it, so I looked it up, and…WTF? Systemd-networkd with extra steps? Systemd-networkd does not need extra steps!

Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.

Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?

Going down isn’t the problem. Keeping an email server alive isn’t difficult.

Your messages getting summarily rejected by just about everyone is the problem.

I wonder if Gorhill could have avoided a lot of the nonsense bug reports by making uMatrix default to allowing everything, as if it was not installed at all.

the accidental benefits of the free software movement: a global community working asynchronously, sharing code without pay. these important, critical benefits, which were responsible for the absolute dominance of things like gcc, the gnu coreutils, and linux - have been hopelessly devoured. all they had to do was strip away the pesky moral movement that all of these efficiency gains carried with it - and voila. money.

Except for the part where a lot of FOSS development is done by corporate employees, for pay, because the corporation uses the software too, needs it improved, and isn’t above sharing those improvements with the rest of the world.

Need I remind you that every single web browser engine in common use is open source now? Every last one. Even the one Microsoft uses.

Why? Because it turns out that cooperating with the community, rather than fighting it, is far more efficient for all involved, behemoths included. We have made free software profitable, without sacrificing freedom.

And yeah, Predator drones run Linux. Everything runs Linux. Phones run Linux. Servers run Linux. Billboards run Linux. Routers run Linux. Video game consoles run Linux. Even Windows runs Linux. Linus Torvalds set out to achieve “world domination, fast”, and he has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, without compromising his principles.

That’s a win for FOSS. A really, really big win. One whose magnitude and importance I think Jes severely underestimates.