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Just paying Figma because nothing else works
- WhyNotHugo 3y agoPerhaps open source would be better if we had less people like this willing to fund proprietary development while writing hate pieces towards open source.
- seanhunter 3y agoOpen source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership. It just turns out that the economics of open source aren't necessarily a good fit for every use case. It's just not going to win everywhere for every user. I'll give you an example: computer algebra and graphing. Open source we have maxima (and wxmaxima). It is.... well weird but highly functional. It crashes from time to time but when it's not crashing you can do a lot with it. Every plot has thousands of options and you sort of need to specify most of them to get anything that looks half-decent. For some reason I don't fully understand you have to specify gnuplot options as well as maxima options sometimes but it's nice that it supports both of them. It's an absolute labour of love by the team who develop it. Paid for there is Mathematica. If you're a student it's like 75 bucks a year but if you're trying to use it in industry it's nearly 4 grand. Per user per year. It can do basically the same sort of thing as maxima but the graphs look amazing out of the box, the options aren't weird, there is support etc etc. Now here's the thing: Maxima is much better than Mathematica at certain things. And it's free. But it's really weird and some simple things are hard (like just graphing 2 2-d plots on the same axis) until you get the hang of it. And it's sort of lispy which I like but is weird for many people.
- lacrosse_tannin 3y agothe author contributes to all kinds of opensource
- danenania 3y agoOpen source is great, but why should anyone expect engineers to create serious alternatives to products with millions in revenue for them for free? I'm probably kicking the hornets' nest here, but I see this as a naive perspective that mainly benefits big tech and VC-funded projects that can afford to fund free stuff as loss leaders or funnels into their proprietary offerings. You should want to pay for the important tools you use. That's how you know that that they're sustainable, that fixes and improvements will be prioritized, and that there's no ulterior motive for the owner of the project. It also creates a healthy ecosystem where indie devs and startups can get traction and make money when they build useful stuff. A race to the bottom only benefits the established players.
- yieldcrv 3y agowhat works even better is a quick sketch for your website/diagram uploaded to Chat GPT4-V, a description of what it is and a request output it in the code you want that makes it executable but that's $20/month so maybe this person hates that
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoFigma serves an entirely different purpose than generating spaghetti code.
- yieldcrv 3y agosuch as? all the teams I’ve been on have been using these tools to ultimately get them to be something more than pictures, what I described seems to skip that process and those personnel entirely
- thoughtpalette 3y agoUX workflow architecting, low/high-fidelity prototyping, etc... You seem to be sharing only _your_ anecdotal experience.
- yieldcrv 3y agoyes its pretty clear I’m sharing my anecdotal experience and asking a question
- thoughtpalette 3y agoThe I took issue with way it was worded as it seemed combative. Thank you for your clarity in this follow up comment.
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago> what I described seems to skip that process and those personnel entirely You’re not wrong; however in many orgs this behavior is highly discouraged to the point of being grounds for termination, and for good reason: you’re sidestepping the design process in order to build something which may or may not be correct, then you have to go back and fix it anyways to meet the spec which wasn’t clear yet because you started development without nailing down the design first.
- apsurd 3y agoI enjoyed the writing style. It's too long for me to read fully - I'm supposed to be working - the length and meandering adds to the charm perhaps. The person is clearly expressing themself.
- hoten 3y agoI read the whole thing. I don't know what I was meant to take away from it. Just came off as a rant?
- fasterthanlime 3y agoI mean it's right there in the tags.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoI can’t stand the smug and arrogant “I know better than everyone” writing style. The content’s generally alright though, at least on a technical level
- happytoexplain 3y agoI think we're living in a time where the tendency to see "smug" in writing/speaking/personalities is unusually high. There's a deep hatred for smugness that is maybe justified and maybe not, but regardless it has been wildly overapplied during the past 10 years. Specifically I think the line between writing in a colloquial, sarcastic, dry, opinionated, florid, or satirical style; and being arrogant; is where we are overinterpreting things as the latter. We seem to be sensitive to the idea that somebody might think they are "better than us". It seems often like an insecurity?
- rtsil 3y agoI think it's just that what you wrote is the difference between good writer and great writer. > the line between writing in a colloquial, sarcastic, dry, opinionated, florid, or satirical style; and being arrogant; If the point they're making is clear, the prose is informative, entertaining and never boring, being smug is a writing style like any other, people will like it. If the writing is annoying, people will criticize the smugness, when in reality that just means they didn't like it. It's also possible that the success of sarcastic, satirical styles drew a lot of people to these styles, and not all of them are successful in using these styles.
- baronblackmore 3y agoFigma is the one product I will not stop preaching about, you literally have to stop me before I start singing it's praises. For me it's made redundant illustrator, acrobat, indesign, PowerPoint and miro. I'm almost free from adobe jail.
- mplewis9z 3y ago…you do know they’re in the process (and quite far along) of being acquired by Adobe, right?
- qzw 3y agoI thought GP’s comment was trying to set up the Godfather 3 quote: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” — Michael Corleone
- NicoJuicy 3y ago/s? You do know that Adobe acquired Figma?
- abhinavk 3y agoSo who's gonna tell him?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tpmx 3y agoI really want Apple to repurpose a subset of the Keynote codebase into an awesome drawing program. They could name it MacDraw. But, no, instead they'll do something involving 3d emojis or something similarly useful.
- FigurativeVoid 3y agoWhat about freeform? I've never used it, but it seems fine.
- tpmx 3y agoIt's extremely meh. It's iOS-ified. There are no files, just some proprietary database of your drawings. You can only export to PDF. You can't import vectors. There are no dimensions inspectors where you can enter numbers, because that feels weird in iOS. You will draw your thing by hand and you will be happy.
- billfruit 3y agoArticle ignoring the elephants in the room: Inkscape and Illustrator.
- ska 3y agoThose really don't solve the same problem. Personally, I've found a lot of stuff that could be a figma or drawio (or inscape etc., yes) are more effective being a PUML or DOT or MetaPost file (or whatever format floats your boat) - not because it's easier to make (it isn't) but because it's much easier to change coherently and they change a lot. You can version control it better also. If you want a prettier final form for some sort of final frozen version, redraw it in whatever tool you like.
- paradox460 3y agoI find mermaid is simple enough non tech people can use it, and has fairly broad support. PUML can obviously do more, but mermaid is there, which helps out tremendously
- billfruit 3y agoWhy not SVG, which is what Inkscape is built around?
- Solvency 3y agoMaybe in terms of generic vectors. Neither of those are even remotely comparable to Figma's full feature set.
- codedokode 3y agoCould you give several examples of what is missing in Inkscape, but is implemented well in Figma? I only used Inkscape so I don't know much about Figma.
- jwells89 3y agoMy experience with Inkscape is limited but last I used Illustrator, it felt very print-oriented and awkward at best for the use case of creating screen-destined vector graphics. That's actually what pushed me into starting to use Sketch for those purposes about a decade ago.
- quibono 3y ago> let me emphasize this: absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file. This might be a stupid question: what is wrong about deploying with Compose? What are the "proper" ways of doing things?
- doctoboggan 3y agoNothing is wrong with deploying with docker-compose. Many people will push you toward k8s but if compose does the job there is absolutely no reason to introduce the complexity of k8s. Compose will get you far. (farther than many people think).
- spdustin 3y agoFTA: """ What you're meant to do is, of course, run it on Kubernetes, which is largely the same (it's containers all the way down) except it's configured differently, you can now think about scaling out (on several nodes), you have actual health/liveness checks and policies for rolling out new versions, restarting, etc. It's k8s! We all love to hate it, but at least the industry has sorta standardized around it, so that makes commiserating easier. And because penpot is made up of three services (backend, exporter, frontend — not counting postgres and redis), although you could technically deploy all three of them separately, the idiomatic and era-appropriate thing to do at the time of this writing is to use a helm chart, which lets you deploy several resources at once. """
- gaganyaan 3y agoIt's fine if you've got a low-volume service or one where downtime isn't a huge deal. If you ever find yourself needing e.g. autoscaling due to load or you start measuring how many 9's of uptime you get, then you'd want to look elsewhere.
- redox99 3y agoThere's nothing wrong. What's actually wrong is always using k8s even when it's overkill.
- evilduck 3y agoCompose is fine for what it is, it’s served my personal VPS for years perfectly and I’ve hosted internal tools for teams with it for stuff that would never need to scale beyond that instance and never needed to be public. Personal projects and even small companies can likely get away with it just fine. But if you’re dealing with any larger organization they probably don’t want to deal with you spinning up a random unprovisioned server running docker and compose services and will require stuff like Ansible scripts or similar to manage it. Once you start trying to manage docker-compose with extra tooling you might as well bite the bullet and learn k8s and get more out of your time and learning investment.
- andrewstuart 3y agoThere are plenty of people who are REALLY committed to not spending money on software. Then there are people who want to live their best life.
- internetter 3y agoAs someone who has dumped hundreds of dollars for software in the apple ecosystem (after switching from linux), there is a time and a place for both.
- nightfly 3y agoPart of my "best life" isn't being nickel and dimed into poverty by everything modern wanting it's "only a cup of coffee" $5 drop of blood every month
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt's just about balance. If there is something I need that provides value then my wallet instantly comes out. I more than happily pay for my JetBrains IDE - it's a tool I use full time. Same for ChatGPT - I'd throw my money at them. I'd pay 5 times as much. I was paying for an anti spam system but I'm not convinced it was doing a great job.
- frou_dh 3y agoYep it's funny to me how many developer/poweruser type people act like exchanging money for goods and services is a weird unsavoury concept. Do they have this same hangup in other areas of life?
- nyanpasu64 3y agoI don't like having my personal workflows dependent on payments or subscription fees, and I don't like rewarding enshittifying corporations deliberately worsening free programs with feature restrictions and manipulative upsell ads (see Windows 10/11, Discord, scummy mobile apps/games, etc.) Re. other areas of life, I will pay (limited) amounts of money for scarce goods (which software isn't), but frankly it's terrifying that you're reliant on unaffordable payments and subscription fees to avoid freezing or starving to death in real life. Given my current (in)ability to hold a job, I don't see a long-term future for myself surviving.
- rice7th 3y agoI am wondering why he didn't at least try Inkscape. Since 1.0 it has gotten SO much better. It even has much better export quality compared to figma (from much more accurate gradients to strokes), and it has one of the best snapping systems ever created. He should seriously check it out!
- nightfly 3y agoI love Inkscape on Linux, and abuse it for desktop publishing and basic CAD work, but on Windows and Mac (especially Mac) it just doesn't seem to work as well and I don't understand why. I almost feel bad suggesting it to people because of this
- clumsysmurf 3y agoI think its because GTK, but I'm not certain. I used Inkscape quite a bit but shifted to Affinity Designer.
- rice7th 3y agoYeah but luckily they're switching to GTK4 AND an OpenGL renderer, meaning that it will be much snappier on both MacOS and Windows.
- itronitron 3y agoInkscape on Windows has been great for me, but I haven't compared it to Inkscape on Linux :)
- yuumei 3y agoInkscape is one of the best programs out there. I use it for everything now. Did you know it can do mesh gradients too now
- rice7th 3y agoYes I know, but mesh gradients are a part of Inkscape since at least 0.92, which is when I started using it, aka 2019.
- eterm 3y agoA reasonable article outlining why sometimes it's worth paying for software and going into detail about what exactly is wrong with the free alternatives. But it's a long article, so I guess I should have just reacted to the headline instead rather than reading the article.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agodrawio supports saving diagrams as editable SVGs
- imslavko 3y agoDoes it support exporting to SVGs without requiring the used fonts installed on the viewer's system? That seems to be the issue the author is trying to address.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoCan the author not simply include the necessary fonts on his site?
- imslavko 3y agoI only read the article once, but to me it seemed like this was an explicit requirement: produce a vector artifact that renders the same on all platforms without dependencies (basically a PDF?) and without invoking a browser in the build process. Sort of like folks would praise Go's ability to compile a static binary without dylib dependencies besides libc.
- steveruizok 3y agoEmbedding fonts isn't really great for SVG exports; either you link to the fonts, in which case the SVGs only load correctly when the user has the font locally or is online, and the CDN is still running; or else you embed them as base 64, which makes the image very large. We do the base 64 route for tldraw, which is sort of the best of all bad options. I'd like to someday add more export options so that a creator could host the fonts themselves on the same site where the SVG is shown.
- jwells89 3y agoThis blog post indirectly touches on one of my most frequent (if potentially unfair) gripes with FOSS projects, which is how few of them have a culture of polish and user-friendliness. So many of these projects seem to try to do as many things as possible somewhat passably instead of doing a handful of things really really well, and this is often not only what pushes me to use proprietary products instead but also disinclines contribution, whether that be by way of code or donations. If I try to contribute code, project misalignment with personal values is going to make getting PRs/patches approved a constant battle, and on the cash side of things it's hard to justify spending on a project I may never find usable. This means that the number of FOSS projects I contribute to is much smaller than I'd prefer it to be.
- coding123 3y agoFOSS doesn't have polish because the original devs plan on selling the polish
- micromacrofoot 3y agowhich OSS has done this?
- ipaddr 3y agoJetbrains
- matkoniecz 3y agoin some cases this may be true, is false as general claim
- qzw 3y agoWriting new features is fun. Polishing is boring and thankless, aka work. Most people will do fun things for free but want to be paid for work. Probably not going to change anytime soon.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
- stevenhubertron 3y agoAnd that is why Adobe purchased them for such a high value.
- kaycebasques 3y agoGreat title. Made me chuckle out loud. Captures a sentiment around computers that we've all probably experienced quite viscerally...
- swyx 3y agowhat about Excalidraw / TLDraw? there are so many of these canvas drawing apps[1]. draw on them, take a screenshot. doesnt export to svg but do people really need that? [1]: https://github.com/swyxio/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#general-purpose-diagramming https://github.com/swyxio/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#ge...
- humbugtheman 3y agotldraw does export to SVG!
- lvl102 3y agoEvery time I use Figma, I say to myself, “so we are reinventing Dreamweaver” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s absolutely absurd that Adobe bought Macromedia/Dreamweaver and did nothing with it. I have no doubt they will do the same thing with Figma. Yay product innovation!
- RandallBrown 3y agoI've used Figma a lot in the last few years but I haven't used Dreamweaver in over a decade. I've never thought to compare them as similar tools and I still can't really understand the comparison. Figma feels a lot closer to Illustrator than Dreamweaver to me.
- a1o 3y agoIllustrator that wishes to be Dreamweaver
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dachande663 3y agoDreamweaver or Fireworks. I miss FW so much. It had that perfect blend of vector, bitmap, and text handling. Figma is the closest anything’s come to matching it.
- Antshockey 3y agoFireworks was the absolute best tool for anything graphical I've ever used
- ksimukka 3y agoI too miss Fireworks:
- ToDougie 3y agoI was able to work so much more effectively in Fireworks. RIP.
- codedokode 3y agoExporting text as paths in SVG makes the text non-selectable and non-copyable. What SVG should have done, is to allow specifying both text and paths to draw the letters. This is one of multiple problems with SVG.
- eviks 3y agoIndeed, how is killing text better than having it render differently on other platforms?
- lmz 3y agoThe article said they initially used PNG screenshots so I guess it still works at being better than that.
- 10000truths 3y agoYou can embed the font file into the SVG if you want the text to remain selectable. If the size increase worries you, you can strip unused glyphs from the font file before embedding it.
- fasterthanlime 3y agoYes, PDF is what I really want, but apparently it didn't get the "<img> tag treatment" so, we have to leave with "SVG with text as paths, and perfect layout" or "SVG with embedded fonts (a subset if you're brave), and selectable text".
- mrklol 3y agoSo the latter would be the best, correct? Isn’t it worse without text selection if a user wants to copy?
- vic-traill 3y agoThat article has an odd cadence to it. Makes it tougher to grok for me ....
- wslh 3y agoMy company is also a Figma customer but for many diagramming stuff, more business oriented, I find Google Slides very handy for simple diagrams and good magnet connectors. In a distant the past I pivoted from Visio to Draw.io but always feel that draw.io seems like unfinished work after many years.
- auggierose 3y agoI guess when you get people to pay for your product who REALLY REALLY don't want to, where every fiber of them screams, I DON'T WANT TO PAY, you got a winner on your hands. When a friend of mine spent $20 a month on a ChatGPT subscription, I couldn't believe it, he is very frugal with this stuff as well.
- 65 3y agoI hate spending money on software. I pirated Adobe Creative Suite for years. I really, really did not want to pay the $55/month for a Creative Cloud subscription, but I had to. There are no great alternatives to Photoshop + Premiere + After Effects. I have Affinity Photo, I have Da Vinci Resolve, and Fusion. But at the end of the day Adobe makes the best video production/animation software. I reluctantly bought a subscription and it's been worth it for me. I still hate Adobe's business practices but their software is still extremely well made.
- Gigachad 3y agoI so often see people complaining about the price of Adobe tools saying it's over the top or greedy, but then they continue to pay and use it despite cheaper alternatives existing. Consider that the reason their software is so much better than the rest is _because_ they charge this much and can reinvest it in to the software.
- petetnt 3y agoInstead of Draw.io or Figma (or Mermaid or any other option), I sketch around with Excalidraw and create diagrams with Miro. Miro took the world by the storm when corona hit and I am not super fond of the way people use it for everything from Kanban walls to whatever, but it does the diagram parts really well and works fast. I bet I have wasted hundreds of hours fighting to get lines straight or arrows pointing to the correct direction with Draw.io - Miro they always just work.
- pests 3y agoThis is the first time I've heard of Miro. Maybe the storm wasn't as big as you think?
- pbowyer 3y agoSimilar, but I use Whimsical instead of Miro for diagrams.
- starkparker 3y agoEng teams and PMs using Miro for retros and sprint planning is one of the stupidest tech trends I've seen in the last 2-3 years. Panning and zooming and manually sizing and moving post-it notes, we might as well do agile ceremonies in Tabletop Simulator.
- MindTooth 3y agoA colleague had a quick presentation on Penpot[1] a few weeks back. Was a real contender I think. [1]: https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/
- bbkane 3y agoI take it you didn't read the article
- catchmeifyoucan 3y agoFor diagrams, Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com) is my favorite by a lot. Pretty low learning curve and you can use it as a single-player as many times (you'll have to export the older file)
- jimnotgym 3y ago> I was also taught "it's a poor craftsman that blames their tools", which apparently means "take responsibility for your fuckups", but, to young-me, definitely sounded more like "you don't deserve nice things". This may be controversial. I think this phrase is very misunderstood. As a former craftsman I think the real meaning was more to do with how a real craftsman only has good tools and maintains them properly. They can't blame their tools, because they are beyond reproach.
- jasonpeacock 3y agoA good craftsman learns how to use their tools to the best of their ability, including accommodating for their short-comings. I've seen amazing work come from very simple/inexpensive tools, or even inappropriate tools, and crappy work come from very good tools. The poor craftsman says "my works sucks because the tools suck", while the good craftsman learns to use what they have.
- _dain_ 3y ago>while the good craftsman learns to use what they have No, he goes out and gets new ones or fixes/builds them himself. That's how I always understood the saying; the emphasis is on the word "blame" not the word "tool". It's about people who sit around and complain rather than taking action to fix the problem. It doesn't mean you should put up with shitty tools.
- nerpderp82 3y agoIt is of course both. You also don't try and build what your skill and your tools cannot accomplish and then blame the tools for the outcome. The other adage that goes in concert with craftspeople shouldn't be blaming their tools is that, "true artists work within the limits of the medium".
- jasonpeacock 3y agoYour interpretation appears to be unique. At quick search shows the common understanding to be about taking responsibility for your work and not blaming your tools. There's nothing about changing your tools: - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_bad_workman_always_blames_his_tools https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_bad_workman_always_blames_h... - https://poemanalysis.com/proverb/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools/ https://poemanalysis.com/proverb/a-bad-workman-blames-his-to... - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/a+poor+craftsman+blames+his+tools https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/a+poor+craftsman+blames... - https://usdictionary.com/idioms/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools/ https://usdictionary.com/idioms/a-bad-workman-blames-his-too... - https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/a-bad-workman-...
- muglug 3y ago> Things like vector networks (https://madebyevan.com/figma/introducing-vector-networks/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/introducing-vector-networks/), which immediately impose themselves as clearly superior to the classical "vector path" model literally everyone else is using. This is Macromedia Flash erasure, which had all of the mechanics it seems Figma now has w/r/t paths.
- nerpderp82 3y agoI had the same experience with OmniGraffle, https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle It just worked. There was support. I wouldn't dig a hole in the ground with my bare hands, why wouldn't I use good tools. Of course I would like to use F/OSS for various reasons. The model I absolutely love is Jetbrains, their core product is OSS, Apache licensed. The whole thing, totally usable. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community The money I send their way does both, it pays for developers and it puts an amazing artifact in the world that others can use and learn from. If they weren't open source, I wouldnt pay for it. I don't know how many others are the same as me, but Jetbrains really deserves credit here.
- makeitdouble 3y agoJetbrains' model is really the best of both worlds. One reason I never could get into OmniGraffle: I can't just pass a file to a coworker to continue editing on their side, if they doesn't also pay for OmniGraffle. In contrast a plantUml/mermaid diagram will work, and they'll have the choice on how they want to edit it (albeit I don't think there is any good, non text based visual editors...) A commercial player coming up with a very good plantUml/mermaid compatible visual editor would be a godsend (albeit, such a niche market I don't know if it would be profitable)
- a1o 3y agoI really wish Akira (https://github.com/akiraux/Akira https://github.com/akiraux/Akira) had worked out :/
- colonwqbang 3y agoThe PDF export function of draw.io doesn't really work, at least not with custom fonts. What does work is to print the diagram to a PDF printer. This puts the diagram on a full A4 page so it's necessary to crop it afterwards. This can be done with some command line tool or other and automated using makefiles.
- tristanho 3y agoSort of off topic, but for diagrams like the author seems to want (well, maybe a little lower fidelity, but good enough for any software system mapping I do), I love using Kinopio (kinopio.club) Didn't see any mentions here.
- biugbkifcjk 3y agoI understand the sentiment. I have the same feeling regarding the use of LibreOffice. Full of features, most of which work "OK". But its absolutely infuriating to use for anything more than just a casual document/presentation etc.. Its severely lacking a level of polish, and the focus on getting real work done seems to be absent. I'm not talking about the UI, though that's certainly part of it, its the actual functionality that is overall a bad experience. Stuff like pressing undo which then breaks formatting of another component, then pressing redo to try and fix the other component which doesn't work, only to lose that work forever and needing to manually fix it again.
- js4ever 3y agoHappy to see my company Elestio is mentioned in the article as a way to deploy Penpot :) https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/#install-with-elestio https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/#ins...
- yencabulator 3y agoRendering fonts into SVG paths destroys hinting, doesn't it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- therealmarv 3y agoyed Why not yed? It's totally free (but not open source) and the only tool I've found (ever) to replace MS Visio. https://www.yworks.com/products/yed https://www.yworks.com/products/yed they even have an online version nowadays (but I've never used the online version) https://www.yworks.com/yed-live/ https://www.yworks.com/yed-live/
- chromakode 3y agoYes, using native SVG is a feature not a bug. As is using native text nodes. Converting to paths is a postprocessing step and not difficult to do. The hard part is making a WYSIWYG editor, which both Figma and Penpot accomplish beautifully. The freedoms described in their marketing material may not be for you, but they are not indicative of poor quality. Quality is an expression of priorities. I find this kind of rant frustrating because it's missing the forest for the trees.
- Micoloth 3y agoOH boy does this arricle resonate with me! I didn’t grow up in a religious environement, but both the mindset you grew up in, and your personality, could very well be me. I’m stll very much struggling with this, btw.. I *KNOW* paying for software is good because time is more important than money, but I still don’t know where to draw the line.. Should I pay 30€ for ChatGpt? And Photoshop? And Netflix? And then what? The stuff adds up…
- bogwog 3y agoI don't remember what the first software I purchased was, but after that point, I no longer was hesitant to spend money on good software. In hindsight, it was an irrational fear (maybe "fear" isn't the right word though). I'm not even a cheap person, I just always felt wrong paying money for any software that wasn't a video game. I wouldnt even buy dirt cheap mobile apps. The only exception nowadays is subscriptions. I avoid those wherever I can, and will happily buy a more expensive/inferior alternative rather than pay a subscription. That might be irrational too, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm being ripped off and/or exploited any time I need to pay for a subscription.
- Aeolun 3y ago> absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file Of all the text in the article, this is what I took issue with most. Docker-compose is fine for running the vast majority of my stuff in production (combined with portainer).
- lmm 3y agoI was sympathetic to most of the leadup, but the conclusion seems to be that FOSS is fundamentally irretrievably broken because a) when you wilfully choose the hardest way to host something it's hard, but more importantly b) they made a different choice than the author wanted in a specific niche area of the product, because clearly any product that doesn't render text as uneditable SVG paths (and fuck anyone who wants to use a screenreader or translation tool amirite) is "not working".
- JoeyBananas 3y agoA long time ago, I decided there's nothing worth doing that is worth buying into proprietary software. But I understand that for the type of person who doesn't have any idea what they're doing, it's a whole different story. If someone wants to argue "It just doesn't magically fall into my lap", there's no point in arguing. Ok, I'm sorry you don't understand computers. I'd also be frustrated I were you.
- Scarbutt 3y agoWhy didn't the free version worked for him?
- user_named 3y agoDealing with developers who insist on building their own or using an open source alternative of the industry leading paid option is a curse
- stefandesu 3y ago> absolutely nobody should be running anything in production using a docker-compose file (from the section about Penpot) Is there any particular reason? Maybe it depends on what "in production" means for you, but all my homelab stuff runs in Docker using Compose files and it's completely solid. Only me and some friends are using it (mostly Nextcloud), so I don't see a reason to scale horizontally ever.
- tamimio 3y agoI just use Adobe XD.
- logbiscuitswave 3y agoI often have to do architecture diagrams and this usually involves Visio. Visio has design stuck in the past. It’s so amazingly clunky to use and even simple things like arranging or sizing shapes on a grid can be incredibly frustrating. There’s a ton of shapes, but they are all inconsistent visually that mixing metaphors becomes a real mess. Search is terrible. I often find myself spending more just screwing around trying to get things laid out how I want than actually designing. Figma isn’t really designed for this kind of thing but I find that with FigJam I can throw together really great flowcharts and infrastructure diagrams with really little effort. UML state diagrams and other things of that ilk are too much effort though. Ultimately I work at a Microsoft shop so whatever I do in Figma ultimately ends up in Visio anyway but I find it faster to prototype in Figma and then adapt to Visio. (As frustrating as it is.)