But when the open source app becomes the best one, it becomes impossible to beat it. Look VLC for example.
There are a few examples where the foss version of the app became the best one. I am having trouble remembering others. But I think BitWarden is just as good as any paid password manager.
Vlc is basically what it is because of ffmpeg and the likes, which are… Corporate supported :p
That said ffmpeg didnt start that way, but at one point it was and vlc quickly jumped into popularity because of it and it quickly supporting new formats ( like mkv back in 2003/2004 ).
Youre not wrong, but its more complex than that xDOr Blender
Depending on what you’re trying to create blender is very easily beat by other programs. Almost every time a friend watches me use blender I’ll get hit with “this would be so much easier in fusion 360”
They made the RTX version, so now I can see it in 4k, thank you developers!
Sometimes slightly worse. Like LibreOffice.
Sometimes actually better, like VLC.
Sometimes about the same, like the latest version of MuseScore (older versions were, in fact, quite a bit worse).
But sometimes, like with older versions of GIMP (I’ll admit, I’ve not tried its latest major version release candidate) it’s significantly worse.
PSA: Inkscape is good now!
I wonder how many paid apps were utterly decimated after they released VLC
I genuinely doesn’t know there’s paid media player out there, VLC came preinstall on all my prebuild PC purchase since forever.
There definitely exist paid players out there (or at least used to…dunno if they still exist), but there are also “free” (as in beer) non-free (as in speech) options, like the ones included out of the box in a Windows or macOS installation.
For LibreOffice, I’d go with, worse and better at the same time.
- I have just noticed, overtime, that it has some problems in some cases, where MS Office does better, while there are certain cases where it does better.
There are 2 major pain points though:
- Calc UI stutters when using the scrollbar with mouse click and drag.
- Adding images to files makes the whole thing way slower than acceptable.
Krita isn’t that much worse than Photoshop/CSP for digital illustration. That said, going back to CSP after a year was such a relief I didn’t know I needed. So many little stumbling blocks removed.
365 is far worse IMO. New web only apps (replacing all the desktop apps) are a big step backwards. LibreOffice does everything needed natively and a lot more.
If you like professional photography, you can try darktables. It’s a replacement for Lightroom and it’s great in my opinion.
Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits. It’s a bit weird to use though.
Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits
See, the problem with that is that that’s precisely not how I use Photoshop. I don’t use it often (certainly not often enough to actually pay for it), but when I do, I tend to go fairly deep.
I should try out Darktable though. I used to use Aperture until it was discontinued, and these days I frequently use Lightroom, though I don’t really love it.
IMO Krita is better than GIMP for the quick simple edits.
LibreOffice is more than slightly worse, but FOSS projects cover the gamut. The thing about them is that the best ones are usually laser focused on exactly what the user needs, rather than what makes the most money.
Calc was actually quite comparable for 90% of Excel features I have ever actually used.
Writer is petty good on its own, but the fact that .docx documents don’t quite matchup vs. When making and opening with Word makes it difficult for me to use officially.
Impress is just plain disappointing compared to PowerPoint.
Base might be okay, better than nothing I guess.
The rest of the suite I don’t know.
Dont edit in shitty formats, edit native, publish to pdf. Skip the pointless MS Office step. If someone else wants to collaborate, great they can download LibreOffice or alternatives for free. If they expect the docx format ask them to pay for your 12 month subscription or stfu.
They can also open open document files in word just fine
To quote a non-computer savvy friend from a few years ago. When he was talking to someone else, I just over heard the conversation.
Na, I use VLC player. It always works, it will play a slice of cucumber.
Libreoffice is slightly worse because all the proprietary office suites keep lowering the bar for everyone to follow them. It’s not a quality issue, it’s a never ending contest to figure out how to complicate writing a simple letter so that everyone has to buy only your software.
I actually find MS Word really clunky, laggy, buggy, and generally intuitive. LO I only find to be clunky
Sometimes the open source equivalent is better. SmartTube is a much better app than the official YouTube app for Google TV / Android TV even though there’s just one developer working on it.
Similarly, pirate TV/movie apps often have a much better user experience than the legit ones. Compare Weyd, Syncler, or Stremio+Torrentio to the Amazon Prime video app for example.
In both cases, the people who work on them usually care about the user experience and use the app day-to-day themselves, rather than being told to do whatever makes the most money for the company.
Slightly worse? I can actually sort and the video player actually works, instead of whatever the FUCK was going on with the other place, for literally ever.
I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?
Meanwhile a bunch of nerds working for free on a passion project are giving away software that is faster and easier to use and often more beautiful to look at.
I guess I’ve simply reiterated what the post image said, so ignore me maybe, but fuck this is depressing and disappointing. All these corporate resources and all they can do is barely achieve what other people do for free in their spare time? What a fucking waste of human life and energy is capitalism.
Honestly, it’s such a compelling point to made for why capitalism is a shit economic system. Regardless of if someone is compelled by communist/anarchist economics, at the very least it should be obvious that capitalism produces only the most profitable products, not the best products.
Technically, MacOS doesn’t cost money to use and has no ads.
You need to buy an Apple-branded computer to use it (at least legally). It’s price is just included in the device you buy.
For real open source projects, it’s a lot of the time not nerds working for free.
All your favorite frameworks and libraries are often developed in house at big companies (angular, react, vue, tensorflow, Kafka, pytorch, k8s, Jenkins, and many many more).
And even then, much of the development on them is done by people who are getting paid to use the frameworks at smaller companies.
There are tons of examples the other way too of course, but even the Linux kernel is mostly corporate commits, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and others.
This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not as cut and dry as people make it out to be.
I want to add, that language development is also often done by companies. Today for example is a Mozilla thing, and while a non profit, the devs aren’t working for free.
Do you have any idea how many jira states our development workflow has?
I wonder how much appetite there is for project managers and scrum masters in the open source world.
What’s funny to me is, the agile approach seems like it’s a much better fit for open-source, non-commercial software development.
The corporate world and is management practices based around quarters and deadlines can’t seem to see how anything could get done without deadlines, but that’s usually less of a factor with open-source. People laugh at “scrum masters” because in a corporate environment, all the scrum stuff tends to be mostly performative. But it seems to me that open-source projects with multiple contributors already kind of work in an agile manner.
the problem is that in the vast majority of cases, designers aren’t involved. it’s just code monkeys trying their best to implement functionality but without UI/UX design they are barely usable by the average person. I guess just by its nature open source is less of a concept in design so you don’t get many volunteers. also designers are probably more averse to doing work for free since every goddamn costumer tries to get them to work for free.
And then you have Blender, Krita, OBS, VLC, bitwarden & Let’s Encrypt.
But tons of corporate contribution to big open source projects so it is sometimes grey.
Open source is the free bicycle that will get you to the coffee shop. Priority software is the SUV you lease to do the same.
Enjoy being poor.
So open source is superior then, as it promotes fitness and climate friendlyness?
So this is why FOSS software is often faster, no traffic jams.
I like to tell people “have fun staying poor” when they don’t use open source money.
I’m willing to bet the poster isn’t aware just about every website they visit is built on an open source stack.
If we’re talking Lemmy and Lemmy clients, I’d argue it’s a helluva lot better. For one, I can rotate my fucking screen
Hell, the thing that got my to switch was when they got rid of third party apps, because of how absolutely abysmally shitty the official app is
Voyager for Lemmy is some seriously gourmet shit.
But seriously the answer is usually that the big company is trying to apply to ALL USERS and usually only pleases a subset or none of those users.
Voyager isn’t for you? That’s fine, Lemmy has a nice API and you can build whatever you like. Lemmy is also open so if that API isn’t nice you can provide suggestions and fixes.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s a pretty good place to be.
Look at early Twitter or formerly Reddit. A nice API. Tons of fantastic clients. Open source is the best, but even just “open” is a fantastic first step.
Voyager is indeed a really good app for Lemmy. It is based on Apollo app which was the best, and IMO, the only sensible way to browse Reddit on iOS.
I am glad @[email protected] had a working version ready merely days after the new TOS came into effect.
I have been using it since it was called Wefwef (which I still feel was a better name, more playful), and I liked it so much that I use it on my Android phone as well as my iOS daily driver.
Closed sauce app isn’t always better, and big corp don’t have ‘all stars’ teams (but do have marketing teams) - the question is why the fossy app doesn’t change UI design every few months (mostly in stupid ways) :D.
Cause one was created to make money, while the other was created to actually be used…
Sometimes not mutually exclusive. Its not common but it does happen. Iphone rocked the industry. Photoshop dare I say it, was the standard. At least at first.
Honestly, I have more free and open source apps and programs on my PC and phone than not because the exact opposite of this meme has been my experience.
