With free software you can adapt the code or pay somebody to do it to make it run on a new hardware. You cannot do this with binaries. And, if $company shuts down its license servers, you would even be lost with a VM image including the software. That’s a huge benefit of free software.
And it is a big risk of subscription-based software like Adobe Lightroom. They can terminate the service any time they want, or may be forced to. That’s exactly what happened in Venezuela, where Adobe shut down the whole country, and people there who had paid in advance were left completely out-of-pocket and none could process their photos anymore. Scary stuff, and a major reason I moved to darktable.
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Money (as in “open source doesn’t cost me”) is not a reason for my change towards Linux and FOSS in general. I even think that FOSS is majorly used by people who can absolutely afford to pay the price for commercial software. Those who can’t afford it don’t necessarily care for license implications (as stated earlier).
By the way: how old and high or low-grade is the typical hardware of dt users?
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Hello @beachbum
I even think that FOSS is majorly used by people who can absolutely afford to pay the price for commercial software.
Yep. I totally agree… 
It takes years (that is, time and money…) to learn the skills most people show on this forum…
Just think at Linux (compared to Windows, I mean): only the most “talented” people know how to work in the Shell for instance.
If you know how to properly write some commands on the Shell you are probably someone with some sort of technical degree on your pocket…
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Today you can install and run Linux by pushing a mouse and not even once open a terminal. This is part of and a huge step towards the “Easy Peasy Linux Desktop Experience” that we all hope and wish for.
We have this beautiful and stable OS running with a GUI of our choice and there are powerful programs available that can help us reach our goals. Par for the course. So why don’t they all run over into our camp yet?
Because it all goes south once you need to troubleshoot. Windows limits you in your abilities to handle problems - but the ones you CAN handle, you can handle with a click. The philosophy of Linux or any Unix is to allow you to take full control - but that requires full knowledge. Do you want less tech-savy users install Linux? Then approach problems from a less tech-oriented point of view.
I get along with the command line. I am no wizard, but I can add a repo or PPA, edit a file and copy or move it. Very basic and not enough, but I make it happen most of the time. My wife would never type anything in the command line. Why is there no simple “click for PPA”? It opens a dialogue, you type “otto-kesselgulasch/gimp” and there we go. No, it’s not hard to remember the syntax of
add-apt-repository ppa:
but it’s a psychological wall and as stupid as it sounds: if a handfull of those “easy” cli routines would become “clickable”, Linux would be so much more accessible for users. That’s where apple got things right: they use the inferior free BSD, put a multi-colored GUI on top and make everything mouseable. People love it, you don’t need to be a hacker, it’s even cool to be ignorant of the technology and say “it just works, I don’t care how” with a shrug of the shoulders
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That’s probably the best summary so far. It sounds difficult, it looks difficult, it seems difficult…
But having been on both sides, I would probably switch to Mac now. Linux is too many fights on too many fronts at once. Xorg is ***, Wayland is not going to be better, color management is *** and sooo painfully slow, desktop environments are all either buggy bloatware or ugly consoles, GPU drivers are ***, printers drivers are completely random, GUI toolkits are ***, battery life is ***, and I don’t have nearly enough time to fix all that stack of *** in my lifetime (and more importantly, do all the lobbying to get patches accepted by devs who don’t seem to see the problem).
Freedom is nice, but jeez, you have to tolerate a lot of degraded features. Linux for (reliable) desktop is still not for tomorrow.
I wish sometimes I could just start my desktop and not worry about OpenCL unavailable because the GPU driver crashed when resuming from idle, or Pulse Audio randomly muting devices while playing YouTube, or Nvidia Optimus still not properly integrated and sucking all my battery, or the latest Gnome not locking the session when it goes idle, or the graphic server not having a unified way of colour-managing display for all the apps (including content and GUI) and having to manage each app separately…
I get away with 12 programming languages, and I can’t even get a fully working Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/whatever.
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@anon41087856 Windows is crap on so many counts and still the most successful OS. People don’t care for quality or perfection - they want ease of use.
When I wake-up my Linux ThinkPad from idle, the two-finger up and down on the touchpad doesn’t work anymore. This sucks. But the same kind of problems occur on my dell windows 10 laptop. Wake-up from idle is never easy - Linux has problems, but those problems are the same on many OS. And you don’t need to solve them all by yourself ;o)
Notice I mentioned Mac, not Win 
Meaning they will never be solved…
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Soon on Mac you’ll have fun with an x86 to ARM emulator as they’re obviously setting up to go all ARM soon(ish). In the last 10 years, Apple has proven they dont care about their pro users, macOS is aweful now, they can’t even make a keyboard. Just buy the iPad/iPhone.
Guess on mac you will soon have many more problems, as much as they are more and more locking down the systems. Heck, on my company iphone, there is almost no way to see which files are on, to do a proper backup outside the apple cloud (or even run it w/o apple cloud), bluetooth is not working properly, …
And, I cannot get the source code for even one of the applications installed. I understand that this may not count, but still …
I expect that the lockdown will continue on the mac computers as well. I see benefits to have good colours from factory without fiddling with calibration (the apple displays are really good), working printers, working scanners, and so on. But not for the price only being allowed to do what they want with my machine. I had some sympathy for apple a couple of years ago, because they did technically extremely good stuff. But with the introduction of itunes, not allowing to just copy music onto a device, their journey on the dark side started.
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You are angry at your friend’s choice, or angry that FOSS solutions do not today meet your friend’s expectations of a good set of tools appropriate to his level of expertise and time?
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Angry is probably the wrong term, and sad does not fit as well. English is not my mother’s tongue, and talking about feelings is difficult anyway.
I am petty sure his choice did not get him on a new level, but as we both got children shortly after that, we will never know as we both do not have so much time for photography anymore. He more or less totally stopped, and I try to adapt it to my situation, doing a lot photography and editing for kindergarten and other children activities. That includes a lot time critical stuff as I more or less offer my “service” to the kindergarten, shorts team etc., of course for free, and of course I do not do jobs where a “professional” could have earned money. The regular annual kindergarten shots are still done by the pro.
Adobe world has lots of features that are missing in floss, big ones and little ones. Most of them you can work around and when you have a sparring partner with the same interest, this is even easier. Probably I worry most that I lost a sparring partner.
The biggest lack I personally see in floss photography tools is by the way not about image operations but about overall workflow and how the tools interact. It’s not as smooth as out could be, and often only little things are missing. Recently things are improving a lot: dt culling mode, rpd, … but still a lot opportunities for improvement, e.g. better interaction of tools.
I used to be a strong proponent of Macs. A true fanboy, you could have called me. But let me tell you, things have changed.
You used to be able to drag the proxy icon of a file in the title bar onto a USB stick or an email, and it would copy the file there. Now it puts an alias on the stick, which is perfectly useless.
When renaming a file, the Finder used to pause half a second before reshuffling the file list, so you could easily go to the next file and rename that. The killed that.
Last time I wanted to use my Mac, it couldn’t install updates, then could after all, then it aborted half way through the update, then finally did install them and it took an hour, during which I couldn’t use the machine.
And when I finally had the computer ready to be used, git-annex would simply fail to download my files, because of some macOS lockdown features.
Anyway, these are just paper cuts. But they accumulated over the years and Macs simply don’t “just work” any longer. I miss the days when they did (in my memory, at least). I truly yearn for a fully-functional, elegant computer. But as things stand, neither Microsoft nor Apple nor Canonical can provide one. But on Linux, I at least have a fighting chance to fix the most egregious problems.
Sorry for the rant.
Hello everyone,
The philosophy of Linux or any Unix is to allow you to take full control - but that requires full knowledge.
YEP!
If I can crack a joke, I think that both its biggest advantage and also the worst disadvantage of Linux is freedom. On the Shell you have plenty of power as power-user but with the wrong command you can easily destroy your setup
Freedom also means you can, given the right technical skills at hand, add no matter what piece of software to the existing stack (kernel, applications at large etc).
By doing so, we now have: Kde, Gnome, Cinnamon etc etc as “desktops”, which is a good outcome of course!
Unfortunately, every one of them has its fair amount of problems to solve (bugs) which is a pain in tha back…
There is an interesting article about this subject.
It is written by the founder of Ardour, an open source “musical” software [1]
As an aside, I read that someone “plans” to move to Apple (ditching Linux).
Please do not do this…
Just joking of course!
Do not get me wrong!
I do agree that Apple products are extremely good: just think at tablets where IPads have no real rivals as of today…
Unfortunately, these past years, Apple has been practicing the worst lock-in ever.
Much worse than Microsoft in my sincere opinion.
At home, for example, I dabble with Python with Visual Studio Code editor, released by Microsoft, as an open source editor [2].
Yes, if you accept to code with their (Apple) stack (librairies etc) you are fine but do not even try to propose something else…
On top of this their (Apple, I mean) products are shamefully over-priced IMHO.
In the past for computers, at least, it was understandable because there was a big chasm between an Apple and a Microsoft product.
Today, in my view, it is no longer completely true and, IMHO, you pay a lot more also to be part of a “supposed” elite (in short, people with plenty of money to splash out for no real reason…). No offence here: my sister works with an Apple too…
Disclaimer, I am writing this post on Windows 10. Therefore, I am probably biased…
[1] Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want? - Blog - Ardour
[2] https://code.visualstudio.com/
I have long-time played in a band and we used Ardour for our CD-recording. I have been in contact with Paul Davies several times and during a certain time, audio tracks from our recordings were shipped with Ardour as examples. A song that didn’t make it on one of our albums has been used to demo Ardour on the Musikmesse in Frankfurt on the info-booth of SAE Institutes - on Mac computers ;o)
All this to tell you that Ardour has ALWAYS been Linux centered and it worked already well (of sorts) in 2006, 2007 and 2008. A local studio here worked with Macs on Logic and Cubase by that time and they encountered basically the same problems we did: If you don’t use the latest and best hardware, you don’t get the multitrack recording working without audible latency. In 2007 that was a 10k Euro investment for the Workstation alone, and if you had THAT workstation available for running Linux, Ardour ran perfectly fine, too.
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Have you ever tried PyCharm? It’s cross platform and it has some seriously useful tools.
Hello @damonlynch
Have you ever tried PyCharm?
Nope, but I have read PyCharm is much better than Visual Studio code editor as regards python…
Currently, at home, I am also working with Spyder, through Anaconda [1].
For my little python projects, since I am not a coder by trade, I am still used to write the python code on Notepad++ and execute the .py on the Cmd terminal…
following up on what @bastibe wrote… count me in as another ex-apple user who now loves his linux box. Maybe I could’ve passed for a “fanboy” from the outside, but it was truly a strong preference for apple products – Aperture! – and the unix core of MacOS compared to windows equivalent.
I moved to linux a couple of years ago now (and I wrote here many posts asking for help during the transition mac os-linux). It started from a mild annoyance at iphones and the ecosystem which I quickly solved moving to a cheaper and equally good android phone (incidentally, I’m now using a google pixel 3a and it’s the best smartphone ever!). Then there was the obsession for the “look”, the graphical appearance, the slickness of the user interface… all applied to some sort of silly variations on the same theme (to-do apps! calendar apps! wtf, is this what we’re doing with computers in 2020???) . And then there was the arbitrary life of products that put a real toll on me; first Apple killing Aperture, and here I go wasting a year of my life moving everything to Lightroom… then Adobe moving to the silly subscription scheme; I told myself this is the time to move to Darktable, trusting that an open source solution will never die.
Anyway, this is just to say that I now can do all the things I want on a linux box, I don’t feel limited in any way and darktable has matured enough to be a real Lightroom contender.
You know what I recently discovered? that the usb extension cable for the apple keyboard I was using before has a little notch so that you can only use it with the usb cable of said keyboard… that is just classic apple! why do they have to come up with proprietary connectors or – the absurdity of it! – modify a perfectly normal usb connector so that you can’t use it with anything else but the fucking apple keyboard?!
Also, commenting on what @Silvio_Grosso and @damonlynch said, I’m also a vscode user; I was first a sublimetext user, then Atom and finally I moved to vscode, which was surprising to me… a microsoft product?? I use it for everything, as a substitute for standardnotes/simplenote using the extension VSnote to writing python code.
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Can Visual Studio Code do code introspection to alert you if you’re using a variable or class member not found somewhere in the namespace, global or local? PyCharm can. Can Visual Studio Code do type checking? PyCharm can. These two features alone are hugely useful for projects big and small.
I support your initiative to do a survey. It’s certainly better than nothing. You might be able to understand where your software is being used, but not why. In the end only ethnographic research will get you the insights you are seeking. To be blunt: you will never be able to correctly understand from any existing or new survey data why darktable or any other program is or is not being used in places like India, or France, or Russia, or any specific industry or sector. Even worse, you run the very real risk of over-interpreting the data and drawing erroneous conclusions that could lead you in the wrong direction.
I have lived quite a few years of my life in the third world (and second world), and done graduate level ethnographic research there too, including my PhD research. The earlier comments speculating on why FOSS is not more common in poorer regions of the world is just that — speculation, and I have very serious doubts about the validity of it. Which is a polite way of saying unless you’re a specialist in the area, you ought to assume you have no actual clue and leave it at that! I’m myself reluctant to say why myself, because I’m not a specialist researcher in this topic, but if I were to investigate the topic and try to become an expert in it, the first aspect I’d look into is social status and power.
Maybe ethnographic analysis seems foreign or not related to computing, only applicable for certain topics? Not so. Intel has several ethnographers who do actual fieldwork looking at how people use Intel products. Facebook and Google hire them too. At least one Intel ethnographer is heavily involved in this project: https://www.epicpeople.org/
If someone in your team has access to academic researchers who can instigate ethnographic research on the use of FOSS tools in a variety of countries, I think that would be a fantastic initiative.
If you’re interested, consider contacting Heather A. Horst for suggestions about how to take it further. Also, there is a woman who did her PhD research on some or other aspect of the FOSS community. She was (is?) active in Debian or Fedora or Gnome, I forget which. If you can track her down that might help too. I don’t recall her name but it’s very likely not Dr. Horst.
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