Voyager for Lemmy is some seriously gourmet shit.
But seriously the answer is usually that the big company is trying to apply to ALL USERS and usually only pleases a subset or none of those users.
Voyager isn’t for you? That’s fine, Lemmy has a nice API and you can build whatever you like. Lemmy is also open so if that API isn’t nice you can provide suggestions and fixes.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s a pretty good place to be.
Look at early Twitter or formerly Reddit. A nice API. Tons of fantastic clients. Open source is the best, but even just “open” is a fantastic first step.
Sometimes slightly worse. Like LibreOffice.
Sometimes actually better, like VLC.
Sometimes about the same, like the latest version of MuseScore (older versions were, in fact, quite a bit worse).
But sometimes, like with older versions of GIMP (I’ll admit, I’ve not tried its latest major version release candidate) it’s significantly worse.
Libreoffice is slightly worse because all the proprietary office suites keep lowering the bar for everyone to follow them. It’s not a quality issue, it’s a never ending contest to figure out how to complicate writing a simple letter so that everyone has to buy only your software.
LibreOffice is more than slightly worse, but FOSS projects cover the gamut. The thing about them is that the best ones are usually laser focused on exactly what the user needs, rather than what makes the most money.
Calc was actually quite comparable for 90% of Excel features I have ever actually used.
Writer is petty good on its own, but the fact that .docx documents don’t quite matchup vs. When making and opening with Word makes it difficult for me to use officially.
Impress is just plain disappointing compared to PowerPoint.
Base might be okay, better than nothing I guess.
The rest of the suite I don’t know.
If you like professional photography, you can try darktables. It’s a replacement for Lightroom and it’s great in my opinion.
Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits. It’s a bit weird to use though.
Gimp is still useful for quick and simple edits
See, the problem with that is that that’s precisely not how I use Photoshop. I don’t use it often (certainly not often enough to actually pay for it), but when I do, I tend to go fairly deep.
I should try out Darktable though. I used to use Aperture until it was discontinued, and these days I frequently use Lightroom, though I don’t really love it.
I genuinely doesn’t know there’s paid media player out there, VLC came preinstall on all my prebuild PC purchase since forever.
There definitely exist paid players out there (or at least used to…dunno if they still exist), but there are also “free” (as in beer) non-free (as in speech) options, like the ones included out of the box in a Windows or macOS installation.
I wonder how many paid apps were utterly decimated after they released VLC
Slightly worse? I can actually sort and the video player actually works, instead of whatever the FUCK was going on with the other place, for literally ever.
the problem is that in the vast majority of cases, designers aren’t involved. it’s just code monkeys trying their best to implement functionality but without UI/UX design they are barely usable by the average person. I guess just by its nature open source is less of a concept in design so you don’t get many volunteers. also designers are probably more averse to doing work for free since every goddamn costumer tries to get them to work for free.
Closed sauce app isn’t always better, and big corp don’t have ‘all stars’ teams (but do have marketing teams) - the question is why the fossy app doesn’t change UI design every few months (mostly in stupid ways) :D.
I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?
Meanwhile a bunch of nerds working for free on a passion project are giving away software that is faster and easier to use and often more beautiful to look at.
I guess I’ve simply reiterated what the post image said, so ignore me maybe, but fuck this is depressing and disappointing. All these corporate resources and all they can do is barely achieve what other people do for free in their spare time? What a fucking waste of human life and energy is capitalism.
For real open source projects, it’s a lot of the time not nerds working for free.
All your favorite frameworks and libraries are often developed in house at big companies (angular, react, vue, tensorflow, Kafka, pytorch, k8s, Jenkins, and many many more).
And even then, much of the development on them is done by people who are getting paid to use the frameworks at smaller companies.
There are tons of examples the other way too of course, but even the Linux kernel is mostly corporate commits, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and others.
This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not as cut and dry as people make it out to be.
I want to add, that language development is also often done by companies. Today for example is a Mozilla thing, and while a non profit, the devs aren’t working for free.
Lemmy is Reddit with more furries and communists
I’m not a god damn communist Fred! How many times do I have to tell you, I’m an anarchist!
Slightly worse in design, far better in consumer-friendliness!
Sometimes the open source equivalent is better. SmartTube is a much better app than the official YouTube app for Google TV / Android TV even though there’s just one developer working on it. Even if it didn’t support ad blocking, I’d still use it. Very nice app.
Similarly, pirate TV/movie apps often have a much better user experience than the legit ones. Compare Weyd, Syncler, or Stremio+Torrentio to the Amazon Prime video app for example. At least on Android (phone, tablet, TV), the Amazon app is garbage even though there’s highly paid employees working on it.
In both cases, the people who work on the independent apps usually care about the user experience and use the app day-to-day themselves, rather than being told to do whatever makes the most money for the company. They have no reason to lock you in or otherwise force you to use the app, and instead compete just by having a better app.
Hah! Like a corporation will improve a product when they’re milking it out for a decade.
Do you have any idea how many jira states our development workflow has?
I wonder how much appetite there is for project managers and scrum masters in the open source world.
Open source is the free bicycle that will get you to the coffee shop. Priority software is the SUV you lease to do the same.
Enjoy being poor.
