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 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.
good enterprise development
That is a contradiction in terminus, those two words don’t go together.
Enterprise development is always managed by middle managers who have no idea what they’re doing yet think they’re god. I’ve seen many enterprise level products, I’ve yet to see a good one.
Oohhh, IBM websphere comes to mind now, and I committed a little in my mouth. Enormous and gruelingly expensive product that is an unmanageable resource hog while similar open source product fly circles around it. I managed that back in the day for one of the top courier logistics and packages companies in the world. Starting it up took over an hour, not shitting you, when it crashed, there were absolutely useless multi gig dump files and then the restart that would take hours yet again. If you saw what it could do it was just… Cute.
I will never again in my life use an enterprise level product
Corporate apps do tend to have game breaking bugs fixed sooner, while some open source apps just don’t
You’re kidding, right?
Saying that after Microsoft CTO had to testify before Congress how the US government could be hacked by China because Microsoft refused to patch security holes just so they would look better, that says it all
Yep, their interests definitely do not match with the consumer. By game breaking bugs, I mean bugs that make software unusable. Like how libreoffice likes to just… crash randomly.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Krita is good, but it pales in comparison to Procreate on an iPad.
LibreOffice is falling further behind MS Office every year. It’s still pretty capable, but depends on your use case. Excel beats it hard in every way once you get serious.
Fair point but anyone actually doing serious data entry and analysis and not just using SUM and a few macros will likely be using python, matlab, or R to analyze large sets of data. Excel absolutely craps the bed.
Libre office calc can probably do a serviceable job for most MBAs needing to make a projections graph justifying firing 1k workers to raise C-suite bonuses by 20% lol
Excel‘s strength is to be an integrated IDE and database that can be abused for many things.
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.
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.
I find the tiny amount of jank comforting
It’s like a subtle reminder that you aren’t being exploited by a big corporation.
By not requiring an account to use, it’s already ten million times better.
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)
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.
Does KDE have support for HDR colors now?
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.
