I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, “Whoa, this is amazing!” and got us hooked on the world of open source.
What made you to jump ships? Was it the “free” side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?
For me those products were:
- Android
- Firefox
- VLC
- Calibre
Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product – maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source
My roommate installed Ubuntu on my laptop when I was in college. That was the start. Now it looks like this: https://xkcd.com/456/
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?
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.
If you’re still looking, try Krita, it’s a polished and powerful open source image manipulation program.
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.
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.
Linux. I think I started playing with it around 2001. I was a computer nerd on high school and I wanted to be a hacker. I would be lying if I said that The Matrix wasn’t a big factor. To this day I use black console with green text.
For me it was first VLC without really knowing what FOSS was, then KeePass while getting to know a bit about it, and finally Thunderbird. What did it for me was just how good and bullshit-free they were, especially in comparison to paid competitors. They really are the best products in their field, proving the quality often behind FOSS software.
FOSS is enshitification-hardened, not proof.
VLC remains awesome because the guy (maybe Jean-Baptiste Kempf?) that controls the project has refused to be bought, has in fact refused HUGE sums of money.
The original author of any project has to right to sell it with the corresponding licence changes at any time.
There’s some legal grey area on something like Linux or VLC which have MANY MANY developer hands in the pie, and existing users could certainly fork off the existing releases, but VLC could pivot tomorrow to a for profit company and make future releases of the official VLC a paid product, if they choose too.
True, and so all honour to the creators for remaining FOSS, especially smaller projects spearheaded by a single dev
Altough usually when a shift like that happens in bigger projects there’s a community fork, and the original project withers. Like Owncloud -> Nextcloud , OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, MySQL -> MariaDB
You could argue there’s some degree enshitification through the Ubuntu snapification driven by Canonical. Although that’s not so much about making Ubuntu deliberately worse, it’s more moving Ubuntu forward in a way that aligns with Canonical’s strategic goals. So its “paying the strategy tax” rather than direct enshitification.
For collaborative projects like Linux I believe every contributor would need to agree to any license change, which is practically impossible
Using linux as an alternative to windows and really enjoying it.
