but seriously, look up photopea
Honestly I would tell people like this screenshotted poster to suck it up or go fuck themselves, because this is free software that is provided for you as is and for use as you wish. If you think the software isn’t “adjusted enough” to meet your needs, then place requests for features in the relevant channels, be patient and try to work with the existing tools on offer, or keep shelling out booku bucks for Adobe’s continually enshittifying service.
Accept your fate with the corpos instead of bitching that the community effort options aren’t in your Goldilocks zone, shitbag.
God, this is why I hated Apple users at my old IT job. They’d bitch about the continually enshittifying status quo of their software and platform, and in the same statement reject all alternatives for not being “a smooth transition”.
Edit: on a more positive note, Kritia, FreeCAD, and Kdenlive are all great and multiplatform.
Inkscape as well
Inkscape kicks ASS god i love Inkscape
I think it’s OK to complain about free software on social media. It’s also OK to tell people that sometimes, if they want something to be better, they might need to be the ones to roll up their sleeves and make it happen. But not everyone has the time or the technical wherewithal to fix every tool they use. I sure couldn’t implement every improvement I ever thought of for free software, I don’t have the time.
But I think It’s still nice, for maintainers and for people thinking about getting into open source, to get a rolling feel for what gripes a lot of people share about open software. If I have a problem and I know a lot of people share my frustration, I’m much more motivated to try to fix it than if it’s something I and no one else care about.
I think it’s OK to complain about free software on social media.
I think it’s like complaining about a free product someone made in their own time and then delivered it to your doorstep.
If you don’t like it, OK, don’t use it. This isn’t something you bought. Using the thing doesn’t help the dev in any way, unless you also donate or contribute.We live in a time where private FOSS devs of popular projects get buried under AI slop bug reports from multi-billion-$ corporations who use their work without paying, and death threats on social media if they made an unpopular change to the thing they put out there for free.
I think it’s more akin to complaining about the public transit in a city where the public transit funded via donations. Yeah, you could pitch in, and maybe you do, but it’s still a massive undertaking that is also massively underfunded, and even if you have an idea of what you want to change, you might not have the skills to fix it yourself, or even to file an actually helpful bug report. Should you learn how to engage with the process of opensource tool maintenance? Yes! It’s a cool and fun thing to do. Is it hard for most people who aren’t familiar with software development? Also very yes.
To be clear, I don’t think maintainers have any obligation to see or think about whatever gets posted to social media. Trying to stay on top of what the internet is saying is an impossible task. But as a user and sometimes contributor, I like reading about what trials other users are going through, and if a complaint resonates with me I like to chat about it, and occasionally I’ll pull down the source code for a project and see if I can figure out how to patch whatever it is we’re talking about. For most of these cases I’ll give up or get distracted before I have anything worthwhile to contribute, but every once in a while I’ll get a PR submitted that spawned from a random conversation on the internet.
That belongs in a feature request though, not on mainstream social media. I’m not going to comb through feeds to try and figure out what bugfixes or features need priority development.
I would even go as so far to say actually placing the request in the proper place matters more than donations.
Peak Consumer Brain individuals cannot understand the concept of actually working together to make and accomplish things, all they know is ‘confirm transaction’ and ‘overdraft fee’.
I think this is a needlessly combative stance. If your goal is to get new users to engage with the development side, calling their criticism “bitching” isn’t going to do that. Most software users don’t have the first clue about software development and wouldn’t even know what exactly to say if given a suggestion form. The best feedback a lot of new users can give is “the user experience is clunky and unintuitive”.
My stance has been forged by the repeated disappointing interactions that I’ve had with people who I spend painstaking amounts of time illustrating how to solve their problems with these tools and why a certain design quirk is the way it is vs. the proprietary model.
Without fail, the kinds of users like the screenshotted poster will look at me with a blank face or reply in forum chats with the same statement: “But can’t they just make it usable like [enshittified software] instead?”
How can we bridge this gap? At least to the point where users can give constructive feedback like “I wanted to do this thing, and searched for a way here and here. It took me hours to figure out how to do it. It would have been intuitive if…” Maybe we will have to be proactive about UX issues and have proper channels for this information?
It would have been intuitive if…
One issue I see with suggestions is that everyone thinks their a designer. What they suggest might even be an improvement for that one small tool but would make the overall experience less intuitive. Overall, I think OSS should cater to their existing users plus a little bit more. Make the experience better for the people who really want to try to use it but eventually give up in frustration. Over time, it will improve and the user base will increase.
Seriously fuck the boot lickers.
freeCAD is great and recently it got a whole lot better!
Yeah,man. Can you believe those carpenters that still want to buy hammers from big tool? Our federation of unemployed navel gazers has built at least three hammer replacements that consist of a rock attached to a thick stick with Elmer’s glue, but they just wanna throw their money at the big tool companies. I even told them that our next iteration will have one side of the rock flattened for better hammering, but they keep going on about “ergonomics”, and “effectiveness”.
I swear, I think all the open source people see software as toys and only as toys. For those of us who actually use it to do things, it’s a tool, and it needs to work like the tools I’ve been using at work for more decades than I want to own up to.
Dude, the open source tools only differ in the sense that you own the software and therefore are immune to enshittification, and that they are provided as is without direct customer support.
If you’re saying a particular “hammer” is missing a component that you relied on previously with what you purchased from “big tool”, there’s a suggestions box right there that costs you nothing and will be read by the maintainers. You’ll have to just be patient and try it out once it’s released (for free mind you).
Also, that hammer from “big tool” has an IED planted into the handle that will explode if you don’t swipe your credit card into it every month. Just saying.
They also differ in the sense that you have to completely relearn how to do everything you’ve been doing your whole career and usually in a way that is more complicated and less efficient.
It’s not missing components, it’s the fact that the most commonly used components are clunkier, less user friendly, and feel like an afterthought tacked on after someone made the software to prove they could.witbout ever talking to anyone who uses the software to do their job. If Open Office were as good a suite of office software as Microsoft, it’d be the industry standard. No business wants to pay Microsoft license fees just because, they do it because the tools work better and create a better end product.
If Open Office were as good a suite of office software as Microsoft, it’d be the industry standard. No business wants to pay Microsoft license fees just because, they do it because the tools work better and create a better end product.
The idea that everything that businesses do is as efficient as physically possible and the executives are all mega geniuses that are incapable of making bad decisions (or are even incentivized to make good decisions) is untrue.
COBAL is not the greatest programming language to ever be invented. It, and the various pieces of dogshit software that companies collectively shell out billions for every year, are used because they are entrenched in their respective industries and corporate structures, not because of their brilliant design.
The idea that everything that businesses do is as efficient as physically possible and the executives are all mega geniuses that are incapable of making bad decisions (or are even incentivized to make good decisions) is untrue.
I never said that was true. But I’ve sat through enough budget meetings to know for certain that if Open Office were even “good enough”, let alone “as good” it would be the corporate standard, because everyone hates paying for Office.
But it isn’t, for all the reasons I listed before.
Oh no slight inconvenience, how will he ever deal with it
If you don’t want to face the inconvenience of learning something new to escape the grasp of technofeudalism suffer in silence, serf
Skill issue
My recommendation was always the Affinity suite. One-time reasonable purchase and it was great. Definitely not the engineer-designed UI this post complains about.
One problem: Mac only.I have been corrected, it was cross-platform too!But now, it’s free! And available for PC! Except it was acquired by the Canva people so they’re probably gonna fill it with subscriptions and slop soon. Bummer.
Affinity 1 and 2 were also on windows.
Supposedly their plan for affinity studio (the new free app) is to make money with the canva AI subscription and other canva things. If that stays true and affinity studio stays a free, fully featured app (aside from AI features), I’d be ok with that. I’d also be surprised.
I knew version 2 was on both platforms, but I don’t know the original one was too. TIL!
Also the next hbomberguy video will be delayed for another 3 months
Ploob*
I was a pixlr user for a while but photopea has been my new go to, does everything I need (as an amateur)
Open sauce
Free sauceware







