You don't need Linux to run free and open source software There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS. In the first half of this short series, we looked at how to freshen up an aging Mac or Windows 10 PC, and ideally, how to wipe it and install a clean, …
I don’t like subscription model software. I like a nice, simple, perpetual license. But, just as I think that musicians, film makers and authors deserve to be paid for their efforts (I am one after all), I’m more than happy to pay for a license for the software that I use.
Unfortunately, a lot of FOSS is functional but not actually pleasant to use - and I’m not actually into wearing a hair shirt or eating my own peeling skin or fingernails.
Not always.
When you have to ask users to part from some of their money, you have to give them some reasons. You can also **pay** better developers (and designers), and when GUIs are involved, you need them. Also you can use better libraries which are not free, for the same reason that good developers like to be paid for their work.
Moreover, cross-platform GUIs are even more complex. And anything based on Qt is simply ugly. You might need to customize the UI on each platofrm, which is an additional effort.
Funny that the framework you decided to crap on is Qt. Ableton Live, Autodesk 3DS Max, OBS and DaVinci Resolve all uses Qt. Ugly? Debatable. Professional and used by industry standard applications? Yes.
Qt also has a paid version that proprietary apps likely use.
>musicians, film makers and authors deserve to be paid for their efforts
Maybe they deserve to be paid for their efforts if they produce a good work, but they should only be paid once so that they move onto producing new works - there is no public interest in encouraging them to milk a single work forever.
By the same lieu they deserve to be punished if they produce a bad work (i.e. a work that is completely against the public interest, as they restrict it with a proprietary license).
>I’m more than happy to pay for a license for the software that I use.
It's okay if someone requires payment before they will provide a copy of free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html) - but the money and real value is in support, warranty and custom modifications now, as anyone with a computer can copy software.
Proprietary software is always unacceptable, no matter whether it's gratis, or costs a fortune.
>Unfortunately, a lot of FOSS is functional but not actually pleasant to use
All free software programs I've tried have been hard to use at the start, but as I learn the interface, I realize why it's like that way and the software becomes pleasant to use.
Even if the software is difficult to use and is slower (I cannot think of an example of this occurring), at least it respects my freedom and therefore I would continue to use it instead of proprietary software.
I believe there's an inherent bias if you've paid a fortune for software - as you've paid a lot of money - it certainty must be "pleasant to use" - it can't possibly be that it's terrible and you've been scammed.
I suspect you've installed a lot of proprietary software that happens to be gratis, but is marketed as "FOSS", but not having the bias of having paid, you realize it's terrible.
Let's explore that "unpleasant to use" bit. Which? In what way unpleasant?
Gimp is often berated. I use it. I probably only use a fraction of it but I get there by my usual approach of stumbling along which, given the vast amount of functions, takes time because a vast amount of functions means a complex UI. In consequence I'm repeatedly impressed by what it can achieve. However I have one advantage: I've never used Photoshop. I don't have to unlearn another UI. I would undoubtedly find Photoshop just as unpleasant.
OTOH. years ago I occasionally used MS Office up to 97 on employer's and subsequently clients' PCs. Switching to LibreIffice was no problem. It looked more or less the same and worked more or less the same as I could make out. The stumbling around approach certainly worked. Modern MS Office I do find unpleasant when faced with it. This,of course, was exactly the reaction of all regular MS Office users to the ribbon interface when it came out. MS had mad their own product unpleasant to all their regular users*. Now, of course, those users who started with the ribbon find the older UI, as found on LibreOffice as well as they would older versions of MS Office.
Unpleasantness is an impression resulting from unfamiliarity.
* They have a habit of doing this to all their products every few years.
GIMP is unadulterated crap.
I remember a guy asked about setting a layer to a specific pixel position in GIMP and got told "that's not something you need to do in an artistic flow"
He replied "I'm not trying to be Picasso here, I'm trying to print a check without needing a typewriter"
GIMP is pretty much the only program I still use since MS-DOS days that does not offer to save unsaved changes when you quit. That shows their attitude towards UI design.
I think the UI could be more unfriendly, but they're trying as hard as they can to rectify that.
"GIMP is pretty much the only program I still use since MS-DOS days that does not offer to save unsaved changes when you quit."
But the way it works that doesn't matter too much because I'm more likely to export than save. I might have opened a jpeg end exported a png or opened a PDF and exported a jpeg.
I find this safer than the Save in Pinta. There I might open a .png, do some work on it, add another layer, do some work on that, intending to save it as a .ora but click Save and overwrite the original .png which I'd indented to keep in its original state.
Sometimes Save can be a bit too easy. Dangerously easy It might be hard to get your head round but I think Gimp gets it rights.
I certainly don't use it, but it does work for a lot of people who can't justify the cost of Photoshop or Affinity Photo.[1] Even though it *finally* got high bit-depth and non-destructive editing, it still lacks several of the crucial tools I use for photography. And yes, I do dislike the UI and find it unpleasant to use.[2]
But I don't presume that my needs, desires, nor way of working are everyone's. For a lot of people, it has all the needed tool and features, and quite possibly has more than they would ever need, and they're fine with the UI. I'm not going to say something's garbage just because *I* don't like it. It works, and is powerful enough for most people. And UI is always YMMV territory as long as it's not completely broken.
[1] And if I have to do any quick and dirty image editing on Linux, I tend to use Krita, which I use anyway for drawing and painting.
[2] Not to mention having gotten into long drawn-out arguments with ideologues who told me that I *have* to use it, because "freedom", and it was "better",[3] when it didn't even have colour management, let alone the more recent addition of essentials.
[3] And would get into the whole "it's better because it's free" and weren't really able to elaborate how something being GPL automatically made me "freer" save in the sense that I'd be freed from getting the results I want.
"Unfortunately, a lot of FOSS is functional but not actually pleasant to use - and I’m not actually into wearing a hair shirt or eating my own peeling skin or fingernails."
No, what you're dealing with is Baby Duck Syndrome. You've learned one way of interfacing with software and therefore think it's the best way.
5 +- 3 -- I may have lost a few to offspring dorm-room decorations.
Why did I buy so many? I kept wearing them out!
Was it just me? No DSoM consistently remained on the top 100 album sales from its introduction until CDs took a foothold.
I only have 1 CD copy.
I really don't imagine PF thought that 53 years after publication, millions of young people would still be getting high to this content.
Oh, and their parents too.
To properly compensate such stellar and undying works can't be achieved by any of the models.
User experience is definitely some open source products forget. Making the UI only show things for the task in hand, removing clutter, being discoverable, being forgiving / helpful, and internal consistent are really important. Sometimes they're more important than the power under the covers.
For example I'd love to use FreeCAD more but the UX is so awful that I'll stick to a free tier on OnShape or Fusion 360. Not because I want to but because those products are way easier to use despite being functionally similar.
I upvoted you. and sending you one ->
The best thing about irfanview are the plugins. In 2006, during my masters degree, when normal windows media took 100% of my Pentium (not pentium 2, pentium) 300Mhz to play one Mp3, and Media player clasic took 80%, an Irfanview plug-in took 50%, allowing me to listen to MP3s while writing term papers, massaging excel sheets, or browsing the web.
And when I fractured my scapula in 2022, a plug-in available only on 32-Bit irfanView allowed me to see the medical images that otherwise were hidden in the virus-riddled app bundled with my Medical Images CD
If possible, ¡send some donations their way!
I got ready to downvote you, pointing out that Pentiums didn't go up to 300 MHz, but checked first - wow, you learn something new every day. Looks like this was one of the last Pentium models produced (1999-2001).
My first machine of my very own (as opposed to my parents') was in 1998, a Pentium II 266 MHz. In 2006, I was running a ~4-year-old Pentium 4 (1.8 GHz?), having recently gotten my Bachelor's degree, and trying hard to save money. So you can see my confusion!
In 1999 I had the option of the P2 266 laptop (with DVD and MPEG2 decodr card) or the OG Pentium 300 laptop with CD and no decoder card (and no slot for one). The p2 was SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive, and I did not think I would keep it so many year, so I took the Pentium 300 one.
When I had to face the prospect of doing the masterd degree with said laptop in 2006, regretted not getting the P2 one.
At that time, extreme OS optimization of older hardware interested me more than it does today (It still interests me, but less)
This is the typical FOSS nazi response.
Yes, IrfanView is proprietary, and it is Windows only, but I use since 1996, back in the early days of Windows 95. And it does it's job absolutely great. More graphics formats to read and convert too than anyone else. In a rather small program , which is also faster and easier to use than anything else. And it is free to use...
I feel the same with the gratuitous use of the (big) C word. Seeing loved ones, family and life long friends suffer immense agony - I can't trivialize that. I'm no snowflake, and I do use humour to mitigate sorrow, as do some others. I don't consider either Nazi or cancer to be words that should never be used, they have their places, it's the flippancy of those using such terms, being either carelessly naive or just plain callous.
>typical FOSS nazi response.
I am against "FOSS" with every fibre of my being - free software!
It's odd to see someone who enjoys and encouraging freedom and sharing and is against all forms of "nazism" and then accuse them of being a "nazi" - but I guess that's the end result of; "Everyone I don't like it a nazi.".
If you want "nazism" in relation to software, you need to go to proprietary software - as how the users are controlled by the software by its developer in a totalitarian manner has many parallels to "nazism" (certain unnamed proprietary software companies have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of people with their shoddy software, although that is clearly not on the level of genocide of millions of people).
>it does it's job absolutely great
The job of software is to serve the users and proprietary software doesn't serve its users at all - it rather serves the developer.
>More graphics formats to read and convert too than anyone else
False.
ImageMagick can view and write more than 200 formats (see `grep '<mime type="' /etc/ImageMagick-7/mime.xml | wc -l` - currently 1137, but accounting for duplicates, it's >200).
Looking at this page; https://www.irfanview.com/main_formats.htm <155 formats are supported, most of which it cannot save to and it seems like half of them require installing additional plugins?
Any free software graphics viewer that uses ImageMagick supports more formats and as ImageMagick is installed, you can convert whatever to whatever.
>In a rather small program
It's 4.25 MB and then 30.50 MB of plugins (= 34.75 MB) compressed is really not a small program.
It seems imagemagick is is somewhere around 20MiB uncompressed?
>which is also faster and easier to use than anything else
[citation needed]
To me; C-x C-f <image> in the Church of Emacs is faster and easier to use than anything else.
>And it is free to use...
It costs part of your freedom, which is far more valuable than money.
There is an attempt to restrict mere usage as part of anything that could be deemed commercial, therefore it's clearly not free to use.
To be fair, Windows was shockingly bad with image file formats, and frankly, it still is - another reason why the Mac is so prevalent in design and video. To the point in the article, there isn't really need for Irfanview on macOS as the OS handles it. I've been working with EXR file most recently, and for both Window 11 and Linux I need extra software to view these files.
"IrfanView seeks to create unique, new and interesting features, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole "creativity" is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView has been stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, for 10+ years)."
(from the application website...)
Largely agree Liam but one caveat: Ninite does what it says on the tin but says it will:
"-not bother you with any choices or options
-install apps in their default location"
Both of which make it unusable for me. The first can be addressed after installation but not the second.
I'd like to raise a hand in support of Jot+ Notes. Not FOSS, Windows-only but free, and a simple, brilliantly functional tool.
> Both of which make it unusable for me.
I used to do custom installations, with a more deeply-organized directory tree; I progressed to building a custom XP installation CD with no themes, no optional apps, custom install locations so you needed an OS partition and an apps partition and a data partition and a swap partition...
And I realised that while it worked and I liked the result, it broke some apps, it broke some updates, and it simply _was not worth all the work_ and my efforts were better employed learning a new OS that not merely permitted such things but encouraged them. And around that time is when Linux was reaching the point that the desktop experience was comparable, the apps were good, and it did all I needed.
So, I went back to very simple default Windows installs and switched, mainly to Linux on laptops and Mac OS X on desktops and later a Hackintosh.
My advice to you is: seriously investigate this and do the same.
And there is another caveat: You don't know in advance how big those partitions should be to last long. OS to small? Get you special tools ready. Program partition to small? Get your special tools ready. Data partition to small? Get your special tools ready. Swap miscalculated? Get your special tools ready. In the end: There is no advantage to split all that stuff up unless you put it on another physical disk. And even then your mount it where you need it (in Linux and Windows).
My only recommendation: Separate your games disk. For everything else: Well 128 GB is enough most of the time, bit bigger is not a mistake. 1 TB seems currently to be the reasonable max. And redirecing sub-data in your profile, and a few other places, is easy in both linux and windows. With the latter "Documents" and "My Games" are both redirected to another volume with deduplication activated. "Documents" because > 100 game-data directories reside the root of "Documents", including a few more with three variants of E*A*, UBI* and a few others. My actual documents are in another castle of %userprofile%.
Games? Not interested. But from the Unix/Linux world:
1. /home, /opt, /usr/local and /srv (if you use i) have their own partitions. You can blow away the rest with a new installation and keep what's special safe.
1.1 About /srv. Debian and followers have a habit of putting stuff that really should be there into /var including Mariadb databases and Apache webstes. I only tried a reinstall without formatting /var once and it didn't go well. So put those sort of files in /srv and set up symlinks to hide that fact from the OS
2. Use logical volumes, then you don't have to worry about sizes until you really need a bigger/second drive. Set up with unused space and check occasionally. If a volume gets to about 2/3 to 3/4 full add more space to bring it down to about 1/3 to 1/2 full.
As a hypervisor, we like Oracle's VirtualBox. As we have explained before, the only licensed part is the Extension Pack, and the hypervisor works fine without it. Avoid that, and you're safe.
Agree on VirtualBox, however, as with everything else from Oracle, keep a close eye on any future license changes/updates/"clarifications"/..., as those might very subtly change what can be considered "safe" use of their stuff and what might put you in the crosshairs of one of their licensing enforcement teams.
> HyperV... Sadly, is for windows only.
I'm not sad about that at all! Happy with my QEMU/KVM thanks :)
Microsoft-casual-bashing aside, I do deploy server apps to HyperV running Linux VMs - where the client is an MS user (not exactly rare!). But the physical server, infrastructure, HyperV etc is handled by their choice of tech support - my OS support starts at VPN in to the Linux server and ends at iptables! The VPN in is managed by the client, ofc.
If you like a more UNIX-y/GNU/Linux pool and want a lot of the FOSS tools like OpenSSH or PERL, I'd recommend cygwin. The installer is a bit fiddly but works ok in Windows and is pretty actively maintained. Modern MacOS is already pretty POSIX/UNIX-y, so you should be able to get those tools via homebrew pretty easy. Or, you know, ./configure make make install :) OGs know what I'm sayin.
Cygwin has saved my bacon on multiple occasions when I was forced to use Windows (I couldn't PowerShell myself out of a corner of a box with 4 sides cut out but can BASH myself out of a bunker reinforced with titanium) Once had an "Architect" who had a race condition she couldn't locate. Took me a bit, but I ran it down. She asked what test tools I was using. "BASH script and OpenSSH." "No, on the client," "BASH script and OpenSSH." "No on your Windows machine!" "BASH script and OpenSSH client." I did not stay there for long and withdrew all my funds from the institution. . .
Cheers and Merry Christmas from across the pond -- D
Btw, Cwgyin is GNU ported to windows without Linux.
MSYS2 is also available and is GNU without Linux and is also functionally somewhat nicer, as you can install packages via the package manager in bash, rather than having to run the slow Cwgwin installer.
>./configure make make install :) OGs know what I'm sayin.
Indeed - I love GNU autotools.
Versions older than Sonoma are not receiving security patches. Use OCLP (Open Core Legacy Patcher) if needed to update to Sonoma or Sequoia. Do nt use OCLP to update to Tahoe (yet).
OCLP disables some of Apple's security protections in order t re-inject some older libraries and Kexts (Kernel Extensions, i.e drivers), and said older libraries and Kexts do not receive Security updates, but over-all, the balance of receiving security patches on everyhting else on the OS leaves you MORE secure than running unsupported versions of the OS.
On the other hand stepping off Apple's upgrade treadmill is a relief in itself. MacOS is turning into a slower bloated mess which dropped support for 32-bit architectures for no good reason, the GUI is objectively getting worse, and like Windows there's more telemetry.
I key program I use a lot on my Mac is Music, along with Photos - everything else I already know of FOSS alternatives.
For Photos, I've been recommended to DigiKam - so "only" a matter of finding time to do the work to migrate my Photos library across.
Can anyone recommend an alternative to Music (I don't use any of the online features, only managing tracks and playlists) ? I also need to sync selected playlists (and associated tracks) to Android - at present I use iSyncr (which also syncs photos from the camera roll on Android to my Mac).
So I need an alternative to Music and iSyncr. And ideally, also a means of syncing selected albums from DigiKam to Android (and camera roll from Android to [whatever]).
With these in place, I'll be able to plan a move to Linux on the desktop - I've already decided my current Macbook Pro will be the last as I'm not going to consider non-upgradable hardware.
For music, especially since I have a lot of .flac files, I've been using Strawberry (one of the Amarok 1.4x forks). I fell in love with Amarok during the KDE 3.x era, and hated the overhaul. Thankfully, people who can actually write and maintain software did as well, and forked the old version to keep it updated with more modern OSes.
> I've already decided my current Macbook Pro will be the last as I'm not going to consider non-upgradable hardware.
Same. My M1 Air will be the last Apple device I buy. Though if/when Asahi Linux has Thunderbolt over USB-C, I may dual-boot that rather than spend on another laptop. As long as I can run the new Pop OS Cosmic desktop.
For music, Strawberry is probably a good choice. I also quite like DeadBeef. They're both album/playlist based and very easy to use/customise.
I use tidal for discovering new music - pick a track and it will play other stuff thats similar and gradually over a longer listening session start to diverge into a wider net based on your tastes. Quality is good also with above CD quality (for a cheapish set of good quality and small space requirement speakers - Majority D40X powered speakers and a wiim mini music streamer connected via Aux or optical - tidal can then be controlled with a phone (sadly the pc version for some reason still doesn't sync with the mobile version for some reason.....)
Considering the shenanigans of owners of virtualbox or vmware I would avoid either. refer to icon
Instead when I next need virtualization: qemu - A generic and open source machine emulator AND virtulizer.
I have used all three at various times on various hosts with various clients. qemu is the most flexible but least user friendly for the GUI dwellers. I know virtualbox can do some things beyond the GUI with some CLI-fu with first-hand experience. I never needed to use vmware beyond the GUI so cannot attest to it's capabilities on the CLI.
virt-manager isn't entirely as user-friendly as VirtualBox, and I think on Windows you'll still have to run WSL or such to run it, but it gets the job done for managing QEMU VMs in a simple GUI manner. At one point I was steering Windows users at my work to Virt-Viewer for a limited subset of such functionality, but the link in my old notes to Windows downloads seems to be dead?
Even on the Mac, I definitely use a *lot* of FOSS software, much of it the same software I'm using on Linux, especially terminal stuff. I'm guessing that the article was written with those who aren't familiar with package managers in mind, since Mac has both Homebrew and, for *BSD fans, Macports for a lot of the FOSS essentials. All my drawing and digital painting are done in Krita, and got Weylus to use the iPad as a drawing tablet.[1]. Video and audio software, LO for work documents, Texmaker for stuff where I care about it looking nice. I'm guessing that I'm probably using a 60/40 mix of FOSS to proprietary, just in terms of GUI apps. And when forced to use something that runs under X, even an old version of Enlightenment as a desktop there. Of course, I'm running the same CLI stuff on Mac as on Linux, and that's pretty much all FOSS. There really is quite a bit out there, and not all of it is just an "alternative" to something proprietary, which often implies that you're settling for something sub-ideal.
Someone said something about "hair shirts" and using some of it. While sometimes it is just because people don't like changing workflows, or small differences can be really annoying, it's quite often the case with usability being seemingly an afterthought, or the devs might be brilliant at writing code but aren't UI designers. That's the sort of thing that costs money that most projects can't afford to spend. Or, perhaps, they're primarily making it for themselves, and making it available for others, but aren't concerned with mass-adoption.
Looking back, maybe 20 years ago, nearly everything I used from the GUI was proprietary, whether paid, gratis, or shareware. Now over half the things I use on a regular basis (again, excluding CLI tools) are FOSS. Progress might have been somewhat slow, and there are still sticking points, but there really is so much more available now, and a lot of it has gotten far better, with more users submitting feedback. I doubt that I'll ever be 100% FOSS, even if one excludes games. Then again, I'm not one of the ideologues, and will continue to whatever best suits my needs, as is true of most users. For those who really do want to leave all the proprietary software behind, it is becoming easier and involving fewer compromises.
[1] Sidecar not working properly when you already have multiple displays is one of the more aggravating things Apple does. Then again, it took 'em forever to give you real control over Time Machine if you weren't using the CLI.
"Or, perhaps, they're primarily making it for themselves, and making it available for others, but aren't concerned with mass-adoption."
I think this is a lot of it. Partially I think that because it describes much of the things I've developed and released under open licenses, but I don't think this is all me putting my own flaws on everybody. A lot of UI work is a boring slog and isn't necessary if you assume that people will figure it out the same way I did when I wrote it. Building something which can be given to the general public without training is hard work that doesn't benefit the programmers much, so it often does not happen. That leaves you with the luck of the draw on whether the programmer's initial idea works well or not.
UI design is certainly a different discipline; it may be a slog for you but it's bread and butter for those who like doing it. Of course, programmers can't be expected to be good and enjoy doing both. And really, it only becomes a big issue if it's something one is going to be using every day[1] or there's a[2] drive for mass adoption. It'd definitely be more of an issue for a big project like LO where people actually want a ton of converts than for some niche software. Most of the software I use for art/design is paid proprietary stuff, but Krita is an exception, largely because they *did* pay close attention to the user side of things.. On Mac and Linux alike I use it for all the drawing and digital painting and the attention paid to the UI really helps me get work done and avoid getting in the way. Between keyboard shortcuts and the right-click thingy[2] the UI is there when I need it but otherwise out of the way so I can focus on my task.
[1] Where bad UI decisions can make the workflow aggravating rather than making it easier. Of course, what's "intuitive" is often YMMV territory to begin with.
[
2] Don't know what else to call it. It's not a traditional context menu[3] and is a combination of convenient colour picker and quick way of selecting preset brushes. Much faster to work with for things that aren't hotkeyed than putting down the stylus and mousing all the way over to my secondary display where the toolboxes are docked.
[3] Traditional and boring UI stuff beats unique/creative 99% of the time. Something different is hard to do right, and the MS Office ribbon is a prime example of doing it wrong.
"UI design is certainly a different discipline; it may be a slog for you but it's bread and butter for those who like doing it. "
And I just wish they'd stop doing it an leave well alone.
Back in about the 1980s we had the CUI guidelines which a lot of early GUI S/W more ore less followed (I know Liam has complaints about the less aspects) but it resulted in a fairly standard design language. Then the UI and UX designers got busy. On the one hand it might have simply been gratuitous busy-work for idle hands.
On the other, I strongly suspect Microsoft threw its weight about to impose the ribbon interface on its victims so that after a few years new users wouldn't understand the FOSS competition's UI which continued to follow the same lines as older versions of Microsoft applications. I also suspect them of having made top-posting the norm for similar reasons whereas we oldies always saw it as an indication of newcomers who lacked the wit or manners to see and adopt netiquette norms.
In consequence what was regarded as good practice and still followed by some FOSS developers (Mozilla fell from grace a long time ago) is seen as "difficult" or "hair-shirt".
There are also instances where FOSS just does its thing for very good functional reasons. The vi editor is one, of course and regular users would not swap it for an editor hampered by a "conventional" but less functional UI. Another instance is the Gimp save functionality discussed about. Pinta is more conventional and all too easy to make the sort of mistakes avoided by having a choice between "Overwirte", "Export" and "Export as" options as well as "Save" depending on the use case.
"And I just wish they'd stop doing it an leave well alone."
Often agreed, but there is still a discipline to doing it right. I've taken tons of art and design (albeit not UI-related) courses over the years. Usually the first thing that a professor rips into you for during critiques is that it is "too busy"; there's too much going on and it becomes distracting. The KISS principle applies to UI design as well, and conventional is that way for a reason. It largely works. A good designer won't break convention without actual need, and will try to avoid clutter, and make the most used options the most quickly accessible, and have to find some place for those things that are rarely used but still needed sometimes. There's a big difference between changing something just to changing something, or there's a method to the madness.
And FWIW, I'm still bitter about the top-posting thing. It completely breaks any conversational flow and I hate having to scroll to the bottom of something to start and then scroll up.
You’re thinking of CUA, which IBM introduced in the 1980s because PC software was a keyboard anarchist commune. Published in 1987 as part of Systems Application Architecture (SAA) and primarily aimed at OS/2, CUA was a full behavioural contract for how applications were supposed to work. Microsoft promptly “borrowed” it - Microsoft’s corporate diet consists mostly of copying other people’s homework - and large parts of it still fossilise Windows today.
CUA defined menus, dialogs, focus rules, navigation, help invocation and editing behaviour. F1 summons Help. Alt wakes up the menu bar. Cut, Copy and Paste were Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert - because this was a keyboard standard, not a cutesy desktop metaphor.
Linux desktops then inherited Ctrl-X/C/V from Windows, which inherited them from Apple - but, much like Windows, neither KDE or Gnome inherited Apple’s interaction model that made those shortcuts make sense. Apple’s bindings were part of an object-centric GUI idea. KDE and Gnome developers just copied the keystrokes and called it a day without doing any of the hard stuff, like thinking.
The result is a familiar but conceptually mismatched keyboard layer glued onto a keyboard-first operating system. CUA’s bindings were designed for application-agnostic, keyboard-driven environments - y'know, the world Linux desktops actually live in - but KDE and then Gnome devs chose nostalgia and familiarity over something more coherent.
CUA had nothing to do with how GUIs looked and everything to do with how they behaved. Almost none of it works on macOS because Apple had already written its own Human Interface Guidelines three years earlier, and macOS still largely follows those rules.
> I'm guessing that the article was written with those who aren't familiar with package managers in mind
No, not at all.
I have written about Homebrew at least twice:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/27/homebrew_version_4_is_here/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/fosss_to_tame_macos/
But myself, I actually removed it from my main Mac recently.
There are two main reasons.
1. I didn't like using the things I installed with it.
To explain:
Apps installed via Homebrew are often one of 2 types.
Either they are CLI/shell apps, which I rarely use on macOS -- and that is one of the things I _like_ about macOS.
Or, they are ports which integrate poorly with the macOS GUI. E.g. Pidgin, which was a WINE port and looked like a Windows app on my Mac -- in other words, extremely out of place. This also applies to FreePascal's Lazarus, which looks and works like a Windows app. I am a long-term Mac user and I remember the stink when Mac Office 1998 came out, which was very visibly a port of the Windows version. It didn't look like a Mac app and it didn't feel like it and Mac users werre outraged.
Now, so many apps contravene Apple's guidelines, including Apple's own, people don't notice. I still do.
2. Homebrew closely tracks upstream macOS.
The latest supported OS for my main Mac is now 4 or 5 versions behind. Note, this little series was in large part about keeping old OSes working and usable. Homebrew constantly complained about an unsupported macOS and got to the point where I could no longer do `brew upgrade` without it wortking for half an hour, fans running hard, then crapping out with a screenful of errors.
Life is too short for this. I listed the packages I'd installed with it, recognised just 2 I used, neither of which was important, and nuked it. As per its own suggestion I installed MacPorts, which Homebrew says is better for older versions of macOS, and used that to install SimH to take the UNIX v4 screenshot. I probably won't use that again and might well remove this.
-----
Conclusion: I don't think it's worth it for the typical Mac user who is not a terminal user. You don't need it, it adds a significant amount of work, the tools it brings are not very nice to use except for hardened CLI addicts, and its support is a moving target.
If you drive the Mac like a Unix box from the shell, sure, fine. If you bought a Mac as a superior GUI computer, which I did, then it brings little to the table.
If I want a better shell experience, I use Linux. It has a more pleasant CLI than macOS or any of the BSDs, because unlike them, it is PC-native and supports PC style keyboard shortcuts, not hateful 1970s junk like Vi which in a wiser saner world would be as forgotten as Ed.
Native Mac apps generally update themselves when needed and the user doesn't need to worry. This is as it should be, and that being the case, a package manager becomes irrelevant.
Bolted-on package managers, and this includes the Windows ones, do not deliver the benefits that they do on OSes where they are native. And that includes on experimental immutable Linuxes such as the Fedora Atomic family, EndlessOS, and so on.
Yeah, I wasn't making an accusation and considered that a deliberate choice rather than an omission of anything essential. It's perfectly fine that you considered them out of scope for what you were writing, especially to a general audience. The only reason I even thought of them with regard to FOSS stuff and extending the life of an ancient Mac was because MacPorts was my salvation when the G5 was getting long in the tooth and no longer supported. The only "new" software I was able to use came through there. And personally, I actively prefer having as much as possible run through the package manager rather than self-updating when I open something. That way I can just set the update/upgrade commands as cronjobs and forget about them entirely, not wait for an app to open and wait while it upgrades and restarts itself.
Yes, bolt-on package managers are ugly and I'd rather have a native one. But needs must. A big reason I'm willing to tolerate dealing with Apple is because I'm running a lot of the same stuff on both CLI and GUI on both it and Linux, and the more I can make things pretty much the same on both machines, the better for my sanity.
> “If I want a better shell experience, I use Linux. It has a more pleasant CLI than macOS or any of the BSDs, because unlike them, it is PC-native and supports PC-style keyboard shortcuts, not hateful 1970s junk like vi which in a wiser, saner world would be as forgotten as ed.”
Ha - see my previous comment. Is Ctrl-X/C/V really that sensible in a terminal, where the Ctrl key already has a defined meaning? Long before the IBM PC existed, Ctrl was used to generate control characters (BEL, CAN, ETX, SYN, EOT, etc.)* for teletypes and video terminals. That is what the key is *for*.
IBM didn’t invent Ctrl - they just inherited it, then skipped providing a proper Meta key on early PC keyboards, which forced Microsoft to squat on top of terminal control sequences when "inheriting" Apple's GUI shortcuts in Windows 3.0.
I get, and agree with, mostly, your point about third party package managers. But, for convenience when using the Mac, if what you actually prefer is the GNU userland over the BSD one, a lot of people use Homebrew to graft those tools onto macOS. I get the frustration with Homebrew’s “latest-only” worldview, so MacPorts is worth a look: it supports back at least four macOS releases. It’s less “complete” than Homebrew, but the core tooling is there, and it feels more like a traditional UNIX environment.
I'm sure there's a whole article in there somewhere, if you haven't already written one!
*Eagle eyed UNIX beards that suffered with VT-100s and their ilk will spot the relative ones in that list.
> Ha - see my previous comment. Is Ctrl-X/C/V really that sensible in a terminal, where the Ctrl key already has a defined meaning? Long before the IBM PC existed, Ctrl was used to generate control characters (BEL, CAN, ETX, SYN, EOT, etc.)* for teletypes and video terminals. That is what the key is *for*.
I suppose that is one thing I rather like about using the terminal on Mac, is I've got CMD-Whatever for the Mac keyboard shortcuts, and since Mac doesn't really use control much, its binds are for whatever I'm running in the terminal.
Didn't think fully re: Macports before posting my previous reply. It's not a half-bad clone of the BSD system, but since it's building everything from source, it definitely *isn't* as convenient as Homebrew. I'm currently stuck on a rather troublesome build for something (Kile) where there's no convenient Mac binary. And while Macports may be more of a fuss, and lack in some cases what Homebrew does, it did help me learn UNIX, dependency problems, and how to deal with build failures. I guess a lot of it is whether one views a Mac as a computer for the people who want "It just works" and not deal with the other stuff, or a UNIX workstation that runs stuff that Linux won't, or at least not always reliably.
But mostly it's useful for getting newer software on legacy systems, and it does have ports that Homebrew *doesn't*, including ancient but full X desktops. At one point, on the G5 (definitely legacy by then), I even had a full KDE3 install including media players, and it's what got me into a lot of the FOSS software I either still use, or use a fork of.
You don't need Linux to run free software - but of course you still do need GNU to - even on windows and macos.
If you're running a proprietary OS, you do not have freedom and will therefore get burned over and over, even if you are running mostly free software programs.
Do not be mislead - the only way to avoid getting burned is to install GNU/Linux-libre and exclusively run free software - although if you instead install proprietary GNU/Linux and mostly avoid proprietary software, you'll only get partially roasted.
If you are going to learn a new program, it is important to not waste your time learning how to be used by proprietary software (as what you learned will soon be obsoleted) and instead learn how to use a good free program (as what you learn will forevermore be usable).
>Compare OpenAlternative.co, which is snazzy and effects-heavy,
That site is proprietary software (via JavaScript) and seems to recommend mostly proprietary software.
>low-tech Best FOSS Alternatives, which is very simple and austere. The latter has nothing to sell; it's just a plain, simple categorized list of FOSS tools.
It recommends mostly(?) proprietary software, alongside some free software - which is a very "FOSS" move.
>So, where do you get safe free software?
>On a fresh new copy of Windows, the easiest way to get up and running is Ninite.
The website, lists mostly list proprietary software, which is not safe - with only a few mostly free software programs.
>For instance, we use Jeena's TextEd
I see a copy of MIT expat dumped in the root, but the actual source files say; "Copyright (c) 2014 Jeena. All rights reserved." - so I would assume that it's actually proprietary software ("All rights reserved" is an explicit confirmation that yes, this is proprietary).
>Our daily go-to tool for this is Ferdium
Screams proprietary software to me.
>for us nothing beats IrfanView,
Proprietary software.
>Worthy alternatives include Paint.net
Proprietary software, that GIMP is a free replacement of.
>and get 7-Zip
That is proprietary, as it contains the proprietary unrar, unless you use a modified version without it.
>It's an Electron app
All electron software is proprietary software, as electron contains proprietary software.
>the only licensed part is the Extension Pack,
All of it is licensed, although there is a proprietary "extension pack" and I believe some other proprietary extensions too.
>investing the time in learning alternative tools, ones from suppliers whose business models don't rely on subscriptions or lock-in, will repay you manifold.
If you spend time learning proprietary software, you will get burned every single time, even if the business model doesn't rely on subscriptions or lock-in.
I disagree on almost all points.
I wrote, and meant, free software. Freeware, with a small F. Not the Stallman definition, which I typically capitalise.
> Screams proprietary software to me.
Your powers are weak, old man. It's FOSS.
https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-app
Paint.net and IrfanView are freeware.
7Zip source:
https://github.com/ip7z/7zip
> All electron software is proprietary software, as electron contains proprietary software.
This claim is false. Prove it. Put up or shut up.
> All of it is licensed, [...] and I believe some other proprietary extensions too.
False and untrue.
https://github.com/VirtualBox/virtualbox
To stop you from going a bit too far, you should acquaint yourself with the dictionary for this poster, including:
proprietary adj. Any license poster Eric 9001, formerly known as GNU Enjoyer*, doesn't happen to like, namely pretty much all of them.
Synonyms: open, open source, FOSS, GPL [without specifying a version], pretty much any other adjective other than "free", which will be insistently interpreted as a license that poster does like and, if it's not, they'll fight you without any good reasons.
* Of course I can't prove they're one and the same without access to the user database, but I am quite confident and believe I could convince if it was necessary.
> * Of course I can't prove they're one and the same without access to the user database,
Yeah. As it happens I don't have access to that either, as I am not an editor, but I have also suspected that "GNU Enjoyer" and "Eric 9001" sound like the same person.
What GNU does is vitally important. On most things, Stallman was right, and he still is.
However, the way that rms and GNU present their message has always been very annoying and the tone seems almost designed to annoy people. It's much the same as campaining vegans. I'm a lifelong vegetarian, well over 40 years now, and even _I_ find vegans bloody annoying. They tend to regard me as some sort of failed vegan who just needs to take one more step. I don't want to be a vegan and never did. I like vegan food, but you know what, I also enjoy a cheese omelette now and again and I am fine with that. Leave me alone.
Same token: I admire and respect GNU and the FSF without wanting to be a GNU user or GNU advocate, thanks.
The shared unadulterated "tone" (not watered down with sweet nothings) is the only way to get the points across without error, but for some illogical reason, that's not acceptable?
I suspect the "tone" is regarded as annoying solely because the messages are correct and refutes corporate-decreed "facts" and people are constantly manipulated to reject things like that.
Of course, if you can't legitimately dispute points and facts (due to correctness), the only thing left is to claim the points are false (usually with nothing to back up that claim - sometimes there's a link, but on inspection, the link proves the point), or if that's too hard, the old reliable technique is attacking the speakers "tone", or their "personality" and/or brigading down-votes and even bans - anything to prevent people from learning something.
It's odd to claim to admire freedom without ever actually encouraging or experiencing it.
You're mostly a vegan, as you only occasionally eat a cheese omelette, but you're certainly nowhere near a real GNU user.
I'm not vegetarian or vegan and it appears that eating many animals (for example grass fed cows or invasive species), leads to less suffering than current nutritionally poor crop farming techniques (everything is sprayed with pesticide, killing or maiming pretty much everything and any animals that go for the crops are killed).
One of the most humane meals appears to potentially be proprietary software developer (as that would directly prevent an immense amount of suffering), but that's illegal.
>alienate people that are likely to **fund and supported** efforts
Many people are simply not interested and sweet nothings aren't going to make them want to fund and support efforts.
Just like the GPLv1 to GPLv2, the GPLv3 fixed many bugs identified in the GPLv2 and it was developed publicly - but that time, everyone was allowed to submit feedback on the latest draft (very much unlike most licenses).
The only "asshattery" is the constant complaining that a better license that fixes all the bugs, that safeguards the users freedom better was written.
Businesses gave feedback that they wanted the hardware they used to be digitally handcuffed by some other company, thus the GPLv3 was made to allow digitally handcuffing commercial-only hardware (unlike the GPLv2, which disallows doing so).
Tivotisation wasn't FUD - Tivo did release hardware, where if you utilized the provided source code and installation information, the aggregated proprietary software would stop running (and the GPLv2 does nothing about such action).
Clearly such was an unacceptable obstacle to the replacement of Tivo's software - for example GNU couldn't have been developed if Unix was Tivotised (as how would you develop a free replacement, if Unix stopped running as soon as you installed the first free program onto it?).
> All electron software is proprietary software, as electron contains proprietary software.
>This claim is false. Prove it. Put up or shut up.
The claim is true - all copies of electron include widevine and god knows what else; http://electronproject.org/testing-widevine-cdm-2.html
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Talk:Electron
But let me guess, Electron being proprietary is a good thing actually?
>Your powers are weak, old man. It's FOSS.
>https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-app
My powers are strong and only grow stronger with age - I saw discord, github and reddit on the website https://ferdium.org/ (I felt it even without needing to scroll down to seen that it's pretty much designed to exclusively run proprietary software) and correctly concluded it was proprietary software .
It's electron software.
>7Zip source:
>https://github.com/ip7z/7zip
Contains proprietary software;
https://github.com/ip7z/7zip/blob/main/DOC/unRarLicense.txt?raw=true
https://github.com/ip7z/7zip/blob/main/CPP/7zip/Compress/Rar3Vm.cpp?raw=true
>All of it is licensed, [...] and I believe some other proprietary extensions too.
>False and untrue.
>https://github.com/VirtualBox/virtualbox
It's true and correct.
If it isn't licensed, it's proprietary - for it to be free - it much be licensed under a free license - see the license listed under the "License" title in the readme as you linked.
I downloaded "VirtualBox 7.2.4 Software Developer Kit (SDK)" from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and I can't find the source code of ~/sdk/rdpweb/sample/RDPClientUI.swf which seems like at least one other proprietary extension.
>Paint.net and IrfanView are freeware.
"freeware" is branding (to make people stop thinking) for many vastly different proprietary licenses that may permit limited uses without monetary payment (with monetary payment typically demanded for other uses), but regardless some form of payment is always required.
«You don't need Linux to run free software - but of course you still do need GNU to - even on windows and macos.»
You need GNU to run free software my ass.
Plenty/most of the Libre software I run has BSD licences (I run MacOS, so, most of the userland is BSD licensed), other sizeable chunck have MIT and Apache, A very impotant one (Firefox) has MPL. All of them Free Software licenses. As free (if not "Freer") than GNU or the GPL, as those licenses give more freedom TO ME.
¿Where are the GNU/GPL SSH libraries to connect to my NAS? ¿Where is my GNU/GPL web browser that is NOT Chromium(controlled by google) or WebKit(outdated standards support) based and has more than 1% market share (so web developers even know it exists)? ¿Where is my GNU/GPL display server to even have a GUI? *crikets* Yeah, tought so.
I am grateful to the GNU and to the GPL, but GNU and the GPL are not the be all end all of software feedom. And people like you do not "help the cause". If anything, you hinder it.
>You need GNU to run free software my ass.
If you actually look at the needed dependencies and libraries, you always find GNU, even on BSDs.
>Plenty/most of the Libre software I run has BSD licences
It is little known that Berkley Software Distributions pretty much defaulted to using proprietary licenses until GNU and other related developers pestered them incessantly to use a free license and the response was the 4-clause BSD, which required further pestering for years until the barely acceptable 3-clause BSD license was developed and adopted.
Realistically, without GNU, BSDs would still be using proprietary licenses.
The main issue with the BSD licenses is that those don't contain a patent license - which allows setting a patent trap, where a patent is used to render the software proprietary.
>I run MacOS, so, most of the userland is BSD licensed
It is not correct that the userland is BSD license - although a bunch of the software was copy pasted into their proprietary software from the BSDs, the relevant license is apple's proprietary license (a license notice with the software is useless - what you need to have freedom is the complete corresponding source code and installation information).
>other sizeable chunck have MIT and Apache
I'm confident that MIT expat and Apache 2.0 were influenced by GNU.
Without GNU having given an example, why wouldn't have MIT continued to use proprietary licenses and why would Apache Foundation decide to support the development of free software?
>As free (if not "Freer") than GNU or the GPL, as those licenses give more freedom TO ME.
BSD licenses have permitted freedom to be taken from you with macos - without such software ripe for copy-pasting into proprietary software, apple would have had to at least work a lot harder to put more constricting chains on you - but it seems you consider that freedom is to throw chains on and somehow enjoy how constricting those are.
>Where are the GNU/GPL SSH libraries to connect to my NAS
In the case that a not that common non-GNU, actual free software program already exists, or is going to be written, GNU doesn't bother to pointlessly rewrite it - instead they enhance it (via GNU dependencies or hosting on nongnu).
I compile openssh with GCC & GNU autotools and use it with GNU readline.
>Where is my GNU/GPL web browser that is NOT Chromium(controlled by google) or WebKit(outdated standards support) based
That's Emacs Web Wowser in GNU Emacs.
Chromium in fact depends on GNU gzip and GNU bison and much more.
Webkit-gtk depends on GNU bison, GNU gettext and much more (it also renders HTML fine - which as far as I can tell, is the only thing that has been standardized - JavaScript stuff seems to consist of replicating what google does without following actual standards).
>has more than 1% market share (so web developers even know it exists)?
Why ask that specific question when you clearly know that the only browsers with high "market share" (seemingly measured by spyware in an extremely limited number of websites) are either chromium-based or firefox-based or webkit-based?
>Where is my GNU/GPL display server to even have a GUI
You don't need a display server to have a GUI.
The GNU GRUB OS has a GUI for example.
Yes, Xorg is the handful of actual free software programs that existed before GNU that survive still today and the current version does in fact have indirect GNU dependencies that give many enhancements, many optional.
>I am grateful to the GNU and to the GPL, but GNU and the GPL are not the be all end all of software feedom.
Many companies are hellbent on putting an end to freedom and without GNU, nobody would have any chance.
«Realistically, without GNU, BSDs would still be using proprietary licenses.» [...]
«I'm confident that MIT expat [...] were influenced by GNU.»
The OG MIT License came in to being most likely in 1987, the OG BSD License definetly came to being in 1988, while the OG GPL came into being in 1989... AND RMS was working at MIT when he wrothe the OG GPL. So, if anything, MIT and BSD influenced the GPL not the other way around.
Without MIT and BSD we would probably not have the GPL...
For a fan, you know bery little of the history of your team, and show very little interes in fact checking before posting.
Good luck in your future endeavours...
¿Sources?:
https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
>The OG MIT License came in to being most likely in 1987, the OG BSD License definetly came to being in 1988, while the OG GPL came into being in 1989... AND RMS was working at MIT when he wrothe the OG GPL. So, if anything, MIT and BSD influenced the GPL not the other way around.
>Without MIT and BSD we would probably not have the GPL...
It could be said that the BSD license was influenced by the license SPICE was released with and SPICE was developed in the 1970's. SPICE being Simulation Package for Integrated Circuit Electronics.
According to wikipedia, the original license for SPICE; "included distribution restrictions for countries not considered friendly to the US" (unsourced of course) - which looks like a proprietary license to me.
Sure that would have influenced the proprietary licenses the BSDs originally used - but I don't see how a proprietary license would have a good influence for later licenses that would later barely manage to be a proper free license.
>For a fan, you know bery little of the history of your team, and show very little interes in fact checking before posting.
As I have bothered to check the actual history, I know the history and I have fact checked.
GNU was announced in 1983 and really got started in 1984 and was *not* influenced by the precursors to MIT expat and the BSD licenses, which came years later.
Years before, while working at MIT, he did learn the consequences of both weak and proprietary licensing practices; "MIT had made a very foolish arrangement with these two companies. It was a three-way contract where both companies licensed the use of Lisp machine system [4] sources. These companies were required to let MIT use their changes. But it didn't say in the contract that MIT was entitled to put them into the MIT Lisp machine systems that both companies had licensed" - such licensing allowed Symbolics to attack everyone, but he got his revenge; https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Eventually he decided to stop working on such Lisp OS (as it was proprietary after all) and a while later he got lost as to what he should do - then one day he wondered what the world needed and realized that the world needed a free OS and also realized he was an operating system developer.
Therefore he decided to start developing GNU to deal with proprietary software and it consequences.
>AND RMS was working at MIT when he wrothe the OG GPL.
False - he stopped working at MIT in 1984, as he needed to quit his job, so MIT couldn't claim to hold the copyright on GNU - although a professor was kind enough to allow him to keep using the office assigned to him.
It took till 1985 before rms decided to write his thoughts down and published his GNU manifesto; https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html (slightly amended version, but the quoted text was the same), which states; "GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free." - clearly totally different to the weak license precursors.
Each GNU package originally had its own custom license (https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/), for example there was the GNU Emacs General Public License, originally published in 1995 (Clarified 11 Feb. 1988); https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/emacs_gpl.html (clearly completely different to such weak licenses and very similar to the GPLv1).
>The OG MIT License came in to being most likely in 1987, the OG BSD License definetly came to being in 1988, while the OG GPL came into being in 1989
There were many MIT licenses - most of them proprietary - it rather appears that the first possibly free license from MIT was published in 1987 and MIT expat wasn't written until years later.
rms most likely originally didn't even see BSD-4.3TAHOE (he wasn't at Berkley and didn't use Berkley software) - I reckon he only ever saw BSD 4-clause years after it was originally published in 1990.
The GPLv1 resulted from merging all the best parts from all the separate licenses used for GNU packages into a single license and making several more changes - not from seeing the first possibly free MIT licenses.
>Without MIT and BSD we would probably not have the GPL...
As I have pointed out, the MIT expat license and the free BSD licenses postdate GNU license practices and the only influence those could have possibly had would be to embolden rms to never make the mistake of using a weak license on nontrivial software.
eM Client is good and I installed it a lot for my Little Old Lady clients, but a long way from FOSS. It has a free version, sure (it works unregistered for a month and you have to register it to the email address - they send you a free perpetual licence) but to "unlock" features you have to pay for it.
What features you ask? More than one email address, for one thing. So forget having your ISP-specific email and your Gmail address in the same place. And the other thing that horrified me was that when I set it up for a non-profit - a very charity-funded children's shelter - it worked for a few months and then, apparently after spying on the the email traffic for that time, decided this was "commercial use" and just stopped working, with a ransom "error message".
I switched them back to T-bird. Has some odd quirks like hard-to-find config / setting options (there are at least three separate places to access these different but overlapping menus - and when you google "how to" you'll probably find instructions that reference menus that have changed or moved) and it insists on opening every new window in its own tab. I find unsophisticated and elderly users just don't seem to be able to retain that information and keep opening more and more of them. And Thunderbird re-opens all those tabs next time you open it, without asking. Tedious. It also is set by default to "threaded" conversation view and most users hate this.
I run DaVinci Resolve on my Linux Mint box.
There is a guy - because of course there is - who has a script to convert the downloaded Linux version to a . deb file and then install it. At the end of the process you have a fully functional free version of Resolve on your Linux box.
Do a search for "make resolve deb".
They are working on this (maybe it's out of beta now since it was written at the start of they year).
Also, Telegram's "secret chats" won't transfer (secret chats are allegedly like Signal's normal chats). Other types of chats are all held on Telegram's servers in spite of all the hand-waving they engage in to make it seem to the user that they are private. Telegram's servers are... sketchy.
Some time ago I decided to purge my two Macs (one Intel iMac still running Mojave and one Air M2 on Sequoia) from anything to do Microsoft.
So far, my experiences with the latest (for Sequoia) Libreoffice is quite good. It reads and writes both xlsx and docx, so far without problems.
Now I feel better.
/JHS
"Wipe and install a new OS". "Apps you've paid for but don't own"
What about the apps I've paid for and *do* own? I've put off updating the OS on my main machine because I will lose all the programs I've gathered over the years and have no idea where I got them from, and will have to track down and re-install all over again, trying to remember and recreate all the directory structures, start menus and context menus, and crucially, remember *what* programs I've got. Why can't I update the OS and just leave the damn programs in place and already there for using with the new OS? And the "wipe and...." bit also terrifies me at the prospect of all *my* stuff vanishing. Or some of it vanishing, but me not noticing it until too late. After all, *I* don't remember what's on my computer, that's the damn computer's job. I've had too much experience of update/rollout jobs where users' data wasn't respected and users demanding the now-impossible restoration of irreplacably destroyed data.
You can update the OS in place. That's been possible for quite a while and it has substantially improved. It can go wrong, as can anything else you try, but it works very frequently. The reason that's not being suggested is that the article and its predecessor were aimed at the less technical user of an old machine who might benefit from the cleaning that a complete reinstall does.
That's also what backups are for. You can often back up everything from an application so it reinstalls with little effort if you're willing to first go to the effort of setting up that backup regime. The major exception is anything with a license check system tied to a hardware identifier, which is much more annoying. In that case or if the preparation is undesired, then you can save installers and re-execute them.
I've always updated in place. I think that the primary virtue of doing a "clean install" is to not have any leftover crap that didn't fully uninstall or similar laying around. Even after I was sure that I had purged it all, I found some of Adobe's stuff still lingering on the Mac. And it's probably not the only thing. And that's not even getting to the things I did at a root terminal but don't remember because of copious amounts of alcohol. I'm sure that I may have got some useless daemons running because I had been fussing with some networking stuff that *wasn't* in a Mac package manager and doing a bit by bit build and install. Clean install is just a serious spring cleaning. Not necessary but a good excuse to get rid of junk that you forgot you had.
"One of the major things keeping me of Linux is the lack - as far as I can see - of any seriously good music typesetting options."
My kids use MuseScore in Windows, they use it for music notation and it talks to their MIDI keyboards, with the Roland USB-MIDI adapter.
Seems to be available for Linux as well. Is it good? IDK. But it's free so the bar is quite low for testing first.
With the significant caveat that I've never tried Sibelius or Dorico : I simply type up tunes in ABC notation using Any Text Editor®. I then run the result through abcm2ps (to produce PostScript or PDF sheet music) and/or abc2midi (for MIDI output).
ABC appears to have been originally oriented to use for traditional fiddle and folk music. I've used it quite happily outside those areas, but could believe there are better alternatives out there, especially for the more keyboard-averse.
First impressions last. My first encounter with vim was trying to do one specific thing - find and remove the Control-Ms in a text file. I found it had been set up to hide them. If it hid stuff from me I wasn't to be trusted.
Replacing vim by nvi is one of the first things I do when I install Linux.
Cygwin is a handy way of building an 'ix' environment on top of Windows. Its actually widely used by IDEs but, like scripting, its not talked about much. Microsoft prefers that you use their proprietary tool setts, Powershiell instead of Bash (for example) but the handful of proprietary extensions while attractive are only there to lock you in. (Remember J++?)
I value portability and maintainability over the latest visual tricks.
Microsoft prefers that you use their proprietary tool setts, Powershiell instead of Bash (for example)
I'm going to give MS some credit here? Is Powershell still 'proprietry'?
It wasn't open source at the beginning.
It has since been open sourced.
It's also open sourced with a license that would allow forking should they do that.
You have more freedom with the open sourced powershell than you do with bash.
As a hypervisor, we like Oracle's VirtualBox. As we have explained before, the only licensed part is the Extension Pack, and the hypervisor works fine without it. Avoid that, and you're safe. [...] the now-gratis VMware is a bit easier. It works a bit differently on Windows, Linux, and macOS, which is annoying, but it does the job and does it well. If you often need a Windows VM, we find VMware noticeably faster than VirtualBox with that guest.
I get this is an article about FOSS software, and in that light VirtualBox is the obvious choice here (being available as GPL'd source).
However that does mean dancing with Oracle, who are probably the worse at the 'bait and switch' license change, so make sure if you use it you keep a good eye on the changes when you download the next version, especially around the use of the extension pack.
VMWare is a much better product and the desktop version is now free, but not FOSS. Also Broadcom do keep looking at what Oracle are doing and writing it down.
While it's far from open source, if you're on Windows then Hyper-V is worth a mention too as it is included in the SKU you've paid for. It's not suitable for everyone, but if your just running the occasional VM it works fine. I replaced my personal use of Virtual Box with it. (And if you're using anything like WSL then your VM of choice is using Hyper-V under the hood on Windows anyway).
It's difficult to lose access to your entire library, bans are usually more fine grained than that. If you cheat online when playing you would receive a VAC or game ban. If you buy software online no matter what the store then you will only ever buy a licence to the software instead of own the software, but DRM-free games on Steam can be backed up and played like GOG.
You will never 'own' a game unless you write it yourself, or pay others to write it for you. You will only ever own a licence to use a game that someone else 'owns'.
If you buy a CD, you are technically only buying a licence to play that recording for your own personal use, you do not 'own' the music.
This distinction seems academic, but understanding it is fundamental in order to understand what it means to 'own' something.
When it comes to games, however... Steam isn't a subscription service, but if what you want is to be free of Steam's DRM, then your only real alternative is GOG. Even then the game itself may contain its own implementation of DRM, especially if it's a multiplayer title. And unless you download offline installers for every game you buy and store them permanently in a secure location, you're still reliant on CD Projekt Red providing the GOG service if you want to download your games ever again.
FWIW, Steam is quite possibly the best and most trouble-free games storefront I have ever used. I've been using it since it was a digital distribution platform for Half-Life 2, and buying games on it for more or less as long as it's been selling games. I can still download the very first game I ever bought via Steam, and even when a game is removed from sale you can almost always still download it. It's quite rare that games are removed entirely from Steam; it happens, but not very often at all. You'd have to work pretty damn hard to have your Steam account revoked and lose access to your games.
Nobody cares about owning the game, they care about owning their copy of the game; that is, the authorised copy which accompanies the licence they purchased. People don't own their recordings of a piece of music, but when they buy a CD, they are purchasing an authorised copy of said recordings; a copy which they do, in fact, own (but cannot make copies of).
When it comes to ownership, you almost always own the accompanying authorised copies supplied to you when you make purchases on GOG, with any usage restrictions being codified in the EULA, if there even is one. I say almost because some games need GOG Galaxy for online multiplayer, and end up tied to your account that way. However, those are the exceptions to the rule, for the majority of games, you receive authorised installers which can be used over and over again to reinstall the game. If you burn said installers to a BD-R, you end up with a completely legal physical copy of the game which works similar to a traditional installable PC CD-ROM game where you own your authorised copy, irrespective of what happens to your GOG account.
With Steam, you sometimes own your authorised copies when you make a purchase, sometimes you don't, it varies from game to game. Sometimes, no purchase is necessary (example: SuperTux). Most games are locked to Steam in a manner where you don't own your authorised copy, but that's the choice of the developer/publisher, not Valve. For example: I can legally have Steam write Corpse Party straight to a BD-R (using UDF packet writing) and the result works as-is. I can pop it in, execute the main game executable, and it will play, with or without Steam installed, on any compatible PC with a Blu-ray drive. The result is akin to a DVD or Music CD, it's a fully functional physical authorised copy, and as long as it remains the only intact authorised copy I've requested, it's fully legal for me to use this way. I can take it round friends houses and play it on their computers, I can also leave said copy there and let them complete it (as long as they return it to me later, since I can't play it again until they do). I can't do any of that with Persona 5 Royal, South Park The Fractured But Whole or <name most mainstream AAA games sold by scummy publishers here> and that's a problem...
More specifically, what can people do with a GUI on Windows that they can't do with a GUI on Linux? In my experience, it's actually Windows which is lacking in the GUI department with missing or half-broken, rotten old frontends. Linux has plenty of other, more fundamental problems on the desktop (which I rant about all the time) but this isn't one of them.
Here's some examples to illustrate the point:
Windows doesn't ship a GUI for its package manager (winget) which is the main tool sysadmins, developers and [power] users are meant to use to keep common software centrally maintained. All the major desktop Linux distros (including Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE) ship with GUI frontends to keep software centrally updated out of the box. Commercial RMMs make use of it under the hood, and plenty of third parties produce unofficial frontends and background auto-updaters for it, but Microsoft won't do the right thing and adopt one, lest it eat into their SCCM money.
What do you do when you run low on disk space on Windows? When the poorly-maintained Disk Cleanup GUI (and the equally worthless Storage Sense) does sod and all for you other than nuke your Downloads folder, you'll need to grab third-party tools like Spacemonger or TreeSizeView (as in, not part of Windows). On Linux, most distributions ship with an equivalently full-featured disk usage analyzer preinstlled with support to visualise usage in more ways than both of the aforementioned can.
Until a very recent build of Windows 11, you still couldn't format a partition greater than 32GB as FAT32 (including USB memory sticks) a very basic thing Linux and macOS has been able to do for a decade or more. Despite fixing that problem, they didn't see fit to make it possible to pick the various supported versions of UDF available, despite that also being a very simple change. Likewise, there wasn't a way to configure per-connection IP addressing (only per-adapter IP addressing) being the only major operating system to lack this basic functionality; as of 25H2, it still lacks support for the overwhelming majority of netsh functionality. Much of it including things Linux, macOS, iOS, Android etc. have been able to do for pretty much decades via a GUI at this point.
Computer Management: Task Scheduler still permits people to schedule jobs to run daily at 00:00:00.00, despite that resulting in jobs that will never execute, it also makes high-latency calls which lag the mouse pointer as it loads various dialogs. Disk Management still works synchronously and will block, waiting indefinitely for operations which may time out on the backend without the frontend ever realising; with gparted you can always see what's happening and when it finishes, you know it's finished. The implementation of the Shared Folders MMC snap-in will happily lock up without much prodding viewing Sessions on production file servers, to the point where people have to use PowerShell to get the info they need. Event Viewer chokes on the sheer scale of logs people need to retain today, especially if you're collecting the kinds of security audit info a competent EDR or SIEM solution demands, again, you'll need PowerShell these days.
SystemPropertiesAdvanced still requires administrator rights to access any of it without using the command line, preventing end-users from adjusting compositor appearance options using the GUI, despite many of those options now being implemented per-user, not system wide like they used to be. Both it and System Configuration Utility (msconfig) lack support for adding boot entries, and of the entries which can be edited via the GUI, the available options haven't been updated since XP, despite the tools changing said options for a completely new bootloader; you better get used to opening a terminal to use bcdedit! Likewise, DxDiag can't be used to restrict or disable DirectX features anymore, defeating most of the point of it as a diagnostics tool, better get used to regedit instead.
There's many, many more basic examples of missing GUI functionality in modern Windows people can pick on. Feel free to add what you've noticed!
I agree with most except:
> Until a very recent build of Windows 11, you still couldn't format a partition greater than 32GB as FAT32
That was an GUI issue, command line is no problem. Never was.
For the rest: Microsoft has since Vista communicated that many configurations you mention are to be moved to command line since Administrators requested it. The lack of taking care of UI and Admin-UI details is still annoying. To add an example: Scheduled Tasks via GPO still has the Windows Vista dialogue, which lacks many fine details the newer dialogue has. And you cannot import an exported Task .XML.
One that springs to mind for me with Windows is having to jump into diskpart via a terminal window to do simple tasks that a GUI like GParted (or even cfdisk!) lets me do in pretty much any flavour of Linux.
The windows partition manager is another example of a half-broken bit of GUI. Random hangs, confusing removable USB drives with a disk drive, and the clumsy way it tries to assign drive letters.
Another one that springs to mind is fighting disk encryption on Windows 11 home. It's not bitlocker, but called "device encryption" and can enable automatically.
The only way to manage it properly? manage-bde in the command line.
> confusing removable USB drives with a disk drive
Haha yeah that one :D. The technical reason is actually the USB drive or the USB chip itself "forgetting" the "Removable" mark. And in turn, the other way around, internal SATA and NVME setting the "removable" mark. The annoying part is that there is no extra filter behind to force-correct it at least for USB drives, whereas for the internal it cannot be fixed by such type-filter, since the CAN be removable during operation (usually only in servers though).
How to solve the latter (SATA example): Open device manager, double click the drive, note "bus number" "target id", "LUN". You need the "bus number". GOTO Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device . Create REG_MULTI_SZ TreatAsInternalPort, and add the bus number(1) on a line each. I did this for my gaming machine since the internal on-board ASRock SATA chip listed all as removable, and I accidentally "ejected" my games drive in the wrong moment.
For Windows 7 look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci .
For nvidia chipsets (Win7) look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata, DisableRemovable DWORD 1.
For Marvel SATA (Win7): right-click your storage controller in device manager, Policies, untick "ENABLE SAFELY REMOVE DISK".
In case of Linux: You can adjust your udev rules to achieve the same, since it can happen there too. Did that last time about 15 years ago though, when i was still a heavy Linux user.
> Windows 11 home. It's not bitlocker, but called "device encryption"
It is bitlocker, therefore the manage-bde. Connect that disk to Windows pro or higher, and it will be called bitlocker. This is just the usual Marketing Customer relation Public relation Propaganda department saying: "We have to use a different name here to not confuse customers"
Thanks for the nudge to try vertical tabs in Firefox. I love it already.
If only I'd RTFM'd and not read your evangelizing article first and tried to get an extension and manually disabling the top tab bar first .. I couldn't get the instructions from 2022 to work .. went back to this article and realised it was a simple as enabling vertical tabs!
I wasted about twenty minutes of life searching the Broadcom website trying to work out how to download VMware for my Mac. It's called Fusion and the website is probably the least helpful support site I have ever had the misfortunate of using. Nothing on the site is helpful in anyway.
<Search Engine As Verb>: Vmware Fusion Changelog
Leads to some changelog, not the lastest, click back to the base:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hypervisors.html
And then to your fusion, latest release notes. There you have the build number of the latest version, 24995814
<Search Engine As Verb>: Vmware Fusion 24995814
Which gives you the exact file name VMware-Fusion-25H2-24995814_universal.dmg, and in some search results the direct link.
About five minutes, I guess I was lucky with my <Search Engine As Verb>-fu. Good Luck trying it!
Edit: And please, don't hunt me 'cause this MAY not be the version you want or need.
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