That’s why open source rules
I love FOSS but GIMP and Inkscape aren’t nearly as usable or feature rich as the Affinity suite, let alone the Adobe suite.
Man i just hate these comments. Imagine you’re gimp / foss developer and you see an uncritical, unactionable, and dumbass comment about how a multimillion dollar company beats your software. Like of course mate Affinity & Adobe developers get money thrown at them, while gimp developers have to stand your ungrateful ass.
‘It doesn’t meet my needs’ seems like light criticism but I understand your point. I’m eternally thankful to devs but at a certain point it either does what you need or it doesn’t.
GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284
Or compare with:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI
GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.
Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).
From someone with a passing interest, Krita seems on a similar trajectory to Blender - gathering momentum and going from strength to strength, whereas Gimp seems rather stuck.
I just installed gimpshop the other day on a whim and immediately I could work at 90% capacity just based 20+ years of Photoshop muscle memory. Gimp never lasted more than a day with me the dozen or so times I’ve tried it before.
There are ways to make it work, and the tooling out there is getting better every day.
Looks like it’s last official version was released in 2007. Are you using a version from gimpshop.com with added adware/spyware? The wiki for gimpshop is pretty eye-opening…
I originally created Gimpshop, but I’m not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
I use a lot of open source apps which aren’t as polished, the UIs need work, they’re clunky, and they won’t enshittify.
Yeah and there’s just as many paid for programs with the same issues… What’s your point? Want me to show you some open source programs that are polished? Heard of blender before? That’s not the point I was making anyway… The issue with non foss software is that you have ZERO control over it. Big corporations can decide to drop support at any moment or make a free tier paid.
Allow me to reiterate:
I use a lot of open source apps…and they won’t enshittify.
When licenses MEAN nothing I PAY for nothing yarrrr
Do what you want cuz a pirate is free
To the people in this thread saying “don’t buy lifetime”, how is that any different than a perpetual license? Your alternative is subscription based… I’d definitely prefer perpetual to subscription.
There is always another way
🏴☠️
Yeah but for software you want it to work and sometimes need help, when you steal that software you are often on your own. In open source, there is nearly always an open alternative that comes with community support!
The only time I ever fell for a “lifetime” software purchase was back when Trillian (the IM client) was popular. That lasted less than 5 years. Then they released “Astas”, which was just a UI refresh, but they treated it like it was a whole new company and product. “Lifetime” is always a scam.
I’m enjoying my Plex one and Nexus Mods. The latter one was in 2013 and cost me $40. Today the yearly subscription is $70.
I got a Plex lifetime sub back in the day. They never got rid of it, but they did enshittify the product out from under me.
Same here, although I’m still using it. It’s doing what I got it for and some of the additions are welcome (I use live TV fairly often and some friends and I are sharing libraries) but I have been concerned. What made you switch and did you find something better?
I still actively use Plex, but I’ve been trying Jellyfin. It’s almost there but still has some work to do to catch up to Plex fully. However, its wonderfully free from bloat. I can’t stand all the crap they’ve added to Plex. Especially when I search for content that’s IN MY LIBRARY and the result it sends me to is a streaming service I don’t even have. 😡
Plex is such ass
Scooping up a lifetime sub to Nexus, back when they were still available, might have been one of my best online moves. If a game can be modded, I will be modding it - I get SO much value from that one-time investment.
Facts
Not only software license, I believe any products “lifetime” comes with a lot of caveates.
Case in point, I purchased a fountain pen a decade ago, and started to leak (a crack around the threads) a few year back. The company is known for its lifetime warranty and good customer service, as per the warranty, it said if the product is defective (which I believe leaking pen body is), I am entilted for a replacement part or a new model of the same price if the pen is no longer in production. I reached out to customer service and was told, they can’t supply a replacement part because the pen is no longer in production and I’m not entitled to a new model because they doesn’t deem a leaking body a defect.
they doesn’t deem a leaking body a defect
Does that mean they purposely design their pens to leak? If it’s not a defect, it must be by design, right? Unless the user did something to break it, accidentally or otherwise
I believe they just chalked it up as normal wear and tear.
Update: The leak is from the threads where the pen cap screws on the pen, there is a argument here as to I twist it too tight, and over the years there developed a crack. You can barely see the crack, but its enough for the ink to leak bleed through.
I’ve bought VPN lifetime several times, 2 of them have disappeared, 2 are still running. On the other hand, just think about it from the company point of view, lifetime support is not a sustainable business model, so it necessarily must be a scam.
Nah not necessarily. It can be a great way to get money early on without venture capital.
Yeah, you will have to provide the service to them forever but they are usually a small bunch so they aren’t a big deal if you manage to get big later on.
I suspect most companies that offer lifetime even when they are big have statistics showing that they lose little money or none because the high price means that the average consumer won’t use the service for the required amount of years to break even.
Yeah, it’s kind of like crowd-funding. The early customers get a great deal, but also have the risk of the company going out of business.
