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)
slightly worse
Five years later
only slightly better
Five years after that
Incompatible with my walled garden OS of crap
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
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.
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.
I remember GIMPshop being a thing back in the day. It was much easier for me, but it was abandoned ages ago. PhotoGIMP is fine, but it’s missing a lot of the QoL stuff that makes Photoshop better.
Yeah
And that’s not to say GIMP is bad software, it’s competing with a design app that’s almost a monopoly worth billions of dollars. That’s a high bar to beat for free.
And their invented forced onto you file system 🤢you can’t open a jpg, change sonething and then you jhave to dance around the export, nit save when clising etc etc. Why devs, why?
Would be super cool if they got things up just a bit.
you can’t do what ? I have trouble following you
They are complaining that Gimp only allows to save in reconstructable formats (e.g. xcf) even when you opened baked fileformats (in this case jpeg)
In Gimp you have to export to those file formats as you would lose layer and history data as they don’t support that.
Why devs, why?
When you’re opening a jpeg it is transformed into a Gimp datafile so you can edit it.
“Saving” as jpeg would remove all your editing history, collapse all layers, and perform lossy compression on the resulting image.
Since losing most of the info included in your open file is not really what you want when you hit “save”, they put it behind the “Export” button.I guess it would be more logically consistent if the workflow for editing images was to create a new Gimp project, then import a jpeg into it, the way some video editing software does it.
But that would be even less convenient.
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.
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…
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.
And now Bitwarden is also proprietary…
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.
Cheat sheets like this are honestly hugely helpful.
OMG.
You’re the hero we need I guess 😋
Saved.
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.
Shift A to create object
Thanks, now I’ll have to try it again :-D
My workflow is (I still will use 3dsmax for rigging & animation) make cubes, tubes and other simple geometry, set them at specific positions, do boolean operations.
Moving the vertices would be nice too but that would be a start.
What do you mean with moving vertices? Isn’t that one would do in edit mode, where you can select vertices, move them around, make new faces based on the selection, delete faces,…
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.
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.
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”
I find the tiny amount of jank comforting
It’s like a subtle reminder that you aren’t being exploited by a big corporation.
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!
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.
Fucking Apple going down that route too.
“<Your disc> can’t be ejected as it’s in use”
It fucking ain’t. I’ve force quit all the fucking apps you shithead. The only way to safely eject is to shut down.
My macbook is circa 2012 and many years ago my CD drive just completely vanished from Finder. No indication that it exists anywhere, so no hope of ejecting the old CD that’s stuck in there now, and of course I can’t stick a fresh CD in. My kingdom for a fucking physical eject button.
I remember trying to use a Mac back in the early '90s. There was no disk eject button and the power button was this big knob sitting right next to the disk drive exactly where a rational person would expect there to be an eject button, so I kept accidentally powering off the computer whenever I wanted to eject a disk. Took me some time to accept the incredibly intuitive dragging the drive icon onto the fucking trash can to eject.
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.
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.
