GIMP for example is nowhere near feature parity with Photoshop

Yeah. That’s exactly my point…maybe I wasn’t clear.

The problem is that no one specific FOSS tool has feature parity. To get the same abilities as Photoshop, you have to use a workflow that is a combination of GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus instead of having it in the one package, which is why Adobe is the industry standard.

Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn’t even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!

That’s sort of where I see the issue as well. What proprietary software does is takes the features of a bunch of different pieces of kit and puts them together into one package.

There isn’t one particular thing that Propietary software does the FOSS software can’t. The problem is that you need multiple different software solutions to do it.

So while Illustrator offers Paragraph Spacing (for example) Inkscape doesn’t, you get that in Scribus. But Scribus lacks the more advanced pathing vector tools, which Inkscape offers. Meanwhile neither of them have strong photo editing abilities, which GIMP brings to the table, but GIMP can’t really do painting well, which KRITA brings to the table…and so on and so on.

Every open source alternative does something as good as their proprietary alternaties. But not everything. You have to use a combination in order to match the capability of one adobe product, and that’s just not feasible in a professional environment.

If you wan’t to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn’t worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.

Then, I would argue, the alternative isn’t to sign petitions to make the corporate guys make their proprietary stuff available on FOSS operating systems. The alternative is to contribute to the FOSS alternatives in order to make them as good as the proprietary.

I’m not saying that you in particular haven’t contributed (either financially or developmentally). I don’t know you, so this isn’t particularly directed at you.

But in general, the “FOSS isn’t as good as proprietary stuff” crowd has overwhelmingly never actually tried to fund or contribute to the development of the software itself and their complaints amount to “Why isn’t my free thing as good as the thing they make me pay for?”

In which case the answer is “of course it isn’t…you’re telling me the software developed on the evenings and weekends by enthusiasts doing it in the spare time for NO money isn’t as polished as a fully funded business software!? NO WAY!!! I’M SHOOKETH!!!”

The alternative to the (perceived) quality disparity between FOSS and Proprietary isn’t to go begging at the Corporations doorstep; it’s to make the FOSS alternatives good enough to take the throne of “industry standard” away from the corporations.

It’s not impossible…hell, Blender is the poster child for pretty much doing exactly that. It’s not the “industry standard”, but it’s accepted in the industry in ways that GIMP and Inkscape still aren’t. And the reason is because it’s good enough to be there.

Depends on what you’re using it for.

Writer, Presentation, etc… yeah. works great. No problems at all.

Calc/Excel…sure…will work for pretty basic stuff. But as soon as you get a relatively complex spreadsheet, interoperability goes out the window.

For example, I have a few spreadsheets that I work on at home (where I use Linux) and at work (where I use windows). I can’t work on it in one without screwing up the formatting, forumlae, and advanced filtering in the other, and vice versa. I’m forced to use OnlyOffice in order to be able to do so.

There’s no such thing as a “non-harmful” pedofile.

Either you’re actively molesting children (yes…even teens), or you’re consuming the CP that is the result of OTHER people abusing children by forcing them to participate and worse.

You don’t get to say “its not repulsive to consume the product as long as youre not a creator of it”. Consuming the end result is still participating in it.

I can’t believe that even has to be pointed out.

I would make one hell of an ugly woman…

I was an archaeology major, hence the history thing. And I’m fascinated by the psychology of crime.

I’m far far far from a younger consumer, and I find that I too have moved almost entirely to online content, mostly in the form of True Crime podcasts and YT channels, History Documentaries, etc…

Especially in non-fiction content, there’s pretty much nothing that paid TV can offer that Social Platforms cannot. It’s the only place where I think this whole internet experiment is actually working as intended; the democratization of knowledge.

They already tried it. It’s called Threads. It exists. People use it. And other instances have the choice to simply not federate with them.

To me (as unpopular as this sounds) that’s the beautiful thing about FOSS and about Federation in particular. No one is stopping anyone from creating their own instance. Even Corporations.

It’s the ultimate expression of “Anyone can do what they want, say what they want, believe what they want…but no one else is in any way obligated to listen to them/federate with them”

I know of companies that host small mastodon instances for their staff to communicate back and forth. I know of similar setups with lemmy instances. Anyone can use the technology for anything they wish to.

It’s a “block party”! </dadjoke>

I’ll show myself out.

I don’t know about that, to be honest.

I don’t have any hard data to back me up, but anecdotally I find that most FOSS software I use is headquartered in Europe. Quite often Germany. There are many maintainers from all over the world, but I feel like (again…in my experience) Europe has always been bigger into starting such projects.

I agree with you.

However…there’s an argument to be made that the post itself is a form of criticism and falls under the free speech rules where it regards political figures. In many ways, it’s not any different than the drawings of Musk holding Trump’s puppet strings, or Putin and Trump riding a horse together. One is drawn and the other is animated, but they’re the same basic concept.

I understand however that that sets a disturbing precedent for what can and cannot be acceptable. But I don’t know where to draw that line. I just know that it has to be drawn somewhere.

I think…and this is my opinion…political figures are fair game for this, while there should be protections in place for private citizens, since political figures by their very ambition put themselves in the public sphere whereas private individuals do not.

I don’t expect it. I just hope for it because it would be the most big-dick-energy move Zelensky can pull on Trusk.

I desperately desperately desperately want to read a headline that says “Ukraine signs rare mineral agreement with the European Union. Ukraine becomes a member of the EU and the EU gets large resources of rare minerals to supercharge their own homegrown tech industry and divest it from the United States of Trump”

Everything from wife-killers, toenail-eaters, to geniuses

Stop spying on me please.

I can’t help but think that there’s a Broadway musical first act closing song somewhere in there…

You are free to learn ‘Xi Jinping thought.’ Doubt this is for the progress of humanity.

That’s not how Open Source works. Is this Chinese version of the AI likely biased? Yes…almost certainly.

But Open Source means that anyone can download and use the same source code and same technology to tinker with it and create one that isn’t biased and has nothing to do with the Chinese government.

The power of Open Source is that regardless of who creates the software originally, a million eyes are literally looking at the code. It’s nearly impossible to hide any shenanigans.

The word “Celt” is largely meaningless. There were no such specific societal group as “Celts”.

“Celts” refers to speakers of similar (though not the same) languages within a celtic language group which includes Gauls (Who became Germans), Celtiberians, who became Portuguese, the Gaels, who became the English and Irish, etc… etc…

Saying that “Celts” are a society is like saying Peru, Argentina, Mexico, etc… are all one single people. (pro tip…they’re not)

So no, “celt” isn’t derogatory, and it certainly isn’t a synonym for “druid”.

Exactly. This is the good thing about federation. If you don’t like the community you’re in, move to another one that better aligns to your values. No one’s speech is “limited”, but other instances aren’t forced to listen to you unless they want to.

That’s a very fair point. But it’s still annoying.

Not when every app decides to use a different point version of the same damn platform.

"Hello Mr. Application. I see you’d like to use the Freedesktop-SDK 23.08.27

“Oh…well hello other application. What’s this? You want to use Freedesktop-SDK 24.08.10? Well…I guess so…”

Edited to add: Yes, I know that flatpaks will upgrade to use updated platforms. But it doesn’t automatically remove the old one, forcing you to have to run flatpak remove --unused every week just to keep your drive clean. That’s hardly user friendly for the average person.