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The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

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Re: The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

#101

Post by SwellJoe »

blasdel wrote: post #96
ahlatimer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are most definitely stability problems with Photoshop. You would think something that cost that much would at least be stable , but I suppose "serious professionals" look at feature sets and not stability. My experience with GIMP is none, so I'm not exactly qualified to comment, but Photoshop has to be one of the biggest usability nightmares on the market today. There are strange restrictions and ambiguous erro…

As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too. It's a lose-lose. I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET

As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board

I can't agree with you on this one. I think you're guilty of believing intuitive means "what I'm used to". We all are to one degree or another, which is why I made a point of mentioning my many years of using GIMP vs. being a beginner with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the learning curve in Photoshop is very steep; I believe steeper and longer than GIMP. Yes, it's definitely a more powerful tool, which is why I bought CS4 recently despite being comfortable with GIMP/Inkscape and able to product most things I've ever needed to produce with just a few minutes of effort (except ai and psd files). But, nonetheless, even just doing basic image editing tasks, Photoshop is pretty hard to use.

I think the only real conclusion we can come to is that complex software is hard to use for beginners.

Re: The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

#102

Post by cschwarm »

ori_b wrote: post #83
cschwarm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, it is easy. When you're already assuming something like RSS feeds for app updates exists, don't you think it's possible to have an application download them once a week and update all apps automatically? For an end-user, there's no difference to APT. Also, you seem to misunderstand the point. To have a third kind of distribution -- "stable foundation and recent apps" -- doesn't affect your choice of distri…

> When you're already assuming something like RSS feeds for app updates exists, don't you think it's possible to have an application download them once a week and update all apps automatically? So where can I get this program you speak of? Why doesn't it exist? (edit: and if it doesn't exist because you don't even have RSS feeds, isn't it even harder than watching those and manually installing?)

Check Sparkle [1] as well as AppFresh [2] for MacOS. The former is even available under the MIT/X license. No need for central repositories when done right.

[1] http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ [2] http://metaquark.de/appfresh/

Re: The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

#103

Post by psadauskas »

ciupicri wrote: post #94
psadauskas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's foundation? I'm a web developer, so to me, I want the latest ruby, apache, etc... However, a server admin might want the more "stable" versions of the same. I know that Gentoo, at least, has the facility to accomplish this. They have package masking, so you can specify exactly the packages you want to be kept on the bleeding edge. Taken a step further, you can set up your own "profile", and list exactly what ve…

> Who's foundation? I'm a web developer, so to me, I want the latest ruby, apache, etc... However, a server admin might want the more "stable" versions of the same. What happens when the "stable" version doesn't have the same feature as the latest one? For example the latest Python is 2.6 and it's even declared stable, but RedHat comes with 2.4 IIRC. There were quite a few changes between these versions, so you have…

Yes, that's exactly my point. The devs and admins at my company got together, decided what ruby version we were going to use, and stuck with that. It's not always going to be the same version, and at some point, we may decide to upgrade. But we want to do that on our schedule, and decide which version, not have a package maintainer decide for us. I'll keep my system fairly up to date, particularly with X and my window manager, but freeze the specific version of Ruby we're using in production. The server, though, only has security fixes installed, no other updates.

Re: The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

#105

Post by blasdel »

SwellJoe wrote: post #101
blasdel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board, and then all the features are missing too. It's a lose-lose. I haven't found a single task where GIMP is less obnoxious. Most of the time I give up -- sometimes I'll try to use ImageMajick or PIL, other times I'll get a Mac or Windows box with Photoshop or Paint.NET

As frustrating and annoying as Photoshop is, GIMP is massively worse usabilty-wise across the board I can't agree with you on this one. I think you're guilty of believing intuitive means "what I'm used to". We all are to one degree or another, which is why I made a point of mentioning my many years of using GIMP vs. being a beginner with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the learning curve in Photoshop is very steep; I believe…

I didn't even mention the spectre of 'intuitive', much less subscribe to its primal fallacy.

I used GIMP and several generations of Microsoft products (my family had a MSDN subscription) before I figured out Photoshop at all, and the difference is night and dusk (PS is no usability king either, just not dogshit). There's tons of opportunities for improvement over PS, but GIMP takes none of them and instead does a bunch of stupid MDI shit.

Interestingly, I find the opposite holds true for Illustrator/Inkscape -- I am baffled by Illustrator, and have never met someone (even digital art faculty) who could really wrap their head around it, much less show me the way. It's CAD-tool bad! Inkscape is awesome, and not just compared to AI (though for the first several years it was ridiculously unstable).

Re: The One in Which I Say Open Source Software Sucks

#106

Post by krschultz »

0xdefec8 wrote: post #68
krschultz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users have no need to court people like you. We're not a business, market share is a meaningless metric. I don't care if 1% or 100% of the people using computers use Linux, what I care about is if there are enough people working on the projects to make it usable for ME. There are. People who complain about FOSS community's "attitude" should really check their own sense of entitlement. We are talking about you g…

Keep beating that strawman, you're sure to make a point eventually. The argument isn't whether or not Linux is useful to a bunch of nerds, myself included, or whether or not I should kiss rms for bestowing this gift unto humanity for free. It's whether it's competitive against its better known closed source counterparts on the Desktop. And you basically answered that question in your first paragraph.

Linux is better for me than Windows, hands down.

My girlfriend and parents prefer it too. If your entire interaction with the computer is through Firefox, a music player, and Office like it is for them, OpenOffice is actually closer to what they know than the "new" Office 2007. Subtract out viruses, add in never needing drivers (how do I make my printer work? just plug it in), and they are much happier under Linux than Windows.

I've installed it for a lot of people and there are basically 3 periods. 1) Installing (which turns a lot of people off if they can't get it right there). 2) Getting used to it (which basically is people learning it and finding out its not that alien) and 3) Preferring it.

I have yet to find someone who didn't get to stage 3 in about 6 months. You don't get it at first but eventually you go back to windows and start looking for the 'Always on Top' checkbox or you have a popup during a presentation and say, why the hell am I paying for this?

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