I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, “Whoa, this is amazing!” and got us hooked on the world of open source.

What made you to jump ships? Was it the “free” side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?

For me those products were:

  • Android
  • Firefox
  • VLC
  • Calibre

Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product – maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source

  • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
    7·
    11 months ago

    I actually did use Paint.net at one point as well, because there was an improved format that GIMP just straight up didn’t support, so at one point I was creating textures for my mods in GIMP, then opening the files in Paint.net and exporting them again lol

    To be fair, I’m not a graphic designer, but I did have to learn about things like using layers to create glow maps, so GIMP worked just fine for a scrub like myself, but I can understand for anything more serious it would have some limitations

    • MudMan@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      Not a graphic designer either, so I also use it for, say scanning documents and stuff like that. But I’ll be honest, if it takes more than that I’ll often just load into some mobile app meant for the edit I need to make just to avoid GIMP’s backwards UI.

      • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
        4·
        11 months ago

        My biggest grip with mobile apps, even for simple edits, is that none of them seem to support layers. I understand maybe it’s a performance thing, but it sure would be nice to be able to do some very basic things in a pinch when I’m away from my laptop or PC.

        Edit: *gripe

        • MudMan@kbin.social
          3·
          11 months ago

          Yep. You either get the features but not the depth in mobile apps or the depth but not the features on GIMP.

          It genuinely sucks. Because it’s not that the technology is proprietary at Adobe and can’t be replicated. Like I said, Blender holds up to the best of commercial software and it’s just as free. It’s that the GIMP guys haven’t quite found their way to that qualitative jump Blender took.