[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:39:58 +0200
"Mehrdad" <wfunction at hotmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 18 September 2012 at 08:09:41 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
> > Is it any surprise the vast majority of *good* software is 
> > either open-source or otherwise non-commercial?
> 
> It is?
> 

Naturally there are exceptions, but that's been my experience more
often than not. Of course, I'm *certainly* not going to say that "OSS
is *usually* good". And I'm not even saying "OSS is more frequently
good than commercial". I'm just saying, when I find I program that
I actually like and doesn't irritate me, it's usually either OSS or
freeware.

> Every time I try to switch from Microsoft Office to 
> Open/LibreOffice, I find them unusable. And those are probably 
> the best alternatives.
> 

It works well enough for me, but then I don't really do much with them.

> Every time I try to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, GRUB belches 
> at me, saying it thinks it's THE boot loader and it just cries 
> like a baby about how it wants to install itself on the MBR.
> And it stops working randomly every once in a while when I put it 
> on the partition boot sector.
> 
> Funny, the only times the Windows boot loader ever gets messed up 
> is when I try to install Linux. Not when I happen to resize a 
> random partition.
> 

Oh, god, I learned a long time ago to NEVER mess with dual-booting.
It's just never worth it no matter what the OS. Use a VM, or a
LiveDisc distro (with USB persistence), but forget dual-boot
bootloaders.

> And if you tell me GIMP or Inkscape or whatever take the place of 
> Adobe suites I'm just going to laugh.
> Are they good? Sure.
> Are the comparable with the commercial versions? Hell no.
> 

GIMP sucks and Inkscape has it's problems, but I've never used an Abobe
program that I didn't hate just as much. So it's either be annoyed by
GIMP/Inkscape for free, or shell out hundreds if not thousands (PLUS
hardware upgrades) for the privilege of being annoyed by Adobe's
equally obnoxious bloatware.

> Google Chrome? It's open-source, but it's driven by commercial 
> interests -- it's driven by the advantages it gives Google in the 
> market, even though it's "free" by itself.
> 

Ok this is the one I *really* disagree with: You'll *never* convince me
that Chrome is anything but the absolute WORST browser in existence.
Wretched, horrid, terrible, awful piece of shit (and yes, it does crash,
too), *and* it's to blame for kick-starting the endless trend of
absolutely god-awful browser UIs. There is no such thing as a browser
with a sane UI anymore, and it's all thanks to Chrome.
I'm not exaggerating when I say I'd sooner go back to *Netscape* then
even *allow* Chrome on my computer at all (And when I need to test on
Chrome, I use SRWare Iron instead - It's the same engine and the
same wretched god-awful UI, but without all the "raping my
computer").

> Oh, and there's a reason people still use WinRAR instead of 7z, 
> as great as 7-Zip is. (Yes, the icons and toolbars DO make a 
> difference, even if you think that's stupid.)
> 

Actually, I never noticed any difference. I only ever use the shell
integration anyway.

> In the programming world -- just look at how popular C# is.
> It's not popular because it was open-source (although people 
> tried to make Mono) -- it's popular because it's got damn good 
> balance in terms of usability and IDE support.
> 
> And VS is a lot of $$$ to buy. Nothing open-source/non-commercial 
> about it.
> 

I find VS bloated. I like Programmer's Notepad 2. Nothing commercial
about it.

> 
> Of course, there's good open-source software. No doubt about that.
> 
> But at the moment I can't think of one that took the place of 
> commercial software because people find it "good" and they find 
> the commercial version "not good".
> 

Disc burning is a good example. These are *great* programs:

- InfraRecorder
- ImgBurn/DVD Decryptor
- DVD Shrink

None of those are commercial. I have yet to find *one* commercial disc
burning program that isn't a steaming pile of shit. Nero's been shit
for over a decade. Roxio is shit. DVD Fab is shit. It's all shit.

Also, note in my earlier post I didn't say "popular software", I said
"good software".

> 
> > Managed by *programmers*
> 
> LOL, that's precisely why open-source software has a "steep 
> learning curve", as the creators like to put it.
> 
> It's a result of programmers not knowing (or caring) about making 
> good UIs, so they just think the users are noobs when they can't 
> use the software.

There is too much of that, unfortunately. But it's definitely not true
of all OSS. And at the same time, most commercial developers have been
doing nothing but making their UIs worse and worse and worse. So
basically most UIs these days suck, period, commercial or not. When I
do find one I like, more often that not it's non-commercial.