The all-star team works to develop software that works perfectly and will supplant all open source competition. Once they become dominant they can switch focus to monetizing literally every aspect of its functions and through enshitification destroy everything that made it great. But hey, what are ya gonna do?
I really try to like these Apps.
But the OpenStreetMap’s App sucks. I can’t do a U-Turn on the Autobahn. And no, I won’t break through a closed Exit. Is there any way to make it that it find a new alternative route when I “miss” or simply can’t take the Exit?
I prefer OSMand over Organic Maps, because it has much more features, just the map renderer isn’t as pretty.
But I mostly use it for pedestrian and bike navigation. But I think car navigation works very well as well.
Also, if the map data isn’t so great in your region, you can try playing StreetComplete and help improve it yourself.
OSM is the Wikipedia of map data, and offers likely the most detailed cards that we have.
For me the UI was just almost unusable. While the features are very nice and mostly unmatched, there is just no way to find them. Also it really killed the battery of my phone. While hiking it was fine, but for real time turn by turn navigations my phone died in about 2h compared to 4 or so on other apps
How is your phone only lasting 4 hours??
Well, in that way it is a classic open source software, very powerful but a bit difficult to use.
I rather have features I need hidden behind a cryptic interface, then not have them.
I also normally carry around a power bank, and sometimes have to recharge my phone at lunch, when using it intensively. That seems just normal to me at this point.
Yeah, if you need those features. In my experience it’s often features only a very small fraction of people need that are cluttering the UI and make it impossible to find the features I actually need.
I will try that! Thank you!
Use Organic Maps
Thats the App I use. .__. Is that not the offical OSM App?
There isn’t one. OSM only provides the map data. You can try OsmAnd which is a good alternative.
That’s because the “all star team of designers and engineers” spent 80% of their time in meetings to keep management up to date with the progress of the project, listen to yet another wild ass idea from marketing and because they adopted a new and fashionable Software Development Processes without understanding the principles behind it so have a daily 1h standup.
I always make fun of this with the coworker that I’m training.
“See, the PDF is malformed and crashes the program. But that’s normal, this program costs only €700 per year. When it happens, use this free program to open it, and there’s no problem”
700 EUROS!?!?
An app developed by hobbyists who, if not passionate about it, at least care enough to spend their time developing and contributing to it, even if it’s free
vs.
An all-star team of designers and engineers who are bogged down in corporate bureaucracy and do the absolute minimum to maintain their positions, while saving energy to do things that they actually enjoy. Like, oftentimes, it is developing the aforementioned free apps.
Honestly many times it’s better. Shoutout VLC, KDE, Linux, qBittorrent, Librewolf, Handbrake, Tenacity, CHIRP, Flipper Zero, and too many more to mention by name.
Ublock
corporations can create good applications and tooling, they also create toxic dark pattern applications
open source devs can create air tight software or they can make some dingus word alternatives that just doesn’t work at all
I love open source but there are certainly some programs out there (for free though)
It’s the dark patterns for me. I recently switched from Plex to Jellyfin for my media server and it was night and day. My server was front and center on the client with absolutely zero bs in Jellyfin, while in Plex it’s been buried and shuffled in with a mountain of garbage ad supported content I never wanted
The profit motive is why they throw so much money at it. I like FOSS better too but these differences can’t easily be separated.
I feel like people will give a pass to the shitty elements of Microsoft Office, etc. but then harp on the tiniest issues with open-source software.
Kind of reminds me of a recent election…
A company I worked for has had such a bad experience with the Microsoft business suite that they actively avoid using any MS products at all costs. They started offboarding a year ago and they STILL haven’t managed to get rid of everything
It’s just like for Windows , but we’re so used to the software that we’ve learned to work around.
When you switch, you are met with productivity loss and learning new quirks, which makes the experience less than stellar.
In today’s context, for the vast majority of people, if it isn’t easy to use, they won’t use it because pretty much every app and software has become plug and play (except niche software that looks like windows 3.1)
It’s probably because they know nobody’s listening to their complaints about Microsoft.
It probably isn’t.
Saying millions of dollars like that’s a lot of money to spend developing an app. Meta has literally hundreds of devs just working on WhatsApp. You’ll burn through around a million dollars in one year with about six devs when you factor in all the costs.
more like 3-4 devs
It’s usually actually the other way around in my experience
Anything that has the label “pro” or “enterprise” suuuuuucks, is badly designed, full of bugs… take the open source app, and it just works
Corporate apps do tend to have game breaking bugs fixed sooner, while some open source apps just don’t
There’s just so much more opportunity for feedback, use case stories, and a variety of perspectives in open source development.
Good enterprise development does all those things as well, but there is always a bigger barrier to the user when you have to design behind a curtain.
I’m pretty sure it’s not lack of user feedback. It’s MBAs deciding the user is wrong and unprofitable, therefore better add more tracking and ads.
Yup, and not just ads. At one of my jobs at a SECURITY company the bugs are considered a liability. Features were prioritised, vulnerabilities be damned.
After that experience I doubt most proprietary software is more secure than open source
Exactly. These companies have more feedback than they could ever parse. They only listen if said feedback results in loss of profit.
Which proprietary app is better than the open source version?
MasterCAM blows absolutely every open-source solution out of the water. It isn’t even a competition. In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy their really expensive and restrictive license, because in the end you save a near immeasurable amount of time in modeling, drafting, programming, and production. The fee CAD programs that can even support a postprocessing operation (becoming closer to a real CAM solution) are really bad at it and the toolpaths are far from ideal.
That sounds really specific.
It is, but MasterCAM is also the primary workhorse for a large global industry, so I wouldn’t say that it is insignificant by any means.
I used Joplin everyday for half a year but switched to Obsidian after that. They both essentially do the same, but I found the latter to be more adaptable to my needs and paradoxically easier to modify.
Don’t get me wrong, the open source one in still great. Served me well while I was using it.
CAD
Agreed, I run Brics CAD on my linux box.
I only chose Brics CAD over AutoCAD/Draftsight because they have a NATIVE linux version. This is for 2D CAD work only.
I haven’t had a need for the 3D stuff yet.
Yeah okay. Damn.
MS office is arguably the best office suite in terms of features. The overall user experience is awful though.
I’m terms of features? Their features are useless because they can’t play nice with others, which is the point of a document.
Adobe may be a shit company but Photoshop’s user interface is far better than GIMP
Photoshop has a nice looking UI but there are some very subtle but really useful things GIMP does that Photoshop doesn’t. For example when drawing with the Rectangle/Ellipse tool GIMP doesn’t immediately lock in the selection but gives me handles I can use to perfectly fine tune the selection down to the pixel, especially for the ellipse tool. I don’t get that level of control over the marquee tool in Photoshop.
I can also freely scroll and zoom while using the lasso tool in GIMP and it can go between free draw lasso and poly draw lasso by clicking and dragging or just clicking to establish new lasso nodes. And I can just undo any of those nodes by hitting backspace.
The only tool I really miss in GIMP is the magnetic lasso but needing to drag the cursor all the way to the edge of the screen just to scroll somewhere else on an image makes the tool so much worse.
I don’t think that’s nearly enough to make it better.
If I had to use GIMP again I’d just kill myself.
Then again, I sure wouldn’t pay for photoshop, either.
While we’re making unpopular statements about free software: Audacity is the GIMP of the audio-editing world. REAPER is where it’s at.
K
By not requiring an account to use, it’s already ten million times better.
By respecting my ownership and not making me jump through flaming hoops for compatibility with everything else, it’s already a billion times better!
I can’t even tell you how absurdly mad I get when I run into an ‘anti-feature’ that’s literally only preventing me from doing something the company wants to keep as their own special power.
Support your local neighborhood capitalism.
Embrace an anti-feature today!
Wtf are you guys talking about, like desktop apps are the end all be all of computing. 98 percent of codebases contain open source. There’s like 5000 open source libraries in your iphone. For most things there just are no proprietary alternatives. It is the state of the art, ubiquitous in everything from medical equipment to satellites and TVs. The digital economy runs open source, with an estimated worth of 8.8 trillion dollars.
