5 ms·

Perhaps you mean proprietary. Ondsel is after all a commercial project. The fact remains that proprietary software seem to be a license to print money, and wit

by kiba 2y ago

Perhaps you mean proprietary. Ondsel is after all a commercial project. The fact remains that proprietary software seem to be a license to print money, and with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. This is a uphill battle for open source software, but it seems that open source software tend to keep improving in the long run.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. It seems like proprietary software has a big advantage when there's still lots of room for improvement, so that investment in further development pays off. However, in some cases, there's little room for real improvement, and the thing becomes a "solved problem" for the most part. At this point, the proprietary companies then start enshittifying the software (look at Photoshop, now a cloud-based program) to try to extract more money from users, and to keep users on the upgrade treadmill. Part of this is probably from the way corporate politics work: when you're a manager with a team in place, you need something to keep that team busy, to justify your team's continued employment to upper management, so when you run out of useful improvements to make, you invent less-than-useful "improvements" (e.g., ugly new UIs). This is where FOSS seems to be able to do well: it doesn't need to waste resources on useless improvements (we'll ignore GNOME for a moment as an exception), and can just focus on delivering the necessary functionality. Once that's done, it can just go into maintenance mode and people can move on to other projects. Until then, it can continue to improve and attract users to switch from the enshittifying proprietary stuff.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  GNOME, several reboots of the audio stack, XWindows versus Wayland,... FOSS only does well when it isn't the main source of income for contributors.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Wayland has its issues to be sure, but the X Window System was no longer suitable for modern systems; the justification for replacing it was quite sound. GNOME I'll heartily agree on. But I've never liked GNOME myself (v1 seemed OK though) and have always criticized that project. I've always been a KDE fan, though admittedly they've had some similar problems and have handled some major changes rather poorly (esp. 4.0). Really, the desktop environments are one place where FOSS hasn't really done that well, frequently re-inventing the wheel for questionable reasons, or adopting questionable new design philosophies. At least there's a fair amount of competition in the space, so if one project rubs you the wrong way, you can try another; this proliferation of competitors also shows just how much disagreement there is in the community on this particular matter. I really don't know enough about the audio stack changes; I can only guess that they found big problems with older solutions there which required major architectural changes, esp. for certain high-performance applications.
    - mavhc 2y ago
      Desktop managers have never decided if they want to copy Windows or MacOS, both of which are terrible GUIs that we're now stuck with, using paradigms from 1983/1984
      - 1propionyl 2y ago
        Honest question: what makes them both terrible?
        mavhc 2y ago
        They're based on the 1984 technology of "we can barely run 1 application at once", you can barely drag objects between applications, mostly you can't use overlapping windows because of raise on click, which makes dragging anything pointless, they put the menus far from the pointer. Why when I have my file manager view of a directory open do I need to open it again inside the application to save a file there?

by kiba 2y ago

shiroiushi 2y ago

>with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. It seems like proprietary software has a big advantage when there's still lots of room for improvement, so that investment in further development pays off. However, in some cases, there's little room for real improvement, and the thing becomes a "solved problem" for the most part. At this point, the proprietary companies then start enshittifying the software (look at Photoshop, now a cloud-based program) to try to extract more money from users, and to keep users on the upgrade treadmill. Part of this is probably from the way corporate politics work: when you're a manager with a team in place, you need something to keep that team busy, to justify your team's continued employment to upper management, so when you run out of useful improvements to make, you invent less-than-useful "improvements" (e.g., ugly new UIs). This is where FOSS seems to be able to do well: it doesn't need to waste resources on useless improvements (we'll ignore GNOME for a moment as an exception), and can just focus on delivering the necessary functionality. Once that's done, it can just go into maintenance mode and people can move on to other projects. Until then, it can continue to improve and attract users to switch from the enshittifying proprietary stuff.

pjmlp 2y ago
GNOME, several reboots of the audio stack, XWindows versus Wayland,... FOSS only does well when it isn't the main source of income for contributors.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Wayland has its issues to be sure, but the X Window System was no longer suitable for modern systems; the justification for replacing it was quite sound. GNOME I'll heartily agree on. But I've never liked GNOME myself (v1 seemed OK though) and have always criticized that project. I've always been a KDE fan, though admittedly they've had some similar problems and have handled some major changes rather poorly (esp. 4.0). Really, the desktop environments are one place where FOSS hasn't really done that well, frequently re-inventing the wheel for questionable reasons, or adopting questionable new design philosophies. At least there's a fair amount of competition in the space, so if one project rubs you the wrong way, you can try another; this proliferation of competitors also shows just how much disagreement there is in the community on this particular matter. I really don't know enough about the audio stack changes; I can only guess that they found big problems with older solutions there which required major architectural changes, esp. for certain high-performance applications.
  - mavhc 2y ago
    Desktop managers have never decided if they want to copy Windows or MacOS, both of which are terrible GUIs that we're now stuck with, using paradigms from 1983/1984
    - 1propionyl 2y ago
      Honest question: what makes them both terrible?
      - mavhc 2y ago
        They're based on the 1984 technology of "we can barely run 1 application at once", you can barely drag objects between applications, mostly you can't use overlapping windows because of raise on click, which makes dragging anything pointless, they put the menus far from the pointer. Why when I have my file manager view of a directory open do I need to open it again inside the application to save a file there?