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 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)
A company I worked for has had such a bad experience with the Microsoft business suite that they actively avoid using any MS products at all costs. They started offboarding a year ago and they STILL haven't managed to get rid of everything
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.
Yeah I agree, I used to use it when I was a student who couldn’t afford photoshop and I was able to create some awesome graphics.
Once I got used to photoshop (I used it from CS2 to CS5) I couldn’t get back into GIMP. The hot keys and mental model were just so much better in PS and PS clones.
I'd rather use photopea a quadruple time before installing GIMP.
Hell I even use Ps CS2 at work because Adobe unlocked the activation (and Adobe removed the page from the archive. org with the unlock keys) for free.
Great enough for the few graphics I want to do and at home I use properly sailed goods.
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.
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.
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.
I find the tiny amount of jank comforting
It's like a subtle reminder that you aren't being exploited by a big corporation.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
If open source is so great, why did Truecrypt get shutdown?
-Sincerely, Your friendly neighborhood FBI agent.
I can think of very few examples where the paid version is better, usually the reason the masses use the paid version is billion dollar marketing campaigns and adopted standards.
More relevant perhaps, corporations are not incentivized to make a good app they are incentivized to be just better than the free version so that enough people don’t switch that the free version becomes the default version, keeping open source code perpetually one step behind because they can always dump 10 billion dollars into improving a minor annoyance as long as it keeps their product the standard de facto product.
I like to point out Home Assistant, it's FOSS and better than anything else. Nothing else comes close not even Google home and they are a trillion dollar company.
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)
Saying millions of dollars like that's a lot of money to spend developing an app. Meta has literally hundreds of devs just working on WhatsApp. You'll burn through around a million dollars in one year with about six devs when you factor in all the costs.
Is it? I pretty much only use open source stuff and all other proprietary alternatives I know are shitty
Open source CAD software is basically useless. As someone who has tried every few years to use open source alternatives for personal projects, I always end up paying for an AutoCAD or Fusion 360 license.
My professional background has always been higher end software like Siemens NX, Solidworks, Inventor, & AutoCAD.
LibreCAD is the closest I ever got to something that seemed useful for 2D. I hate FreeCAD, QCAD, BRL-CAD, etc. Many open source projects waste so much time to do simple tasks and buck standard methodologies for their own spin on how they think you should design.
Which proprietary app is better than the open source version?
Adobe may be a shit company but Photoshop's user interface is far better than GIMP
MS office is arguably the best office suite in terms of features. The overall user experience is awful though.
The profit motive is why they throw so much money at it. I like FOSS better too but these differences can't easily be separated.
It probably isn't.
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