[off-topic] PhotoPrint

Thu Apr 27 13:22:00 UTC 2023

On 4/26/23 23:34, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
> On Wed, 2023-04-26 at 12:45 -0500, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
>> You might be thinking of Pantone colors? If so, Pantone and Adobe
>> recently ripped those out of Photoshop, and made it so that you have
>> to buy the ability to use those colors from Pantone.
>>
>> Which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this also
>> means that, if you used to use the free Pantone colors in an older
>> version of Photoshop, and then upgrade Photoshop, it will render all
>> of the places where you used those colors before as **black**. Which
>> essentially extorts money out of users in order to see the artwork
>> that they made.
>>
>> The lesson here (at least for me) is, it doesn't matter if the
>> proprietary equivalent of something has better features or if you have
>> enough money to buy it. Go with open source, the proprietary stuff can
>> and will mess you up.
> Hi,
>
> Adobe has become something of a standard for professional companies. It
> doesn't matter to them if this results in absurdly high rental costs for
> them, since they can write something off through taxes or otherwise.
> Freelance artists and similar professionals gravitate towards Affinity.
> One occasionally hears that Inkscape is used. Gimp, Krita and Co. are
> practically not used at all. The reason for this is that actually FLOSS
> stuff can and will mess you up, proprietary stuff doesn't. In summary,
> if you want to work professionally, stay away from FLOSS unless you want
> to complicate your work unnecessarily, prolong your working hours, and
> annoy unnecessary bugs or design decisions. Proprietary solutions
> sometimes suffer from bugs and bad design decisions, too, but Affinity
> listens to its customers, while FLOSS programmers usually don't care at
> all about the opinion of the users. The coasts for Affinity are minimal
> and there's no monthly fee.
>
> Don't simply believe me, ask freelance artists and similar professionals
> who don't make a lot of money. They will tell you the same. You will
> hear Affinity, Inksape, but unlikely Gimp.
>
> Ask professionals who make a lot of money and you likely will hear
> Adobe.

I backed up my stance with a historical example that actually happened. 
I see what you're saying in return, but as a developer myself, I don't 
really see what you're seeing.

My mom has been using GIMP for professional work for around a decade, 
and I've been using it myself for professional work for several months. 
I've seen it used for professional work in enterprises before with great 
results. I will not deny that it has its share of bugs and that some of 
the design decisions *appear* on the surface to be strange. But in my 
experience, proprietary software has been just as bad, if not worse, 
than FLOSS software in this regard. I've had MS Office "soft-crash" and 
eat my work, Windows 7 allow me to break the opening of executable 
files, Windows 8 Pro's Hyper-V destroy VMs, etc. Those are all Microsoft 
programs, but there are numerous examples outside Microsoft too (I won't 
list all of them here since they're just generic "it crashes and eats my 
stuff" bugs). Programmers make mistakes, mistakes make bugs.

Proprietary stuff does mess you up. I provided an example of when it 
did, where it made people's artwork load broken and required additional 
payment to unbreak it.

As for programmers not caring, in all instances I've seen this, it was 
the result of a lack of understanding by the person requesting that 
something be done. The FLOSS programmer world oftentimes does listen to 
the requests of their users. It's just that some of the people who don't 
get their requests met for one reason or another are quite noisy about 
the fact that someone isn't willing to do something that would require 
about 10 times more work than they imagine it will. People think "hey 
can you just add a setting here" is going to be a simple request and 
have no idea that they've just requested that you do something that will 
require several hours of work, weeks of time coordinating with other 
devs, and that may even require rewiring some critical piece of 
infrastructure. And FLOSS devs are even willing to go to those great 
lengths in some instances, but they have other priorities that slow down 
total overhauls like that. More than likely Affinity has the same 
problem and is just better at hiding it than FLOSS projects are (maybe 
they don't have a public forum or strictly moderate theirs?). I know for 
sure Microsoft has the same problem and they don't care to hide it (you 
can look up stuff about Windows 11 on Microsoft's forums and see people 
griping like crazy).

At any rate, this is a mailing list about a primarily open-source 
operating system with open-source software, so recommending software 
that can't even run on that operating system doesn't make a whole lot of 
sense to me. If you want to use proprietary software, that's fine. But 
warning people that FLOSS software is "bad" in an ML about FLOSS 
software is sort of like saying MS is evil in the middle of a Windows forum.

>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>
-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

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