CUTCODEDOWN
Minimalist Semantic Markup

Welcome Guest
Please Login or Register

If you have registered but not recieved your activation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time, or have issues with using the registration form, please use our Contact Form for assistance. Include both your username and the e-mail you tried to register with.

Author Topic: Open Source Software  (Read 2141 times)

k64

  • Junior Member
  • *
  • Posts: 14
  • Karma: +0/-0
Open Source Software
« on: 21 May 2020, 04:29:57 pm »
I was able to replace all my closed source software w/ Open Source including Windows7. Sure Linux is a little different, but I'm all right w/ that. Closed Source, like MS, Adobe and others are becoming FleeceWare Subscriptions and locking your files in the cloud like Adobe does. The next Windows is going to be subscription based like the enterprise edition is. Yes, those soft-mugger monthly fees just keeps increasing.  How much is too much for you? Adobe is already over $50 per month...

For Graphics: Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, RawTherapee
For WebDev: Bluefish
For FTP: FileZilla
For Office Suite: LibreOffice
For DTP: Scribus

This is the main software I use daily.
« Last Edit: 21 May 2020, 04:43:18 pm by k64 »

Jason Knight

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1049
  • Karma: +188/-1
    • CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #1 on: 22 May 2020, 12:12:08 am »
Whilst I am comforted by the idea that when/if Microsoft does screw over windows that something like Linux is waiting in the wings, it's still utterly unsuited for my needs.

The piss poor font rendering, piss poor support for multiple displays inferior to what Windows had 22 years ago, the piss poor UI scaling, the piss poor to borderline crippled video and audio support, the ridiculous audio latency regardless of which of a dozen different standards there are, and the simple fact that I've yet to use a single window manager -- or even better file manager -- that's as competent or capable as Windows 3.1 was?

It's just not suitable for my day to day desktop use. Haiku is more robust, and that's like saying Billie Eilish is a better singer than Poppy.

(There's a reason Eilish's Grammy was a crime against music)

It's a great server OS, I'd pick it all day every day for most projects... what with getting legitimate help with freeBSD being a joke, and windows server being the antithesis of sane and rational practices... but as a desktop OS it has been and remains a complete failure regardless of distro, software, or even the hardware I've tried.

... and most of that is because it is architecturally unsuited for quality graphics or professional audio, the open sores software limitations is a hobble skirt to font rendering quality, and the X11 legacy still hangs around its neck like a dead albatross.

There's a reason only about 100 people in the whole world program for X-Windows or its modern equivalent s directly, and those people universally work directly with creating interfaces for us mere mortals to use it like Motif, GTK, Qt, and all the other X-Toolkits out there.

Toolkits and decent OS shouldn't even have need of in the first damned place.

Honestly, BeOS 5 Max or Haiku would be my daily driver if not for the complete lack of robust software for them, alongside my need to test both IE and Edge meaning regardless of what the host OS is, I'd have Windows in a VM anyways. Just like I run OSX and Linux Mint in VM's under windows for website testing.

Reminds me, need to re-install virtualbox on this rig since I just upgraded it a few weeks ago to Zen2 and a 2tb Gen4 nvme SSD.
« Last Edit: 22 May 2020, 12:15:51 am by Jason Knight »
We are all, we are all, we are all FRIENDS! For today we're all brothers, tonight we're all friends. Our moment of peace in a war that never ends.

k64

  • Junior Member
  • *
  • Posts: 14
  • Karma: +0/-0
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #2 on: 22 May 2020, 12:37:32 pm »
Font Rendering & Multi-Displays Works Fine on Some Distros: The Fedora Design Suite this is what I mainly use. I also like Xfce a lot too.

Just add, Code Editor, FTP and a Firewall (GNOME3 Thing? Xfce has it, including real screen savers!)

Fedora Xfce Spin has Default Styling and Tools like Debian Does.

I have tested other linux distros, but I keep coming back to Fedora for now.  Linux Mint Xfce or LMDE would be my second choice. Another one I'm watching is PureOS.

Jason Knight

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1049
  • Karma: +188/-1
    • CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #3 on: 25 May 2020, 12:13:17 pm »
Font Rendering & Multi-Displays Works Fine on Some Distros:

It really doesn't. Sure you can run the (illegal) font smoothing code to bring the glyphs up to spec, but it still kerns text like a sweetly retarded rhesus monkey on crack. I've NEVER used anything that uses freetype for render where text kerning wasn't utter garbage.



That's a worst case scenario since Linux HATES "Windows core" fonts, but it does it with pretty much every damned non-monospace font. Open up Libre, type in the word "spacing" and then keep adding spaces before it, and watch the spacing (kerning) around the "p" and "i" dance around like a mexican jumping bean.

The SAD part being that whilst Linsux exhibits this behavior on all applicatiions, LibreOffice and OoO drag said garbage over to both OSX and Windows to a degree, making it a double-whammy. (OoO/Libre have this issue as they do per character kerning instead of per word, same as freetype itself)

Don't even get me STARTED about the spacing between words... Freetype and software written specifically for it first are incapable of even rendering the same word the same way twice on the screen. Even more pathetic turning on the (illegal) better font quality rendering actually makes the kerning worse, leaving you stuck with a choice between trash glyph quality OR trash kerning.

/FAIL/ hard in both cases and all because the freef*** FSF types go wah wah wah over the licensing issues of actual full Truetype support. You know who I mean? The nutters who created Iceweasel because Mozilla dared to trademark the Firefox name and logo? (talk about petty nonsensical bullshit from the Church of Stallman whackjobs)

The Fedora Design Suite
I hate Red Hat legacy Linux flavors. RPM's always seem to be buggy junk, nothing is in the standard *nix directories defeating the purpose of it even being a *nix-like, and the "design for suits with wallets by suits with wallets" approach of the original Red Hat Linux plagues it to this day.

But I learned *nix on Xenix, SCO, and Solaris -- so I expect things to be certain places they just aren't. Hence I'm more of a Debian guy since they have everything where I expect it to be, and the "out of box" tool choices are more familiar. That and I had Ian's ear. He was another good friend that met a tragic end. That was a BAD couple of years for the IT community as a whole. So many important and talented people lost in such a short timeframe.

GNOME3 Thing? Xfce
I have YET to encounter a WM for any *nix that feels as robust, complete, or up to date in terms of ACTUAL functionality as Windows 3.1, much less 95/98. VISUALLY they do a good job of LOOKING feature complete, but every time I try to do the simplest things It's like a trip in the wayback machine to MacOS System 2 or Windows 286.

It's the little things that are utterly broken, like the COMPLETE LACK of user feedback whilst an application is starting. I click to start the program.. nothing. Ok, click again... nothing. No disk activity, no mouse cursor change, no visual queue's like a placeholder window to say something is happening... then 5 seconds later the disk heads start screaming back and forth, so that 20 seconds later ten copies of whatever program I'm trying to start all open up at once! /FAIL/ at UI design.

Little things like stuff that should be a simple checkbox requiring 200 character long cryptic esoteric command line entries... like having pulse audio work after hibernate without having to dick around with modprobe. Like HAVING to manually edit .conf files on a new install to get anything other than 800x600 at 16 bit because *nix drivers can't even read the display information across VGA analog, much less DVI/HDMI properly.

As a desktop OS I have never seen a flavor of Linux that has caught up to the most basic functionality and user experience quality of Windows 98.

Much less it's USELESS for me in my other tasks like audio production, because of the painfully and ridiculously high audio latency. You can't have 300ms+ of audio latency by the time you turn Midi over USB and/or live mixing against soft-synth output. It's why I often joke that "what the hell is the point of them even maintaining a copy of Reaper for Linux?"

Especially since most of the good softsynths -- like the ones from Sample Modeling -- have to go through Wine to be used, adding another 50ms or so of overhead when you need the entire process to be 60ms or less.

More so when the audio drivers for professional grade hardware -- like my EMU Morpheus -- or even prosumer stuff -- like my Audigy 2 Platinum -- ranges from buggy and unreliable to outright crippled. So much hardware is listed as "supported" when it should literally be listed as "incomplete crippleware".

... and It's not like I don't keep trying different distros every few months. I ALWAYS end up back on Windows because Linux is just not usable for me as a desktop OS due to a mix of giant failures in desktop UI design, the crappy font rendering technology, crippled audio, crippled poor performing video, and general obtuseness of shit being command line only that makes it feel more like a parody of the late 1970's or the 1980's.

If I wanted to waste half my life dicking around on the command line every time I start up the machine or want a new piece of software to work PROPERLY, I'd drag out my Trash-80 Model 12 and boot up Xenix.

... and it's not that I'm command-line/terminal shy. It's just this is 2020 not 1983, we can do better!

But to be fair, I came up on the microcomputer side of things during the big "war" between the Micro and Mainframe crowd, where we referred to *nix fanboys like Stallman as "know-nothing big Iron dinosaurs" and fully expected posixisms to be dead by the mid 1990's. To be brutally frank if not for Linus Torvalds 90%+ of this cryptic outdated outmoded crap would have died off over two decades ago.

Hence why I'm still not sure this is a joke:

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html

and I still have a copy of this on my bookshelf:

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
We are all, we are all, we are all FRIENDS! For today we're all brothers, tonight we're all friends. Our moment of peace in a war that never ends.

fgm

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 60
  • Karma: +5/-0
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #4 on: 27 Jun 2020, 07:27:33 am »
Although not directly related to art, I'd like to suggest a great free tool to check for broken links: linkchecker.

Since it runs from the command line it can be used directly in the web server.

Jason Knight

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1049
  • Karma: +188/-1
    • CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #5 on: 27 Jun 2020, 05:17:53 pm »
Although not directly related to art
This whole thread since the first post has that problem, though I'm not sure where to move it to, and at least it provides SOMETHING for content here.
We are all, we are all, we are all FRIENDS! For today we're all brothers, tonight we're all friends. Our moment of peace in a war that never ends.

Jason Knight

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1049
  • Karma: +188/-1
    • CutCodeDown -- Minimalist Semantic Markup
Re: Open Source Software
« Reply #6 on: 10 Sep 2020, 06:28:11 am »
I have YET to encounter a WM for any *nix that feels as robust, complete, or up to date in terms of ACTUAL functionality as Windows 3.1, much less 95/98.
I have to take that back slightly, Cinnamon isn't half bad. It's still not what I'd call modern, but it makes what most other *nix WM's try to do look like bad early '90's relics.

Shame it's a resource hog that does a poor job of leveraging video acceleration, at least in a VM. I should try it native.

Well... I do have a 500 gig SATA SSD sitting here gathering dust. Time for me to go full "OS Whore" again?

Not that I have anything better to do than go around quoting myself!
We are all, we are all, we are all FRIENDS! For today we're all brothers, tonight we're all friends. Our moment of peace in a war that never ends.

 

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk

Advertisement