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196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Baut [she/her] auf. @lemmy.blahaj.zone

12mo ago

free ruleware

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

55 comments

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
- 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
- Then you aren't picking it because it's free. You're picking it because you prefer it.
  
  Why not both?
- 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

Stuff being free is hella convenient to me :D
On that note, are you free this evening?
- Free in a "you can own me without paying anything" sense but not free in an "I'm busy" sense
  
  free as in beer but not free as in freedom 😘
- rare FOSS rizz
  
  free software rizz is how you get the hot girls

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  How’s that even patentable? If it actually is, then whichever game dev decided to use WASD to walk missed out on something.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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. 😑
  
  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.
- What CAD software doesn't have a crazy steep learning curve?

Source image:

😎 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.
- wouldnt you still need steam to use the index? steam is sadly propriatary
  
  Nope! The HTC headset hardware has an open API, so you can use OpenHMD (http://www.openhmd.net/) instead of Steam if you want.
- 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.
  
  Ooh that sounds interesting. I'll check out that patreon. For now I'll just continue using steams proprietary solution tho...

If it's more convenient for me to obtain your software for free than it is to pay for it, guess what I'm not doing.

Obligée?

55 comments