alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. “Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software”
alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. “Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software”
Community note: Free software is in many cases more convenient than their proprietary alternatives. Proprietary software quickly becomes very inconvenient if you dislike how it works, if you don’t want to be a product, or if it has ads (like in your operating system? That’s pretty inconvenient, Microsoft).
Free software: Usually works right away
Proprietary software: Usually licensed. Need to purchase a license. Payment keeps failing. You finally get activation key. Software fails to activate. You contact support. They insist it works. After a few days it finally works. A few years later the software gets discontinued. Software cannot contact activation server as it doesn’t exist anymore. Software is now absolutely unusable.
50% of the time it works mostly some of the time.
My experience with open source software is that it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the proprietary options when I need it and then 10 years later the community has rewritten it to become far superior and I always mean to go back and try it but no longer need it.
Blender I’m looking at you.
Holy shit yes, this has happened so many times to me
Ok but seriously, Blender has being going like crazy ever since the 2.7 release. It is insane to me what this software can do today, while being FOSS
Yup. It went from “this is a horribly thought out way to move in a 3D scene and I can’t rebind the key bindings” to something pretty industry relevant in a short period of time.
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Actual malware, too. Even if you uninstall it, so many different bits are left over that still happily run in the background and might report god knows what back to base
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Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
I have so much passionate hate for Adobe, if their headquarters ever burn down, everyone who knows me will think I did it
Then you aren’t picking it because it’s free. You’re picking it because you prefer it.
Why not both?
i paid $50 for an affinity photo license, it worked great but now they want me to buy v2 for another $50
I agree on a personal level. FOSS software is much more convenient for my usecase of writing papers/typsetting notes, some automation, writing a program that works for me, and browsing/videos.
On the level of someone working in academia, it can be incredibly inconvenient if not outright impossible to implement. I can manage if I come across a bug in some FOSS software in my personal usage. An enterprise encountering an error with some utility whose support forum is a discord server: completely unacceptable. The entire printing service being offline because CUPS is temperamental: completely unacceptable.
Enterprises are the core customers of these inconvenient pieces of software with subscription based models.