alt text: Someone looking disinterested at their fingernails. "Me pretending that i dont care about convenience so i can use free software"
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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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.
Then you aren't picking it because it's free. You're picking it because you prefer it.
Why not both?
Sometimes you can have both. Sometimes you can't.
You'd be crazy to suggest that GIMP is a more convenient option than Photoshop. You would not be crazy to suggest the same of Audacity.
MuseScore is a particularly interesting case. I'd have said that it's more on the GIMP side of things previously, where you'd only use it if you couldn't afford Sibelius or Dorico because it's a seriously inferior product (an ironically painful thing to say, because even they are extremely flawed in their own ways). But then in response to a pretty scathing and humorous review, they hired the person responsible for that critique to head up a redesign, and today MuseScore is excellent.
Obviously that's true. I don't use any of the two, since I rarely edit images and inkscape can be abused for when I do.
However, for me using PhotoShop would be pretty inconvenient. I can install GIMP with two? clicks on any machine and instantly use it. For PhotoShop I don't even have a device which has an OS on which it could run. Being unable to exercise the freedoms which free software gives me is pretty inconvenient, if I would like to at some point. Especially if I wanted to share the software with other people.
But I understand your point: if PhotoShop would be extremely more convenient for a task I need to regularly do, then it's possible I'd use it. There cannot be a right life amidst wrongs, so a pragmatic approach feels more sustainable to me than dogmatism.
Personally I find GIMP's design so poor that I would literally rather find a torrent and download Photoshop than try to do what I need in GIMP.
I'm not currently daily-driving Linux, but back when I was I'd have rathered torrent Windows and run Photoshop in a VM than put up with GIMP. That's how inconvenient GIMP is and how much better PS is.
Out of curiosity, what kind of work did you do with PS/GIMP?
Nothing professional. I'm a hobbyist Photographer. Most of my editing is in a DAM but I do occasionally break out PS. The most complicated thing I've done was creating a map (both faux-satellite and faux-handrawn) of my RPG world.
For me, free software is most often competing against pirated pro software, so free software's "free as in beer" component loses its advantage, and instead it becomes about the convenience of just downloading and running (as opposed to the inconvenience of pirating) versus the convenience of more-polished software (versus the inconvenience of often-poorly-designed software), with money not factoring into it. And with installing being a tiny fraction of the time interacting with the software, I choose the more-polished option every time. (And for me, the availability of this software is a big part of the reason I don't daily-drive Linux any more.)
It's what makes Audacity and new-MuseScore so great. They're not inferior-but-free options. They're genuinely great software in their own right.
I think GIMPs biggest issue is that it still doesn't have non-destructive editing with ajustment layers.
It's the single most useful feature any kind of editing software can have. Not being able to use that makes any project that is more than a low-effort shitpost incredibly frustrating.
Obligatory Krita plug. Still can't draw for shit and know Blender like 20x better but unlike GIMP Krita actually makes sense, I can find stuff, generally it doesn't get in the way of being a canvas.
it's way more convenient because i can just install it from repos, and don't have to pay out the ass every month for the privilege to use it
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.
i paid $50 for an affinity photo license, it worked great but now they want me to buy v2 for another $50