4 ms·

You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of older versions. Win8 is joke compared to Win7, Office 2003 is better than 20something

by altero 13y ago

You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of older versions. Win8 is joke compared to Win7, Office 2003 is better than 20something. New Photoshop brings zero improvement except some crazy DRM. Open-source programs are at least stable. It is less likely some commercial company will flush my investment into toilet. And Photoshop is probably better than Gimp, but in other areas the winner is not that clear. For example OpenOffice versus MS Office. Or my favorite example KWin versus.... nothing.

eitland 13y ago
Seconded. Until recently I've kept a copy of oprn office/libre office around for longer documents. Until office 2010 I used to joke about word only being able to deal with up to 25 pages and less than two authors (i.e. one) Of course seasoned professionals can use Word but for general office... no. Most people didn't understand styles in Word
Silhouette 13y ago
You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of older versions. We certainly don't bother with the upgrade treadmill here. We'll spend a small fortune on serious software if it has demonstrable value to us. But upgrade to a recent version of MS Office on the desktop? I suppose that's marginally more likely than us signing up to a recurring subscription for something we already bought once, where the "enhancements" mostly involve added DRM, randomly changing user interfaces, paying several times as much in practice for useful software, and cloud serv^W^Wsecurity, reliability, sustainability and privacy risks that we would never seriously consider taking. Open-source programs are at least stable. It is less likely some commercial company will flush my investment into toilet. I so wish that were true. In reality, I don't find most FOSS native applications significantly better or worse in this respect than proprietary/commercial ones. Still, both are dramatically better than most SaaS applications or magically changing software like Firefox and Chrome.

by altero 13y ago

eitland 13y ago

Seconded. Until recently I've kept a copy of oprn office/libre office around for longer documents. Until office 2010 I used to joke about word only being able to deal with up to 25 pages and less than two authors (i.e. one) Of course seasoned professionals can use Word but for general office... no. Most people didn't understand styles in Word

Silhouette 13y ago

You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of older versions. We certainly don't bother with the upgrade treadmill here. We'll spend a small fortune on serious software if it has demonstrable value to us. But upgrade to a recent version of MS Office on the desktop? I suppose that's marginally more likely than us signing up to a recurring subscription for something we already bought once, where the "enhancements" mostly involve added DRM, randomly changing user interfaces, paying several times as much in practice for useful software, and cloud serv^W^Wsecurity, reliability, sustainability and privacy risks that we would never seriously consider taking. Open-source programs are at least stable. It is less likely some commercial company will flush my investment into toilet. I so wish that were true. In reality, I don't find most FOSS native applications significantly better or worse in this respect than proprietary/commercial ones. Still, both are dramatically better than most SaaS applications or magically changing software like Firefox and Chrome.