Lmao I've been doing a digital forensics class online, and it's always got VMs with ancient versions of software on it, so I got to discover what Apache OpenOffice was. Love that they have to use FOSS to teach us shit since Windows needs a subscription.
::: spoiler Typo
I almost wrote dogital forensics. Is that using dogs to find data? Sniff out that hard drive and get datadumping boy!
:::
We're always on some ancient Kali version and Windows XP to 10, and once we used some Linux Distro I'd never heard of in my life. The software is Autopsy, OSForensics, ProDiscover Basic 64, Hex Workshop, and more, a bonus one being IceWeasel (now known as GNU IceCat?). I genuinely want to gouge my eyes out when looking at the old Kali.
OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.
That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.
To expand further on your point, here are the releases for Apache Open Office (OO). We are at 4.1.6. the page for 4.1 release was last updated in 2014. It's been mainly small bug fixes since then.
LibreOffice (LO) and Open Office were essentially the same application at OO 4.0 vs LO 4.1. LO had 3 major releases by 2023 before it went from 7 to 24. With the annual releases it is me difficult to gauge progress in the same way. But we are already at 26.2.
Is there an office suite you had in mind that looks futuristic? Comparing a slightly old version of LibreOffice with a modern version of MS Office... They look pretty similar to me? (The gray document background in libreoffice is from me, it defaults to something closer to MS office).
I haven't used Apple's suite much, but it's likely that LO could learn something from it, for the simple reason that Apple knows about the principles of grouping in design and thus never subscribed to the approach of ‘cram lots of buttons in the toolbars without spacing’.
However, changing the paradigm of the existing UI is probably a big ask.
Ah, I assumed you were comparing it to MS Office as the gold standard, and chose the tabbed mode to make it closest to that, though I don't personally use it that way myself.
LibreOffice has a simpler mode, though not quite as bare-bones as your Apple example. It's how I how use it personally:
There's also a Sidebar mode, which can collapse out of the way when not in use, or be brought back by pressing a small button on the side of the program.
I agree it could stand to offer a mode with much more spacing and just the essential options, but I think for the most part, the simpler toolbar mode which I use is pretty adequate, and doesn't feel overwhelming to use.
Alternatively, Libreoffice is quite customizable, so a user can remove every option from the toolbar they never use, and make it appear nicer and less cramped.
I'm not the guy to whom you originally replied, so I'm just chiming in with my observations. I would never pose MS' design as anything to aspire to, because MS only recently learned about the principles of grouping, which is very basic design stuff. Their design philosophy for ages consisted of crammed toolbars, crammed lists, and crammed tables.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice isn't better in this regard, and won't be until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow). Apple's UI is good not because it's ‘bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through. Other Mac apps are the same way, usually including third-party ones because they follow Apple's guidelines. Btw, iirc the toolbars are typically customizable.
until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow)
Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around? That would be cool to have in Libreoffice.
Apple’s UI is good not because it’s ‘bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through.
Could definitely see that as a big improvement, even as someone quite used to the Windows 95 way of doing things (or at least, I prefer the old way to the ribbon), hopefully someone who has a similar itch to us as well as the capabilities to implement it does so someday :)
Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around?
Yeah, the spacers are the key thing here, because humans perceive spaced-out things to be topically distinct. Meanwhile Windows always offered separator bars to divide groups of buttons in the toolbars, which of course added visual noise. Idk what toolkit LO uses, but from what I've seen Java UIs typically follow Windows' conventions.
LibreOffice's look stems in large part from the UI toolkit that they use. Which was guaranteed to look like Windows, since LO is made in Java, and is not gonna be changed easily.
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[58] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[59] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead.[60] Another controversy in July 2021[61] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[62] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution".[61]
Awwww... :(
Hey at least they removed mentioning it in the TOS!
required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA
Which most probably means that if you report a bug, you send them data about your installation and whatever additional data you include, like the email to contact you.
Lawyers keep stepping on this rake time and again when writing terms and policies.
Tbf I haven't used either extensively (or at least the features I've used in either have been very basic one), but I haven't had any issues with OpenOffice. What are some of the issues you're referring to in OpenOffice? Personally I tend to prefer it because I just think it looks nicer, but clearly there are some issues with it I'm unaware of.
Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice and OpenOffice. Never even heard of OpenOffice before...
It's been over 10 years since I tried it, but at that time it was common for OpenOffice to have compatibility issues with MS office formats, but those issues were already fixed in LibreOffice.
Isn't that sort of an issue with LibreOffice today though? At least in the sense that there are features in for example Microsoft Word where, if you use them in a document, and then open that document in LibreOffice Writer, it won't render correctly/won't function? I struggle to give you an example because it was a along time since I tried to do that, but I have definitely run into some compatibility issues there, on the side of LibreOffice. Maybe you're referring to something else though?
Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice with OpenOffice. Never used OpenOffice, don't even know what it is.
OnlyOffice was an office suite developed by Sun Microsystems. Oracle stopped development whel they bought Sun. eventually the developers got fed up and founded the Open Document Foundation. oracle threw kind of a hissy fit, then eventually gave up and donated Open Office to the Apache foundation. Apache alleges Open Office is an active project, but they're just shuffling deck chairs. Open Office is dead, and Oracle killed it. Libre Office is what Open Office used to be, and more
Only Office is an open source free suite that is developed by Ascension System SIA. It is open source but has a paid option for corporate support. It offers cloud storage servers or local server storage.
When I retired, I wanted to ditch LibreOffice because I just don't need a full office suite anymore. So I tried Only Office for a bit. It's kind of like the office suite we have at home. It's fine for most people. But I always had issues with it dying on me under Fedora and Mint.
After a while, I realized I didn't even need that much office anymore. So I'm back to where it all began on Linux-- AbiWord and Gnumeric. That's all I need anymore. It's refreshing how a mere 125Gigs of storage on a cheap mini desktop can show what you really only need.
Got any links to learning? Ive gotten pretty far in fusion360 but am trying to transition and found f360 let's me be too lazy or sketch centric/doesn't require parametric rules
Ive found it useful to search for a freecad tutorial for any object on YouTube and follow it, making an actual thing. Even if that thing is not of use to me, I learn from building it and use those concepts in what I want to build.
I wonder if it changed much in the last year. The assembly implementation is what's holding me back. Well, that and staring at cad all day at work already.
definitely a goated application on linux by now. I've just started using it, and holy cow, it's way more capable than I thought it was. 1.0 was a blessing!
I csme in here to see if anyone cared for FreeCAD and yup, here I see you. Love it. And it's better than many proprietary softwares I have tried (edited to remove the names), I mean in terms of hobby creation at least. I am trying so as to master it and create professional level CAD drawings. It's light weight, so beautifully intutive and that it runs smoothly on one of my ancient PCs with 2GB RAM, intel Pentium processor running Windows 7. It's truly awesome. So many add ons, leaves one spoilt for choices.
I'm not sure Firefox belongs on this list. Google finances Mozilla's operation to the tune of $420M a year. It's not for-profit, but it's also not the same as the others.
Google wants to finance anything they can get their damn search engine into, that's not entirely the fault of Firefox. I still use a firefox-based browser, but only for now.
There is ladybird on the horizon, a browser being built from scratch, not based on either Gecko or Webkit.
Almost certainly not. All the offshoots from Mozilla's tech rely first and foremost on Mozilla's production of the foundational software, which eats up a significant portion of their roughly $500M/yr operational costs. The heavy development cost of modern browsers is why everything is either Chromium or Gecko-based.
That said, Mozilla will be around as long as Chromium continues to dominate the market. Google literally funds Mozilla because it's cheaper to prop up a competitor than it is to be sued by the government for monopolistic practices (check out 1998 decision against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows).
And the Blender foundation gets yearly donations from tech giants like Epic, NVidia, Unity, Google and even car makers like BMW and Volkswagen. Even Adobe, their competitor, sponsors them.
It’s still a not-for-profit same with Mozilla. Doesn’t matter who funds them or how much they get in funding.
What people don't always remember about FOSS is they are just making it for themselves they are users as well as devs. The great thing about FOSS is if someone else happens to use it that's great and maybe they will contribute to something they use.
Yeah and they get other devs contributing to their project. Nobody's making Firefox or Blender as a solo project, but band together with some other nerds and this is what you get.
Never doubt the power of nerds arguing over their specific interests to make something amazing. Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind, entirely powered by nerd fights.
yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn't include one at all. many just wouldn't play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn't do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that's TUI based that does everything I want and it's perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a "SUPER" music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.
I'm not going to release it because A. like i said it's perfect for me and B. I dont' want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it's mine, and that's that. will never see the light of day.
So many people let perfect be the enemy of good. Firefox is great. It's the pillar of non-Chromium of browsers. Servo and Ladybird are not there yet and will take many years to surpass Firefox if ever. A Firefox fork has a better shot than those 2
GIMP is great software. Is it just Photoshop and Affinity better than it. Not seeing as much hate on Inkscape when it's just Adobe and Affinity as better.
OpenOffice is outdated but was good for like ~2010
A bunch of y'all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread
So many people suck up for the better of two bad options. You can use it and still give it deserved criticism, you won't hurt it's (or the wealthy Firefox exec team's) feelings.
I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.
Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google's footsteps, and the other I don't particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.
A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.
I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole "friend" at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn't have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.
The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly "Platinum" on Wine's AppDB but would often freeze and didn't support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn't connect online.
Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can't get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.
So why is Mozilla shoving AI garbage nobody asked for into Firefox? I seriously doubt that their severely overpaid execs don't have some kind of profit incentive.
Because they also want to entice new users or appeal to users that for some reason do want that feature. More users means more money and despite being non-profit, people do enjoy having more money. They're not immune. Which is why we need to pull the reigns back every now and then.
Mozilla exec compensation aside (relative to other tech CEOs it is pretty low) the reason they do this is because they are trying to make money in some way that isn't the Google search box.
The other thing to consider is that even though a lot of people around here and AI skeptics loads is the general public are not and use it everyday and don't think twice.
I swear the Firefox users have no perspective whenever this stuff comes up.
It's always "why don't they just work on the browser" or " I would pay for just the browser" ( they won't, and even if they did most won't and it won't be enough)
Web browsers don't make money. It's why only chrome basically exists and that's a cost center to support Google's Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.
I am watching ladybird and hoping they manage to coalesce the required amount of support to get something off the ground and keep it there.
Firefox isn't used by the "general public". The general public doesn't give a shit about open-source or which corporate logo is stamped on their copy of Chromium. Many won't even look past Edge, and the rest will likely use Chrome because everyone does already.
No, Firefox is used by the enthusiasts who care about not using Chromium; about actively choosing control over convenience. Now Mozilla Corp is pissing off that same audience by doing what Google does -- shoving AI up everything. To date, every decision regarding AI has met with pushback from their own userbase. Being the lesser evil does not grant them a free pass for every boneheaded decision.
If they need cash, they can fire that fuckwit of a CEO, roll the savings back into their engineers and products, and go on a funding campaign promising to actually improve their products like Mozilla Org Foundation did with Thunderbird.
I guarantee you that most Firefox users do not feel the level of emotions that you do on these issues, either about the AI prompt sidebar or the CEO's salary. They also don't use Firefox to spite Google. They use it because they think it's better than Chromium.
You're unhappy with Firefox? Easy fork. Off you go. Want to convince me to be mad too? Okay, make your case, but don't just assume that I'd just have to be mad if I just knew that there's gasp an AI sidebar that I can use if I want to.
Web browsers don't make money. It's why only chrome basically exists and that's a cost center to support Google's Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.
Yep. Well, I don't necessarily agree it started exclusively for the ads, but they definitely wanted to create something that they control. Microsoft Edge and Opera switching to Chromium just means Google has more soft control on how the web operates. (Even saying "soft" there is pretty generous.) A majority of browsers are Chromium forks. Google can control how the web operates because of it.
But to your point though, thwarting ad blocking is a huge part of it now. The manifest V3 changes (which severely limited what sorts of ad blocking extensions could do) came the same year they listed ad blocking as a significant risk to their revenue in their shareholder statement. Which, I just wanna mention for folks who might not be keeping up with this as much, isn't some sort of conspiratorial statement. It's a public document because they're a publicly traded company.
Source - download page's main option wants you to download using the "Muse Hub". Even if you install with a normal installer, here's one of the welcome tips
Your complaint is that they offer optional plugins, downloadable via their launcher that is specifically designed to make installing plugins more convenient?
My complaint is that that MuseHub is being pushed as the main way to download Audacity. Right now, it's a relatively small push, but I vaguely recall that (so I might be misremembering), a few months ago, the Audacity installer would try to sneak a install of MuseHub
Really? It doesn't look like it - theta been some bleating about lag and far of oy uploading audio but other than a whole lot if argument, I can't see much in the way of details, let alone facts
Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).
Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)
Also Firefox isn't built from the ground up I don't believe. It's based on Gecko which iirc was based on KHTML. idk i can't fully remember don't take this as fact. i use firefox and prefer it to chomium based browsers but Mozilla has been making really weird moves lately around AI that I think is very unnecessary.
Ladybird is not becoming vibe-coded, the AI generated code is being tested and refactored all the time, it's not straight up slop like what most junior devs do now.
I just started making some headway into using it and I've found it way less intuitive than Fusion. It also seems to be more finnicky about constraints and such. Like I wasn't able to extrude something because I had lines intersecting each other. Just have to be more methodical and use more sketches I guess. Im still on my first project with it though and haven't gotten to the point of printing anything yet though so take that with a grain of salt.
I'd say so! I made some 3D-printed pipes to connect my snake's terrarium extension as my first real project and they turned out pretty good. But I have no comparisons to other CAD software haha
Reminds me a local youtuber saying something similar about non-profit companies.
They said it's human nature to be driven by profit, so non-profits are profiting in some other way. Hence he prefers to give business to for profit companies as you know their intentions.
IDK, but I'd rather be the beta tester for some open source project, or even contribute code to it (I fixed a language server this way), than to pay premium for a software, which I won't "own", has a bunch of microtransactions, and becomes lower and lower in quality.
Well unfortunately he's right. Most non-profit companies are profiting off of things like your donations and such like that. You look at the Susan g Komen foundation for breast cancer awareness. Something like 5% maybe 10% of all donated funds actually go to breast cancer research. The rest of the funds are used to fund the staff including those that are in charge of the board. And they have massive paydays.
People at the heads of nonprofits are often highly compensated, and it's rare that any of them solve the underlying problem or even make meaningful headway. It's why there is so much "awareness" and short term band aids involved. A nonprofit that solves the problem it's supposedly trying to solve has no reason to exist and will cost people well paying jobs managing it.
Blender is far better than anyone not-in-the-know would expect.
VLC does much more than just play videos, but the user interface inexplicably hides most of the functionality. Also, they've vehemently claimed for many years that it's impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.
GIMP and Inkscape keep improving, with GIMP being the better of the two. GIMP should just copy Photoshop's interface as closely as possible. There's no shame in that, and Photoshop does many things better. Most users coming to GIMP are coming from Photoshop. (Yes, I'm using PhotoGIMP, but that really doesn't do much to help.)
I've used Photoshop professionally for 20 years and GIMP for about 3 and, to be fair, both of their default interfaces have have their pros and cons. After spending the 2/3 hours it takes to become proficient in one after being used to the other, the comparison mostly comes down to other things e.g availability of tools, raw performance, enshittification etc.
Don't get me wrong, there are some things that annoy me about GIMP (like any software), but I'll be recommending versions 3.0 onwards over Photoshop every time. Adjusting to the interface is easily worth it.
I don't understand economics but why does there have to always be profit? If someone made devices that last 50 years they would go bankrupt? Make it make sense.
They don't want some profit, or even sustainable profit. They want all the profit, and always more this quarter than the previous.
I do understand that if somebody created something that is cheap, lasts forever and there's a limited (non infinite) need for it, they would eventually stop selling. That's why they need to make things last less, or invent excuses to make you buy a new one.
The capitalist imperative is: make as much profit as you can as fast as you can.
The fastest way to make as much profit as you can is not to create the best possible product. Sure, that'll get you far enough- but in capitalism there is never "enough". For instance, you could use the capital you amassed to buy up all the competition and create a monopoly and hike prices to whatever you like because people will have no choice but to buy it from you, especially if it's something essential like food, energy, housing, or what have you.
Of course, monopolies are illegal. Not because capitalism says so, but because society says so, in order to contain capitalism, which would otherwise consume society even faster than it already does!
Monopolies are just one ugly example, there are other ways of making super much profit super fast. Like, stealing! That, too, is illegal, because it goes against the very concept of living in a society, which itself is predicated on the idea that we are stronger and better and happier when we come together and pool our resources.
So basically what it all comes down to is competition and not just greed like most people believe. If you don't make more money than the competition, you will fail. That's why companies keep getting bought out all the time, they lost this game. Most people have no idea just how many companies they know are owned by bigger ones they may not know. The whole thing is conglomerating like the T-1000 after it had been shattered and melted. So rabid profit chasing is a matter of survival.
That is precisely correct, capitalism is in some sense like a story, I don't remember who wrote it, in which human scientists ask a semi-omnipotent AI to answer some question, and the AI decides that in order to solve it, it needs to transform all the matter in the solar system into an even greater AI, and calmly treats human extinction as an irrelevant side effect.
"Maximize profit forever" is a bad algorithm if the goal is to sustain a thriving human society. It has no goal state. Just more, forever. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its core design and central idea, that somehow, by creating ever more "wealth", everyone gets richer as a whole, while not taking into account the societal effects of some getting vastly richer than others, compounding over time unto infinity.
I could go on. But capitalism is a fundamentally broken idea that will implode on itself as a matter of causation as it plays out over time, it is logically and physically incapable of sustaining itself. We are seeing the late stage effects of it play out before our eyes right now.
Funny you should mention that! The Phoebus cartel formed in 1924 by major light bulb manufacturers, because they were at a point where they were producing light bulbs that could last for decades, and they realized that this would kill their profits because nobody would buy bulbs because they lasted so long, so they made rules to deliberately make the bulbs fail after about 1,000 hours and fined members for making bulbs that lasted too long, effectively creating the concept of planned obsolescence as a business model.
See? Capitalism promotes innovation! In how to profit!
The Problem with open source is, it relies on self exploitation. Most OS Dev don't get paid, so they've got to work another jib full time. This leads to a lot of burned out devs from their project and that is a real problem.
Before a project becomes self sufficient on donationa, it needs to become really big. Most projects simply never reach that scale.
People have ALWAYS wanted to make better tools. Did we need to improve our arrowheads and spears every generation? No, we could have kept the same designs as long as they got the job done.
But humans are pretty unique. We will spend significantly more time testing and improving our tools for only a minor improvement. Because we are not doing it for only ourselves. We are doing it for the knowledge of future generations.
Closed source software and profit driven economic models go AGAINST human nature. It is human to plant trees for which you will never live to enjoy the shade of.
There is no major company that allows tools to be written that fill this human connection in building something solely for the purpose of building a good tool to make our lives easier and better.
Aw. Thanks. I honestly think there is tons of potential for Linux nerds to understand the problems with capitalist modes of production because of their direct exposure to its massive contradictions.
I mean, when I worked for Cisco and they sold the exact same hardware as an "upgrade" to older hardware I saw this first hand.
We literally had sections in the code that would check the EEPROM for a flag to enable the upgrade through software. Literally the same hardware with a single bit in the EEPROM being swapped from a 1 to a 0. So we could sell the same hardware twice.
If that doesn't make you realize something is fundamentally wrong with how software is used under capitalist modes of production. Well, nothing will.
"Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?"
As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I'm genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.
This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.
Non-profit means the corporation isn't set up to make a profit and the business operates off of donations instead of selling a product. So there is always a profit motive. I wish more people understood this. Everything from Greenpeace to MADD is still a corporation ran by people who want to make lots and lots of cash.
Non-profits seem to work better when they produce a product. But when they produce nothing and just have a goal, they don’t want to close shop after achieving that goal. Like MADD. The woman who founded it left a quarter of century ago because she accomplished what she set out to do. Those running it today don’t want to lose their meal ticket.
When money comes in the picture, then profit is more important than the product, and this people really loved the product they are doing, if they have enough money to live comfortably they get to keep control of something they care and love.
Intuition is based on experience i guess. Blender was the first non-CAD modelling software i used, and i quickly learned that the search tool in blender is the primary UI gateway. Made everything really quick and easy to find, and any questions I have had was answered by the great community around Blender.
Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.
I mean... it definitely plays a large factor. The idea that these organizations aren't profit-maximizing is very different than claiming they're net negative or hobbyist endeavors.
This is the same argument as “you hate capitalism but you participate in it.”
"We live in a capitalist society and must play by its rules" is merely an observation of the status quo.
I would more compare it to the complaint about a number of socialist states - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela - that wildly outperform their expectations despite flying in the face of Chicago School orthodoxy. "Well, but they're cheating!" is an allegation made regularly.
Western AI data scrapping companies love to get mad at Chinese AI data scrapping companies for scrapping their data, for instance. American MIC love to bemoan foreign investment in cheap, efficient deterrents. American biotech companies are firmly committed to keeping anything developed in Cuba out of the hands of the American public.
Gimp is not exactly on par with programs in other categories, but that doesn't mean it's not high quality. It's good code that is stable, multiplatform, and the project has picked up the pace in recent months. I feel it's unfair to call the project "not high quality"
Gimp is love, gimp is life :) I have lost track of the years I have relied on that tool always being there when I need a quick edit or to modify some layers.
Plus all the (once valid) criticism about it not being professional is either solved or in the process of being solved (non destructive operations, high bit depth, cmyk...)
Man, you left out Obsidian, it is a godsend for studying and notetaking.
Get an ultra-wide monitor, split it into four panes, one pane to import the pdf you want to read, another for note-taking, and spare another one for the AI for Markdown formatting and explaining texts (optional). I can't think of a more efficient workflow for studying digitally.
Yeah, they don't let you self host the server for syncing either. They wanted like 8$ a month for their service last time I checked. It's really nice software and you can use other apps for syncing but that aspect is annoying.
What method are you using? I have Nextcloud running but it's not great on android and I can only sync notes from my PC not create them on the phone. I've heard syncthing works well but their android app is sketchy too last I saw.
I used to just use a cloud service like you years ago, but try sync them through GitHub, there is a 1gb limit on private repositories though, but it should be fine as long as you don't put videos and sounds in there.
iirc, some plugins on obsidian are oss, obsidian and core plugins are closed, I remember trying to use joplin or other software because obsidian isnt foss
The reason Microsoft sponsors it to universities is to get you used to their systems. Free yourself early, or you will start a long life of digital sunken cost that will make the change even more difficult.
Yeah low. If you compare load times side by side with chromium based browsers, you can't deny how painfully slow firefox is. Thats not to mention the ancient bugs that will never get fixed and the random predatory functionality they keep adding. Low is generous.
Are you talking about the bugs or the delay? For the delay I just tried last week actually. I always run a few browsers side by side out of necessity, and watching how much longer I wait for spinning loading icons on Firefox made me real sad. I can't afford the small but real delay. Life is too short for that. Anyone who can stomach the slowdown, I praise you for your ideals, genuine respect.
Talking about delays. For Mozilla products, yea, they have bugs, I trust you on this and have experienced it haha
What websites? Some are optimized for specific browser types and probably shouldn’t be accounted for as it’s not really the browser's fault: TikTok on web for example
I’ve used both Brave and Firefox and apart from specific websites, I’ve never really seen a difference. But if it’s still slower that’s good to know, but most people seem to disagree with you.
Frankly, anyways I personally prefer wasting a few minutes of my life every day and life my life the way I want it to be, supporting better software and protecting my privacy and anonymity rather than going all Google or the easy route. That’s why I use FOSS software.
Apache OpenOffice??
Surely you meant LibreOffice. OpenOffice has basically been dead for years, with no significant work going on.
Lmao I've been doing a digital forensics class online, and it's always got VMs with ancient versions of software on it, so I got to discover what Apache OpenOffice was. Love that they have to use FOSS to teach us shit since Windows needs a subscription.
::: spoiler Typo I almost wrote dogital forensics. Is that using dogs to find data? Sniff out that hard drive and get datadumping boy! :::
remember to scoop the poop after
Jesus those images must be 15-20 years old. I guess that's probably still good enough for the basics but there's been a lot of changes since then.
We're always on some ancient Kali version and Windows XP to 10, and once we used some Linux Distro I'd never heard of in my life. The software is Autopsy, OSForensics, ProDiscover Basic 64, Hex Workshop, and more, a bonus one being IceWeasel (now known as GNU IceCat?). I genuinely want to gouge my eyes out when looking at the old Kali.
Find the rhino pics!
It's an older image, not updated.
OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.
That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.
I agree that it shouldn't be there. LibreOffice is the clear replacement.
LibreOffice just doesn't roll of the tongue like OoenOffice though. Which really sucks. I even catch myself saying it when I mean LibreOffice.
To expand further on your point, here are the releases for Apache Open Office (OO). We are at 4.1.6. the page for 4.1 release was last updated in 2014. It's been mainly small bug fixes since then.
https://www.openoffice.org/development/releases/
LibreOffice (LO) and Open Office were essentially the same application at OO 4.0 vs LO 4.1. LO had 3 major releases by 2023 before it went from 7 to 24. With the annual releases it is me difficult to gauge progress in the same way. But we are already at 26.2.
https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/
All of the ones here are pretty old, so I can believe the meme is over 10 years old with mayve the firefox logo swapped out
LibreOffice has been updated? Interface still looks like it was designed for Windows 95.
Is there an office suite you had in mind that looks futuristic? Comparing a slightly old version of LibreOffice with a modern version of MS Office... They look pretty similar to me? (The gray document background in libreoffice is from me, it defaults to something closer to MS office).
Also @[email protected]
I haven't used Apple's suite much, but it's likely that LO could learn something from it, for the simple reason that Apple knows about the principles of grouping in design and thus never subscribed to the approach of ‘cram lots of buttons in the toolbars without spacing’.
However, changing the paradigm of the existing UI is probably a big ask.
Ah, I assumed you were comparing it to MS Office as the gold standard, and chose the tabbed mode to make it closest to that, though I don't personally use it that way myself.
LibreOffice has a simpler mode, though not quite as bare-bones as your Apple example. It's how I how use it personally:
There's also a Sidebar mode, which can collapse out of the way when not in use, or be brought back by pressing a small button on the side of the program.
I agree it could stand to offer a mode with much more spacing and just the essential options, but I think for the most part, the simpler toolbar mode which I use is pretty adequate, and doesn't feel overwhelming to use.
Alternatively, Libreoffice is quite customizable, so a user can remove every option from the toolbar they never use, and make it appear nicer and less cramped.
I'm not the guy to whom you originally replied, so I'm just chiming in with my observations. I would never pose MS' design as anything to aspire to, because MS only recently learned about the principles of grouping, which is very basic design stuff. Their design philosophy for ages consisted of crammed toolbars, crammed lists, and crammed tables.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice isn't better in this regard, and won't be until they work on the UI toolkit to allow a different approach (like e.g. Firefox does allow). Apple's UI is good not because it's ‘bare-bones’, but because it organises elements visually instead of piling them all into a giant toolbar for the user to wade through. Other Mac apps are the same way, usually including third-party ones because they follow Apple's guidelines. Btw, iirc the toolbars are typically customizable.
Ah, so you are! My mistake :p
Like how Firefox lets you drag and drop icons and spacers around? That would be cool to have in Libreoffice.
Could definitely see that as a big improvement, even as someone quite used to the Windows 95 way of doing things (or at least, I prefer the old way to the ribbon), hopefully someone who has a similar itch to us as well as the capabilities to implement it does so someday :)
Yeah, the spacers are the key thing here, because humans perceive spaced-out things to be topically distinct. Meanwhile Windows always offered separator bars to divide groups of buttons in the toolbars, which of course added visual noise. Idk what toolkit LO uses, but from what I've seen Java UIs typically follow Windows' conventions.
LibreOffice's look stems in large part from the UI toolkit that they use. Which was guaranteed to look like Windows, since LO is made in Java, and is not gonna be changed easily.
It still looks and behaves like StarOffice.
The templates they include look ancient as well. They do have a mediocre copy of Microsoft’s ribbon interface.
I mean, there's no such thing as a good copy of Microsoft's ribbon interface.
With enshitification nowadays, the fact that they're nonprofit is the reason why the software is good quality.
If you ever feel like you can't make anything good, keep in mind that companies will intentionally make worse stuff
😤 I'm upset I never thought about it this way till now.
That's my main issue with windows in particular. Their bad decisions are known to be bad for the user, but in theory good for the shareholders.
I can accept I'm not the right user for a program or feature, but not that the features are against the users.
The Audacity!
Will they get away with it? Vee'll see.
I'll go home now, HEY DON'T PUSH ME
They did not, in fact, get away with it.
Awwww... :(
Hey at least they removed mentioning it in the TOS!
Yeyyy!... :)
.....:(
Which most probably means that if you report a bug, you send them data about your installation and whatever additional data you include, like the email to contact you.
Lawyers keep stepping on this rake time and again when writing terms and policies.
Why on earth is OpenOffice here??
LibreOffice is the maintained fork.
It has been that way for 16 years now.
16 years.
There are people working full time jobs who were born the same year that LibreOffice started.
Stop promoting OpenOffice. People will have problems with it that have been long fixed in LibreOffice.
Edit: typo
Tbf I haven't used either extensively (or at least the features I've used in either have been very basic one), but I haven't had any issues with OpenOffice. What are some of the issues you're referring to in OpenOffice? Personally I tend to prefer it because I just think it looks nicer, but clearly there are some issues with it I'm unaware of.
Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice and OpenOffice. Never even heard of OpenOffice before...
It's been over 10 years since I tried it, but at that time it was common for OpenOffice to have compatibility issues with MS office formats, but those issues were already fixed in LibreOffice.
Isn't that sort of an issue with LibreOffice today though? At least in the sense that there are features in for example Microsoft Word where, if you use them in a document, and then open that document in LibreOffice Writer, it won't render correctly/won't function? I struggle to give you an example because it was a along time since I tried to do that, but I have definitely run into some compatibility issues there, on the side of LibreOffice. Maybe you're referring to something else though?
Edit: Nvm, I'm mixing up OnlyOffice with OpenOffice. Never used OpenOffice, don't even know what it is.
What is only office then?
OnlyOffice was an office suite developed by Sun Microsystems. Oracle stopped development whel they bought Sun. eventually the developers got fed up and founded the Open Document Foundation. oracle threw kind of a hissy fit, then eventually gave up and donated Open Office to the Apache foundation. Apache alleges Open Office is an active project, but they're just shuffling deck chairs. Open Office is dead, and Oracle killed it. Libre Office is what Open Office used to be, and moreedit: what the fuck is only office?
I think you misread "only office" as "open office". Though, you typed both in your reply... 🤔
ah shit. you're right. sr moment. what the fuck is only office?
Haha classic.
Good info in this comment https://lemmy.world/comment/22430995
Its only office.
Only Office is an open source free suite that is developed by Ascension System SIA. It is open source but has a paid option for corporate support. It offers cloud storage servers or local server storage.
When I retired, I wanted to ditch LibreOffice because I just don't need a full office suite anymore. So I tried Only Office for a bit. It's kind of like the office suite we have at home. It's fine for most people. But I always had issues with it dying on me under Fedora and Mint.
After a while, I realized I didn't even need that much office anymore. So I'm back to where it all began on Linux-- AbiWord and Gnumeric. That's all I need anymore. It's refreshing how a mere 125Gigs of storage on a cheap mini desktop can show what you really only need.
Thank you
Because I can understand “Open” while “Libre” sounds strange. — most people, probably
Where is FreeCad in this one? I've started using it after buying a 3d printer, and it's awesome what that piece of software lets me create.
Shoutout to openscad!
It's got OpenOffice in it. This picture must be ancient.
Got any links to learning? Ive gotten pretty far in fusion360 but am trying to transition and found f360 let's me be too lazy or sketch centric/doesn't require parametric rules
Also Deltahedra.
Check out MangoJelly on YouTube. The guy has hundreds of tutorials for FreeCAD and they're great
Thank you!!
Ive found it useful to search for a freecad tutorial for any object on YouTube and follow it, making an actual thing. Even if that thing is not of use to me, I learn from building it and use those concepts in what I want to build.
I wonder if it changed much in the last year. The assembly implementation is what's holding me back. Well, that and staring at cad all day at work already.
Freecad is my first cad experience, so I have no idea what I'm missing out on. That said, try the 1.1rc3 there's a lot of changes between 1 and 1.1
definitely a goated application on linux by now. I've just started using it, and holy cow, it's way more capable than I thought it was. 1.0 was a blessing!
I csme in here to see if anyone cared for FreeCAD and yup, here I see you. Love it. And it's better than many proprietary softwares I have tried (edited to remove the names), I mean in terms of hobby creation at least. I am trying so as to master it and create professional level CAD drawings. It's light weight, so beautifully intutive and that it runs smoothly on one of my ancient PCs with 2GB RAM, intel Pentium processor running Windows 7. It's truly awesome. So many add ons, leaves one spoilt for choices.
Also LibreCAD for 2D.
Heck, they won’t even let you into a difficult-to-cancel subscription! What are they thinking? Think of the revenue!
I heard they don't collect your private information and sell it to third parties, either. It's as if they hate society itself!
Line goes down :(
I'm not sure Firefox belongs on this list. Google finances Mozilla's operation to the tune of $420M a year. It's not for-profit, but it's also not the same as the others.
It's an easy paycheck for allowing Google as the default search setting. If Microsoft paid as much we would be seeing the same arguments about Bing.
If you have better ideas for financing firefox, go ahead :)
First of all, I'd get rid of a CEO that wants to be paid millions of dollars a year.
Do what they did with Thunderbird. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/
You don't and cannot finance Firefox. Mozilla gets all the money. I would love a Firefox subscription, but the CEO grabs all the millions.
If you have better ideas...
Google wants to finance anything they can get their damn search engine into, that's not entirely the fault of Firefox. I still use a firefox-based browser, but only for now.
There is ladybird on the horizon, a browser being built from scratch, not based on either Gecko or Webkit.
Servo is way way way ahead and isn't being built by fascist white supremacist and sympathizers.
who are the fascists and white supremacists?
There's also Servo but it's been in the works for a long time.
hmm.....if Firefox dies, can LibreWolf continue? 🤔
Almost certainly not. All the offshoots from Mozilla's tech rely first and foremost on Mozilla's production of the foundational software, which eats up a significant portion of their roughly $500M/yr operational costs. The heavy development cost of modern browsers is why everything is either Chromium or Gecko-based.
That said, Mozilla will be around as long as Chromium continues to dominate the market. Google literally funds Mozilla because it's cheaper to prop up a competitor than it is to be sued by the government for monopolistic practices (check out 1998 decision against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows).
Doubtful. Librewolf still uses Firefox as base.
Google funds them so their is "competition" in the browser space, to ward of antitrust lawsuits
And the Blender foundation gets yearly donations from tech giants like Epic, NVidia, Unity, Google and even car makers like BMW and Volkswagen. Even Adobe, their competitor, sponsors them.
It’s still a not-for-profit same with Mozilla. Doesn’t matter who funds them or how much they get in funding.
What people don't always remember about FOSS is they are just making it for themselves they are users as well as devs. The great thing about FOSS is if someone else happens to use it that's great and maybe they will contribute to something they use.
Yeah and they get other devs contributing to their project. Nobody's making Firefox or Blender as a solo project, but band together with some other nerds and this is what you get.
Never doubt the power of nerds arguing over their specific interests to make something amazing. Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind, entirely powered by nerd fights.
yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn't include one at all. many just wouldn't play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn't do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that's TUI based that does everything I want and it's perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a "SUPER" music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.
I'm not going to release it because A. like i said it's perfect for me and B. I dont' want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it's mine, and that's that. will never see the light of day.
Can I ask how you integrated Qobuz? I see they have a locked API and no other obvious way to integrate
honestly I just looked at what others have done with qobuz-player which is a TUI qobuz player and pretty much copied and pasted that.
Thanks, I'll have a look at that!
Openoffice-> LibreOfficeSeriously, don't use OpenOffice, it's abandoned for over 10 years.
So many people let perfect be the enemy of good. Firefox is great. It's the pillar of non-Chromium of browsers. Servo and Ladybird are not there yet and will take many years to surpass Firefox if ever. A Firefox fork has a better shot than those 2
GIMP is great software. Is it just Photoshop and Affinity better than it. Not seeing as much hate on Inkscape when it's just Adobe and Affinity as better.
OpenOffice is outdated but was good for like ~2010
A bunch of y'all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread
So many people suck up for the better of two bad options. You can use it and still give it deserved criticism, you won't hurt it's (or the wealthy Firefox exec team's) feelings.
I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.
Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google's footsteps, and the other I don't particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.
I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole "friend" at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn't have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.
The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly "Platinum" on Wine's AppDB but would often freeze and didn't support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn't connect online.
Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can't get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.
Yes.
For example, LibreWolf skipped the AI forced-down-the-throat drama.
I think maybe LibreWolf only ships with Debian, by default; but it is also in the repositories for Mint, and so I assume also Ubuntu.
Librowolf is not a fork, just a set of patches on top of Firefox stable.
Sure it’s great, but man Mozilla won’t get my money, same for Wikimedia
So why is Mozilla shoving AI garbage nobody asked for into Firefox? I seriously doubt that their severely overpaid execs don't have some kind of profit incentive.
It really should be LibreWolf up there instead
The image says "making", not "rebranding".
Because they also want to entice new users or appeal to users that for some reason do want that feature. More users means more money and despite being non-profit, people do enjoy having more money. They're not immune. Which is why we need to pull the reigns back every now and then.
They made high quality software...
Until they got a profit incentive.
They actually pay their employees.
???
Of course they do.
I don't see your point.
The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit.
Mozilla exec compensation aside (relative to other tech CEOs it is pretty low) the reason they do this is because they are trying to make money in some way that isn't the Google search box.
The other thing to consider is that even though a lot of people around here and AI skeptics loads is the general public are not and use it everyday and don't think twice.
I swear the Firefox users have no perspective whenever this stuff comes up.
It's always "why don't they just work on the browser" or " I would pay for just the browser" ( they won't, and even if they did most won't and it won't be enough)
Web browsers don't make money. It's why only chrome basically exists and that's a cost center to support Google's Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.
I am watching ladybird and hoping they manage to coalesce the required amount of support to get something off the ground and keep it there.
Firefox isn't used by the "general public". The general public doesn't give a shit about open-source or which corporate logo is stamped on their copy of Chromium. Many won't even look past Edge, and the rest will likely use Chrome because everyone does already.
No, Firefox is used by the enthusiasts who care about not using Chromium; about actively choosing control over convenience. Now Mozilla Corp is pissing off that same audience by doing what Google does -- shoving AI up everything. To date, every decision regarding AI has met with pushback from their own userbase. Being the lesser evil does not grant them a free pass for every boneheaded decision.
If they need cash, they can fire that fuckwit of a CEO, roll the savings back into their engineers and products, and go on a funding campaign promising to actually improve their products like Mozilla
OrgFoundation did with Thunderbird.I guarantee you that most Firefox users do not feel the level of emotions that you do on these issues, either about the AI prompt sidebar or the CEO's salary. They also don't use Firefox to spite Google. They use it because they think it's better than Chromium.
You're unhappy with Firefox? Easy fork. Off you go. Want to convince me to be mad too? Okay, make your case, but don't just assume that I'd just have to be mad if I just knew that there's gasp an AI sidebar that I can use if I want to.
Yep. Well, I don't necessarily agree it started exclusively for the ads, but they definitely wanted to create something that they control. Microsoft Edge and Opera switching to Chromium just means Google has more soft control on how the web operates. (Even saying "soft" there is pretty generous.) A majority of browsers are Chromium forks. Google can control how the web operates because of it.
But to your point though, thwarting ad blocking is a huge part of it now. The manifest V3 changes (which severely limited what sorts of ad blocking extensions could do) came the same year they listed ad blocking as a significant risk to their revenue in their shareholder statement. Which, I just wanna mention for folks who might not be keeping up with this as much, isn't some sort of conspiratorial statement. It's a public document because they're a publicly traded company.
At least they listened to users and made it easy to turn off. Still not acceptable, but at least something.
It's so that they get goog money
Audacity sold out and is now spyware; use Tenacity instead.
For real!? Damn
Not really, it's still fully FOSS, they were just terrible at communicating what they actually wanted to do and people got spooked.
Not for real.
Wait, what?!? You got a source for that?
I'll be pissed if it's true... Audacity holds a special place in my heart.
Source - download page's main option wants you to download using the "Muse Hub". Even if you install with a normal installer, here's one of the welcome tips
Yuck. Thanks for the heads-up.
Your complaint is that they offer optional plugins, downloadable via their launcher that is specifically designed to make installing plugins more convenient?
My complaint is that that MuseHub is being pushed as the main way to download Audacity. Right now, it's a relatively small push, but I vaguely recall that (so I might be misremembering), a few months ago, the Audacity installer would try to sneak a install of MuseHub
Really? It doesn't look like it - theta been some bleating about lag and far of oy uploading audio but other than a whole lot if argument, I can't see much in the way of details, let alone facts
Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).
Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)
shoutout to ffmpeg!
Maybe some day I can read that without adding an R
The biggest selling point of capitalism is innovation.
That's why nothing was ever invented before capitalism.
Which makes some wonder how capitalism was invented.
But they are communists and should be shot for questioning the wisdom of the system.
What came first? The innovator or the capitalist??
firefox? no profit incentive? we wish
Same can be said about the Linux Kernel.
Seriously though, thanks to all the FOSS developers out there. I try to donate $5 to $20 where I can, but I k ow that far from what they all deserve!
Boredom mostly, if their lazy bosses worked them more then they wouldn't have time to be productive at home.
/s
firefox is debataable
Name a better open source browser built from the ground up that isn't backed by big tech, I'll wait.
Firefox is literally backed by big tech though?
Just because there is no better open source browser doesn't mean it fits the description of OP's list
there are none but that doesnt mean firefox is good dont settle because everything else is worse
Ladybird is on the horizon.
Also Firefox isn't built from the ground up I don't believe. It's based on Gecko which iirc was based on KHTML. idk i can't fully remember don't take this as fact. i use firefox and prefer it to chomium based browsers but Mozilla has been making really weird moves lately around AI that I think is very unnecessary.
Chrome and Safari are built from forks of KHTML, WebKit, not Gecko
Firefox was born out of the Mozilla project.
That came from Netscape?
Ladybird is also making weird moves around AI and I feel obligated to mention fascism
Ladybird is not becoming vibe-coded, the AI generated code is being tested and refactored all the time, it's not straight up slop like what most junior devs do now.
Firefox is not high quality. Every other browser is just worse.
Tbh I quite like it
🫢 Kof, kof! ...fork browsers.
Same issues
Obligatory shoutout to curl.
I'm more of a wget kinda guy myself.
I’m more of a Zmodem guy.
Try wget2 instead, it's faster.
If wget2 is so good, why is there no wget3?
Wget with AI that hallucinates HTML to reduce bandwidth.
If all you use is HTTP or FTP then sure.
🪟: absolutely atrocious. let's do for-profit low quality software instead 😡
I've been learning FreeCAD recently and it's pretty incredible too!
Is FreeCAD good for 3D printing stuff? I started learning fusion but I'm kinda digusted by being tied to autodesk
I just started making some headway into using it and I've found it way less intuitive than Fusion. It also seems to be more finnicky about constraints and such. Like I wasn't able to extrude something because I had lines intersecting each other. Just have to be more methodical and use more sketches I guess. Im still on my first project with it though and haven't gotten to the point of printing anything yet though so take that with a grain of salt.
I'd say so! I made some 3D-printed pipes to connect my snake's terrarium extension as my first real project and they turned out pretty good. But I have no comparisons to other CAD software haha
It's so ugly and unintuitive in the beginning, but when it clicks and you finally get it, it is pretty awesome (and surprisingly lightweight)
Blender is so incredibly good. Big fan here. I'm just a hobbyist tho
shoutout to MPV!
Reminds me a local youtuber saying something similar about non-profit companies.
They said it's human nature to be driven by profit, so non-profits are profiting in some other way. Hence he prefers to give business to for profit companies as you know their intentions.
IDK, but I'd rather be the beta tester for some open source project, or even contribute code to it (I fixed a language server this way), than to pay premium for a software, which I won't "own", has a bunch of microtransactions, and becomes lower and lower in quality.
I'd doing something that makes you happy is a kind of profiting then he is right. But he is probably not that wholesome.
Well unfortunately he's right. Most non-profit companies are profiting off of things like your donations and such like that. You look at the Susan g Komen foundation for breast cancer awareness. Something like 5% maybe 10% of all donated funds actually go to breast cancer research. The rest of the funds are used to fund the staff including those that are in charge of the board. And they have massive paydays.
People at the heads of nonprofits are often highly compensated, and it's rare that any of them solve the underlying problem or even make meaningful headway. It's why there is so much "awareness" and short term band aids involved. A nonprofit that solves the problem it's supposedly trying to solve has no reason to exist and will cost people well paying jobs managing it.
Oh the irony
Blender is far better than anyone not-in-the-know would expect.
VLC does much more than just play videos, but the user interface inexplicably hides most of the functionality. Also, they've vehemently claimed for many years that it's impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.
GIMP and Inkscape keep improving, with GIMP being the better of the two. GIMP should just copy Photoshop's interface as closely as possible. There's no shame in that, and Photoshop does many things better. Most users coming to GIMP are coming from Photoshop. (Yes, I'm using PhotoGIMP, but that really doesn't do much to help.)
I've used Photoshop professionally for 20 years and GIMP for about 3 and, to be fair, both of their default interfaces have have their pros and cons. After spending the 2/3 hours it takes to become proficient in one after being used to the other, the comparison mostly comes down to other things e.g availability of tools, raw performance, enshittification etc.
Don't get me wrong, there are some things that annoy me about GIMP (like any software), but I'll be recommending versions 3.0 onwards over Photoshop every time. Adjusting to the interface is easily worth it.
Ah, so that's not just me, is it? That's bugged me for a long time. I was so happy when I discovered SM Player could do it.
What are some of the other functionalities of VLC?
It can display video streams, my work uses it to display security cameras so shipping knows when a truck is coming.
Pretty sure you can convert videos with vlc and watch iptv
Oh sick, I didn't know you can convert vids with vlc. I guess i should RTFM.
I don't understand economics but why does there have to always be profit? If someone made devices that last 50 years they would go bankrupt? Make it make sense.
They don't want some profit, or even sustainable profit. They want all the profit, and always more this quarter than the previous.
I do understand that if somebody created something that is cheap, lasts forever and there's a limited (non infinite) need for it, they would eventually stop selling. That's why they need to make things last less, or invent excuses to make you buy a new one.
The capitalist imperative is: make as much profit as you can as fast as you can.
The fastest way to make as much profit as you can is not to create the best possible product. Sure, that'll get you far enough- but in capitalism there is never "enough". For instance, you could use the capital you amassed to buy up all the competition and create a monopoly and hike prices to whatever you like because people will have no choice but to buy it from you, especially if it's something essential like food, energy, housing, or what have you.
Of course, monopolies are illegal. Not because capitalism says so, but because society says so, in order to contain capitalism, which would otherwise consume society even faster than it already does!
Monopolies are just one ugly example, there are other ways of making super much profit super fast. Like, stealing! That, too, is illegal, because it goes against the very concept of living in a society, which itself is predicated on the idea that we are stronger and better and happier when we come together and pool our resources.
Alas, I wax verbose.
So basically what it all comes down to is competition and not just greed like most people believe. If you don't make more money than the competition, you will fail. That's why companies keep getting bought out all the time, they lost this game. Most people have no idea just how many companies they know are owned by bigger ones they may not know. The whole thing is conglomerating like the T-1000 after it had been shattered and melted. So rabid profit chasing is a matter of survival.
That is precisely correct, capitalism is in some sense like a story, I don't remember who wrote it, in which human scientists ask a semi-omnipotent AI to answer some question, and the AI decides that in order to solve it, it needs to transform all the matter in the solar system into an even greater AI, and calmly treats human extinction as an irrelevant side effect.
"Maximize profit forever" is a bad algorithm if the goal is to sustain a thriving human society. It has no goal state. Just more, forever. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its core design and central idea, that somehow, by creating ever more "wealth", everyone gets richer as a whole, while not taking into account the societal effects of some getting vastly richer than others, compounding over time unto infinity.
I could go on. But capitalism is a fundamentally broken idea that will implode on itself as a matter of causation as it plays out over time, it is logically and physically incapable of sustaining itself. We are seeing the late stage effects of it play out before our eyes right now.
runaway infinite consumption at all costs .... aka ... cancer
Funny you should mention that! The Phoebus cartel formed in 1924 by major light bulb manufacturers, because they were at a point where they were producing light bulbs that could last for decades, and they realized that this would kill their profits because nobody would buy bulbs because they lasted so long, so they made rules to deliberately make the bulbs fail after about 1,000 hours and fined members for making bulbs that lasted too long, effectively creating the concept of planned obsolescence as a business model.
See? Capitalism promotes innovation! In how to profit!
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
The Problem with open source is, it relies on self exploitation. Most OS Dev don't get paid, so they've got to work another jib full time. This leads to a lot of burned out devs from their project and that is a real problem.
Before a project becomes self sufficient on donationa, it needs to become really big. Most projects simply never reach that scale.
There is a reason for profits spend a fortune on marketing.
People have ALWAYS wanted to make better tools. Did we need to improve our arrowheads and spears every generation? No, we could have kept the same designs as long as they got the job done.
But humans are pretty unique. We will spend significantly more time testing and improving our tools for only a minor improvement. Because we are not doing it for only ourselves. We are doing it for the knowledge of future generations.
Closed source software and profit driven economic models go AGAINST human nature. It is human to plant trees for which you will never live to enjoy the shade of.
There is no major company that allows tools to be written that fill this human connection in building something solely for the purpose of building a good tool to make our lives easier and better.
It should be common sense, but while it's not, this kind of comment is refreshing like a breeze on the nape
Aw. Thanks. I honestly think there is tons of potential for Linux nerds to understand the problems with capitalist modes of production because of their direct exposure to its massive contradictions.
I mean, when I worked for Cisco and they sold the exact same hardware as an "upgrade" to older hardware I saw this first hand.
We literally had sections in the code that would check the EEPROM for a flag to enable the upgrade through software. Literally the same hardware with a single bit in the EEPROM being swapped from a 1 to a 0. So we could sell the same hardware twice.
If that doesn't make you realize something is fundamentally wrong with how software is used under capitalist modes of production. Well, nothing will.
"Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?"
-Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I'm genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.
This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.
Non-profit means the corporation isn't set up to make a profit and the business operates off of donations instead of selling a product. So there is always a profit motive. I wish more people understood this. Everything from Greenpeace to MADD is still a corporation ran by people who want to make lots and lots of cash.
Who woulda thunk greed is the denominator??!!
Non-profits seem to work better when they produce a product. But when they produce nothing and just have a goal, they don’t want to close shop after achieving that goal. Like MADD. The woman who founded it left a quarter of century ago because she accomplished what she set out to do. Those running it today don’t want to lose their meal ticket.
I love that OpenTTD made the list
OpenTTD is the pinnacle of open source software. They should have stopped there
When money comes in the picture, then profit is more important than the product, and this people really loved the product they are doing, if they have enough money to live comfortably they get to keep control of something they care and love.
I stand by blender being the absolute best piece of software I have ever used.
Blender is abso-freaking-great, I just wish they would have been less pokey pokey with the UI over the years.
Search: how do i do X in blender
Answer: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-_
Me: Doesn't work
Answer: bobbit menu, right pane, third box down
Me: Not there
Answer: Rightclick from x mode and press Y
Me: Not there
so you live in an insane asylum? Powerful, but the least intuitive UI ever.
Came a long way since pre 2.8
Intuition is based on experience i guess. Blender was the first non-CAD modelling software i used, and i quickly learned that the search tool in blender is the primary UI gateway. Made everything really quick and easy to find, and any questions I have had was answered by the great community around Blender.
Tux, FF and VLC have been dailies in my life for over a decade. Many MANY thanks to them, and to ALL those pipple.
Why is Firefox there?
A big share of Linux contributions come from big tech companies, which are definitely making a profit from it
Because it’s fun!
(At least) Half of the contributions to the projects you have there are for-profit. To sell hardware, to sell support licenses, to sell ads, etc.
Obviously this isn't a Ferengi operation.
Mozilla is kind of a piece of shit company/foundation (it’s still better than most things out there)
Greedy and stuff, governance problems…
They started selling user data and integrated AI
This article goes over the git diff when it happened. This blog post from Mozilla themselves is them not removing the ML tools, but giving users a "kill switch" option for the tools.
What if I told you all of these ventures were profitable?
Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.
This is the same argument as "you hate capitalism but you participate in it."
I mean... it definitely plays a large factor. The idea that these organizations aren't profit-maximizing is very different than claiming they're net negative or hobbyist endeavors.
"We live in a capitalist society and must play by its rules" is merely an observation of the status quo.
I would more compare it to the complaint about a number of socialist states - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela - that wildly outperform their expectations despite flying in the face of Chicago School orthodoxy. "Well, but they're cheating!" is an allegation made regularly.
Western AI data scrapping companies love to get mad at Chinese AI data scrapping companies for scrapping their data, for instance. American MIC love to bemoan foreign investment in cheap, efficient deterrents. American biotech companies are firmly committed to keeping anything developed in Cuba out of the hands of the American public.
Media Wiki actually makes money though.
GIMP is not high quality. Audacity was sold out. Firefox has also sold out. Apache OpenOffice was what fucked over and led to LibreOffice coming ahead
VLC remains the GOAT
Gimp is not exactly on par with programs in other categories, but that doesn't mean it's not high quality. It's good code that is stable, multiplatform, and the project has picked up the pace in recent months. I feel it's unfair to call the project "not high quality"
Gimp is love, gimp is life :) I have lost track of the years I have relied on that tool always being there when I need a quick edit or to modify some layers.
Plus all the (once valid) criticism about it not being professional is either solved or in the process of being solved (non destructive operations, high bit depth, cmyk...)
Check other comments through the thread
If accessibility is a part of quality, I think we have not much to be proud We're losing visually impaired people
I wouldn't call a lot if those "high quality"
Ngl if those are "bad quality" I don't know what my personal projects are.
Even accounting for how self-critical I am with my old code.
Like which ones?
Man, you left out Obsidian, it is a godsend for studying and notetaking.
Get an ultra-wide monitor, split it into four panes, one pane to import the pdf you want to read, another for note-taking, and spare another one for the AI for Markdown formatting and explaining texts (optional). I can't think of a more efficient workflow for studying digitally.
I tought Obsidian was closed source
Oops, I didn't even notice.
Yeah, they don't let you self host the server for syncing either. They wanted like 8$ a month for their service last time I checked. It's really nice software and you can use other apps for syncing but that aspect is annoying.
There are tons of alternative ways for you to sync notes. I have used it for so long without spending a dime.
What method are you using? I have Nextcloud running but it's not great on android and I can only sync notes from my PC not create them on the phone. I've heard syncthing works well but their android app is sketchy too last I saw.
I used to just use a cloud service like you years ago, but try sync them through GitHub, there is a 1gb limit on private repositories though, but it should be fine as long as you don't put videos and sounds in there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4-BPcveBI
I do have a git server, I didn't even think of that. I'll check it out. Thanks.
iirc, some plugins on obsidian are oss, obsidian and core plugins are closed, I remember trying to use joplin or other software because obsidian isnt foss
I’ve been considering obsidian but my uni gives me Microsoft office for “free” so idk
The reason Microsoft sponsors it to universities is to get you used to their systems. Free yourself early, or you will start a long life of digital sunken cost that will make the change even more difficult.
I’ll have to transfer all my docs one day
Obsidian is just a one note replacement. Use libre office or only office to get away from MS. No transfer needed.
For what it's worth I like obsidian a lot more than OneNote.
Firefox has a profit incentive and its making low quality software...
I wouldn't say low
Yeah low. If you compare load times side by side with chromium based browsers, you can't deny how painfully slow firefox is. Thats not to mention the ancient bugs that will never get fixed and the random predatory functionality they keep adding. Low is generous.
Your last benchmarks were made in 2015 or something?
Are you talking about the bugs or the delay? For the delay I just tried last week actually. I always run a few browsers side by side out of necessity, and watching how much longer I wait for spinning loading icons on Firefox made me real sad. I can't afford the small but real delay. Life is too short for that. Anyone who can stomach the slowdown, I praise you for your ideals, genuine respect.
Talking about delays. For Mozilla products, yea, they have bugs, I trust you on this and have experienced it haha
What websites? Some are optimized for specific browser types and probably shouldn’t be accounted for as it’s not really the browser's fault: TikTok on web for example
I’ve used both Brave and Firefox and apart from specific websites, I’ve never really seen a difference. But if it’s still slower that’s good to know, but most people seem to disagree with you.
Frankly, anyways I personally prefer wasting a few minutes of my life every day and life my life the way I want it to be, supporting better software and protecting my privacy and anonymity rather than going all Google or the easy route. That’s why I use FOSS software.
Ya let's use chrome instead
Firefox? Lmao
yeah Firefox doesn't belong in this meme