alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. “Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software”

  • Baut [she/her] auf.@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
    124·
    9 months ago

    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).

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      64·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • GlitterInfection@lemmy.worldEnglish
      30·
      9 months ago

      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.

    • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      Then you aren’t picking it because it’s free. You’re picking it because you prefer it.

    • 0x2d@lemmy.ml
      4·
      9 months ago

      i paid $50 for an affinity photo license, it worked great but now they want me to buy v2 for another $50

    • Seeker of Carcosa@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      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.

  • WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world
    31·
    9 months ago

    There really isn’t much good FOSS software in the CAD/Engineering world. I’ve tried the 2D and 3D solutions that I’ve beena able to find and they are missing way too many features or the learning curve is crazy steep. If anyone knows of good CAD software let me know, I’d love to try it.

    • Hugucinogens@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      23·
      9 months ago

      I wonder if it’s because of patent-trolling crap, like Adobe’s case.

      (Adobe runs patents on individual good-design features, like “having x option available on the right-click menu”, forcing competitors to have that same option buried in some other dropdown menu somewhere, or have the same option split in multiple steps, in order to avoid being sued…)

      AutoCAD’s company has done other sleazy copyright-related shit, so I wonder if something similar is going on, just like Photoshop alternatives being shit.

      • WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world
        5·
        9 months ago

        It’s probably a mix of that and how CAD/Engineering software is a complicated niche market. It’s not as ubiquitous as something like an office suite or even a phot editor like GIMP. I don’t have anything to back that up other than a hunch.

      • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Oh wow that’s actually evil. Imagine having such shit software that the only thing keeping competition away is having a literal monopoly on your features.

        • Hugucinogens@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          9 months ago

          Because huge legal teams make sure to find the right loopholes.

          Here’s a good 10 minutes of some of the more disgusting offenders.

          Quick and tasty video by a great YouTuber (Uniquenameosaurus, my beloved)

    • SpeakinTelnet@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      9 months ago

      I second that. I work mostly with Catia and I’ve been searching forever for a Foss and Linux compatible replacement to a point I was seriously thinking about creating one from scratch.

      • WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        I do a lot of 2D civil drawings for underground utility construction and I haven’t found anything that does what I need. Also the selection is pretty much limited to Windows. The CAD programs on Mac seem to be limited compared to their Windows brethren.

    • Thrashy@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      It’s a damn shame, too, because the commercial software in the sector is abusively overpriced, and there’s just nothing to be done about it (unless somebody can get antitrust regulators to pay attention, which hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not holding my breath for it).

      It’s not like the FOSS options out there aren’t fundamentally capable of doing the job, either – it’s just that they almost universally seem to have been designed by people who think of GUIs as a concession to the normies, and don’t understand typical or expected design workflows. I’d love to be able to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion for hobby projects, but just creating a sketch in the former is like fighting through molasses compared to the process in Fusion. A bit of focus on UI instead of under the hood features would go along way towards making these programs viable competitors – look at how Blender’s perception changed amongst professionals after it ditched its idiosyncratic pre-2.7 UI, for instance.

      Don’t even get me started on BIM software… Ridiculous subscription pricing, barely a bug fix to be found, and feature requests ignored for a decade or more! The last release of Revit’s headline new feature was (drumroll, please…) A dark UI mode. Good to see Autodesk put my employer’s seven-figure subscription payments to good use. 😑

      • WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 months ago

        You are right about the current state of CAD/Engineering software being a mess. Crazy subscription models and no real innovation. Buggy software everywhere.AutoCad crashes at least 3 times a day or does weird stuff like the ribbon and menus disappearing. I’d love to find something that worked as an alternative.

  • Smorty [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    18·
    9 months ago

    😎 Debian. If I weren’t into VR, I would have literally no reason to use any proprietary software on my computer besides the bootloader (which I would of course also like to replace). I’ll get an index soon, as I’ve heard it runs on Linux, so that’ll be very cool.

        • Smorty [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          9 months ago

          So the HTC Vive works with FOSS software but the index doesn’t? Oh man… I mean, if I’m gonna play VR games, those are gonna be mostly proprietary either way, but oof.

        • Smorty [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          9 months ago

          I tried to get my cv1(Original oculus rift) up and running with OPEN HAD but it is so complicated to me, it feels more like some completely standalone software which one needs to understand the entire codebase to even use it… And positional tracking also doesn’t work yet, so ya can just look around

    • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      9 months ago

      Statistically you use an Oculus headset. Someone is currently working on a minimal runtime called Oculus Ameliorated that doesn’t have the shitty Dash performance overhead. It’s currently in Patreon-only alpha. Here’s her Discord.

      As someone else mentioned, Steam is still proprietary, but at least getting rid of the resource heavy Meta runtime for their headsets is something to look forward to.