but seriously, look up photopea
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If you don’t want to face the inconvenience of learning something new to escape the grasp of technofeudalism suffer in silence, serf
Ngl learning new UI is pretty easy.
I see Resolve has just moved to challenge Lightroom too, which is kinda of amazing.
Between the affinity apps, reaper and Resolve there’s a fairly competent replacement set for Adobe apps on windows.
I wish Linux was as good.
My main gripe is the lack of professional typesetting software. Scribus just doesn’t cut it.
I see this genre of post going around a lot, and it just reeks of learned helplessness.
Yeah, I get it, sometimes you’re stuck in a situation where, for whatever, the alternatives aren’t viable or practical. You feel trapped. We all do. But why is the first instinct to gripe at the cool free software for not being quite what you wanted instead of getting mad at the rapidly enshittifying megacorps that put you into this trap you’re in to begin with?
that, and it reeks of consumerism and a desire to feel superior.
“haha those stupid nerds and their shitty nerd software, i’m much more sensible for using corporate software that actually works (except it doesn’t but ignore that)”
This reads like someone who just isn’t willing to learn whatever new workflow the software requires. If that’s the issue, then that person will never leave their enshittified walled gardens. There is no workflow that matches or imitates the one you learned, it’s probably copyrighted, you’re best bet is to jump ship and learn a new paradigm.
Also, have yet to run into an alternative that’s actively recommended which doesn’t at least have a windows build. LibreOffice, Krita, Blender, Darktable, GIMP, Audacity, Inkscape, and Openshot - the most common recs as alternatives to apps, all have windows as an option.
i found Krita to not really work well for me and my drawing tablet. i went with MediBang instead, and it’s been going well
Swapped Adobe Audition for Reaper. No regrets
Wish I knew how to read mayan. That’d be badass.
The Mayans descendants do too.
Oh no slight inconvenience, how will he ever deal with it
Ploob*
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.
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.
Seriously fuck the boot lickers.
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.
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.
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.
Inkscape as well
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It’s not the same, the idea is that you are suggesting things that are not suitable replacements. You can’t then say “bUt ItS fReE sOfTwArE” as it that makes it a suitable replacement.
That’s the kicker though. The poster framed it as Adobe was the only game in town that was abusing them, a friend told them about a service that was free and had their entire feature set, but it was rejected due to UI and platform concerns.
Not all free software will reach feature or UI parity with their proprietary competition. That’s just reality. However, if you are paying a grand total of $0 for the alternative and have no interest in being constructive either through submitting a feature request or contributing code (donating doesn’t have an obligation for anything so in this circumstance that wouldn’t factor), then you should just either accept the software “as is” (which is a key component of most licenses), or accept that it’s not for you.
Stay with the devil that you know if you disregard positioned alternatives for not being “suitable enough”, and if you want to change that, be proactive and open-minded. Not bitch.
I read it more as a critique on the self-satisfied recommendation for something that just isn’t the drop in replacement they’re making it out to be.
Don’t get me wrong, I love foss software. 3 out of 4 computers in my household run linux and I‘ve converted a handful of people already.
However, I couldn’t and wouldn’t replace photoshop with gimp/krita, premiere or davinci with kdenlive, etc. for the time being. Not because they’re bad but because I use them professionally and cannot take any risks. Adobe is shit but their software is a known quantity.
Privately, I would never pay for Adobe (not paying anyways, my boss does). And for personal use and maybe smaller (somewhat tech savvy) freelancers, I‘d absolutely recommend everyone at least try the FOSS alternatives.
But, I‘d never go „um akhtshually, foss program xy is just as good as adobe program xy“. Because while they might be as powerful in theory, that doesn’t help if they’re a hurdle to use.
gimp/krita
I think this is one thing people who don’t make art don’t really understand when it comes to making digital art. Changing the program you draw with is sometimes like changing from watercolors to oil paints; the “replacement” just can’t do what the artist is using the original for in the first place. It does not matter if it has 80% of the same technical specs if you can’t use it for what you are doing
but then… maybe if the watercolors are making the world worse, it’s not really worth using them to make art?
That’s a fine, nuanced take. I think the key part is that accepting that you are using a flawed option because it’s critical for your employer’s standard practices or required for a client’s needs (or is the only option that is acceptable to said employer or client) is perfectly fine. You are accepting that the enshittified software is aggravating and not what you’d prefer, but aren’t dismissive of alternatives and would consider them if you had the flexibility to.
What I’m trying to poke at here is people finding the “perfect savior” to their existing tools that were made out of choice (that enshittified) or complacency (unwilling to move until they find something that is effectively a reverse engineered clone). Of course, that usually doesn’t exist, so they whine about how “FOSS doesn’t match everything I want!” despite being capable of learning and not truly bound to their tools by say an employer.
“Hurdle to use” (In my opinion) is just the outcome of being used to the old platform rather than poor design by the developer (even if some FOSS projects may need some UI love).
There are indeed a lot of people who completely dismiss good things because they’re not perfect.
But I‘d argue „hurdle to use“ goes a bit further.
UX is obviously a part of that. It’s the main reason you can’t make me touch gimp, for example.But, on top of that, a lot of those foss programs require a more involved setup, especially if you want all features to work. Getting hardware de-/encoding to work in kdenlive, for example, isn’t necessarily something everyone can easily do but something that’s absolutely necessary for professional use.
And of course there’s the endless gamble, whether the foss community will happily aid you or curse you, when you’re asking for guidance.
Or if the tutorials and documentation need you to use the terminal for setup or certain features.
Most paid software has both a large community of users (forums, tutorials) and is polished to an extent that every idiot can install and start using it.That’s what I mean with hurdle. I’m personally tech savvy enough, that I could deal with any problem that might occur, even if I‘m not willing to learn a developer designed UI, but lots of people I know would not.
That’s why, for example, for video editing software, I love to recommend DaVinci resolve. It’s closed source but it’s free, polished n powerful. (And in my humble opinion better that Adobe premiere in every single way). Good software doesn’t have to cost anything, but it also doesn’t always have to be foss either. There’s a middle ground.
I have a hard time taking a rant seriously when it includes such a neologistic gem as ‘booku’.
Apologies - took it from a video that used it to describe a ludicrous amount of money being spent. Same spelling, by the way (from closed captions)
‘Beaucoup’ is the word you were looking for. Although Wiktionary says that ‘bookoo’ and similar spellings are indeed used alternatively, possibly popularised by US soldiers in Vietnam. And, although the French pronunciation is ‘boh-koo’, Louisianan is indeed ‘bookoo’.
So my jab about it being a neologism was inadvertently on the nose, though belated by fifty years.
How old does a word have to be to satisfy you?
“Beaucoup” is like 800 years old. Shitty spelling isn’t a neologism.
Lemmy users are never beating the reputation of taking anything and everything in the most literal way.
Yes, I have literally stolen the word “beaucoup” from you. ;-)
Not the lemming you replied to, but I’ve never seen the word booku before, and had no clue what it meant until your post. Still don’t know what beaucoup is doing in an English post but sure
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard this as well, but never seen it spelled before. My grandad and dad used to use it to essentially mean “a ridiculous amount”.
It’s a loanword.
The great free software that works on windows and I have personally tried (some are only free for personal use, but others are completely free):
- Photo editing, book editing and graphics by Canva - Affinity: https://www.affinity.studio/
- Movie Editing by Black Magic -Davinci Resolve: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
- 3D animation, movie editing, modeling, sculpting by Blender: https://www.blender.org/download/
- Digital painting by Krita: https://krita.org/en/
Have not tried
- Motion Design by Maxon - Autograph: https://www.maxon.net/en/autograph
- Animation by Canva - Cavalry: https://cavalry.studio/en/
- Photo manipulation by Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/
- RawTherapee: https://rawtherapee.com/
- Darktable: https://www.darktable.org/
- Rapid Raw: https://www.getrapidraw.com/
- Kdenlive - Excellent video editing software.
If some adobe chump can’t figure out how to install and use this program, then that’s on them. Completely unhinged meme.
btw blender also has 2d animation, a video editor, compositing suite and physics sim
Darktable: https://www.darktable.org/
I’ve tried it. It’s an extremely powerful alternative to Lightroom. It was my tool of choice for the last year or more. But it really is the epitome of what people complain about with open source. It feels like a bunch of features just thrown at a wall with no regard for UX. Even its own loyal users will tell you how ridiculous it can be that there are multiple seemingly redundant ways to do the same thing.
And it provides very little guidance on how or why to use the different options.
Ironically, that post is from a thread about…
Rapid Raw: https://www.getrapidraw.com/
I’ve just recently started trying this out. It’s far too early to give any real conclusions yet. I think I like its basic editing feel a lot more than Darktable, but it’s still far too early for me to say. I haven’t even finished going through the first project I decided to edit with it.
And to be honest, part of the reason I’m looking at these at all isn’t even about open source. It’s that I have become dissatisfied with Lightroom. Specifically, with its file management aspects. If I could just have Lightroom 🏴☠️ with file management that didn’t feel like a pain in the arse every time I touch it, I’d be happy.
Photo manipulation by Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/
I’m mostly very happy with the latest version of it. It seems to have a really great UX now. It finally feels like an adequate replacement to Photoshop in many ways, which it certainly did not prior to the recent-ish major redesign.
Except that it is insanely resource-intensive. For some reason a fairly simple project consisting of nine 25-ish MB jpegs and basic layer masks ended up for me as 1.5 GB compressed, and I think it may have been 5.7 GB uncompressed, based on what its UI was telling me. This made it painfully slow, in addition to the ridiculous amount of disk space it took up.
And it still unnecessarily fails to have sensible defaults, as I experienced in this thread, though thankfully the wonderfully friendly @oeuf@slrpnk.net was able explain how to fix its broken settings.
If you don’t care about the Lightroom replacement being open source you could check out the Davinci Resolve beta that was released recently. They added a photo mode with library management. It’s relatively barebones but it might be enough for you.
I would certainly prefer open source, but yeah, closed source is not a dealbreaker.
I’ve actually been using DaVinci Resolve an an NLE for a while now. A bunch of things about it frustrate me, but I think having experienced FCPX I’m never going to not be frustrated by any other NLE. But as far as track-based NLEs go, I’ve definitely really enjoyed Resolve.
I had no idea it had a photo mode. I’m definitely…sceptical of a photo mode in a video editor. But I’m also very intrigued! Will definitely give it a look at some point.
Some of those are free as in beer, but not free as in freedom. Relevant distinction to keep in mind.
True, but Blender is free as in awesome, free and freedom. They’re making movies with it.
Also, DaVinci is old school in that the free version is pretty good for beginners. I bought the lifetime version for a one time fee. For now, it’s better than premiere pro.
Skill issue
Linux only? Yes please. Do you know your distro waifu/catgirl/catboy? It rules.
linux only isn’t even a problem, just use wsl lol
I’d like to file a complaint, my distro didn’t come with a catgirl? ☹️
I run NixOS. Mine came with too many. We can share.
Thank you! One with glasses please~ :3
kin tukult je’el u páajtal u sa’atal ti’ teech Jayp’éel jaatso’ob ti’ le ecuación
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.
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.
Open sauce
Free sauceware
