121–130 of 264 posts
What wonder what we use if majority of computer is intel based and they have a parallel computer controlled your cpu?
Strangely arm is sort of open what can you pay to develop your own total open env and ...
Any further, wonder what is open source movement is all about if not asking for a mixed environment ? It is the dying middle that might be the problem or is there no problem. Wonder.
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Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.) There are good…
> Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.
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Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no i…
>Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you. If you're working with embedded Linux, Visual Studio isn't going to be much help for debugging on a target. >Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. LaTeX does some things much better than Word, and Illustrator is very expensive. >GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what…
Some Windows users use neither GIMP nor Photoshop to crop an image, but rather MS Paint, which is comes with the OS, so it is "no additional cost", and requires next to no training to use.
MS Paint has vastly diminished functionality compared to either GIMP or Photoshop.
Its more abjectly a moral failing of society that institutions have not aligned to enable free software proliferation. Software, and information in general, have been a prisoners dilemma for time immemorial. The optimization of utility is total freedom of information - but such a state of affairs means benefactors reap the labors of others and have no obligation to give anything in return. Copyright was fabricated to…
Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a F…
You're right that we can't advocate for just eliminating copyright, without shooting ourselves in the foot. However, eliminating copyright, combined with, say, an obligation of software companies to disclose the source code of their "products" to their customers, or, less intrusively, with making the type of NDAs you describe illegal, would work.
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I don't think a few of us using Gimp (yes, I am an occassional user) will stand in the way of convenience winning . Hige majority of people do (and will) use Photoshop, simply because it meets their needs better.
> it meets their needs better . That's hardly the case; they are not even aware of the existence of alternatives. Most of people's occasional image fix-up needs could be met just by MS Paint, which they would find easier to use. Problem is, they don't even know that exists and that they have it pre-installed, let alone that GIMP exists.
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Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no i…
I don't think a few of us using Gimp (yes, I am an occassional user) will stand in the way of convenience winning . Hige majority of people do (and will) use Photoshop, simply because it meets their needs better.
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> nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio If Visual Studio ran on Linux, would anybody bother with gdb? Currently, the second-highest voted UserVoice issue for Visual Studio is people asking for a Linux version (and rather hilariously not understanding what a colossal rewrite that would entail...) https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... > Nobody would be LaTeXing instead…
Interestingly enough Visual Studio now supports cross platform debugging ( you still need Visual Studio running on windows, but it can debug a linux based program )
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When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?
Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)... I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack i…
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> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. Isn't this kind of the point, though? To compete with proprietary software, free software needs to actually be competitive. "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.
> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it. Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically infer…
Software doesn't need to be better to win. Look at Google Docs, a shallow imitation of what document editors were doing even in the early 90s. It became popular in spite of it. (And don't say it was just because of Google's huge influence; they've had plenty of reimplementations-of-what-we-already-have-except-on-their-servers that have failed miserably).
I look at Google Docs as an example of someone saying "right, we mightn't have all the answers, but we have the answers to what people want right now", which turned out to be easier collaboration rather than nitty-gritty, barely-used features. Nobody except company IT admins gave a flying toss about whether moving to Google Docs had any licence or implications on software freedoms; it was inferior to Word (and others) in so many ways, remains so, but does what users want.
I am unconvinced that the argument that users should ever settle for inferior software just because it comes with superior freedoms is anything other than masturbatory. It has the pretence of being user-focused (freedoms) without actually being user-focused (what users care about). I think it would be a better strategy to focus on the latter whilst also promising and delivering the former.
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When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?
IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.
https://rocket.chat/
https://zulipchat.com/
https://matrix.org/
https://mattermost.com/