this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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I think you're vastly overgeneralizing the world of software here. Before I make my point here's two facts:
Just about everyone reading this comment is using FOSS software to do so (Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or even Edge which is really just customized Chromium). Lemmy itself is FOSS and the majority of websites you visit every day are using FOSS on the back end. Do you feel all this software is "not-user-friendly"?
Let me take a step back from that though and assume you're not really talking about software in general but are actually referring to software with a GUI that runs on a desktop computer. Someone elsewhere in this thread compared to GIMP to Photoshop so let's look at that...
Photoshop is not an easy, just-use-it application. To get started most people recommend watching a YouTube tutorial and, having watched a few they definitely start from a place where, “you should know all this already”. For example, if you don't understand the difference between a JPEG and a PNG file you're going to have a bad time.
GIMP is also not an easy, just-use-it application. To get started most people recommend watching a YouTube tutorial and, having watched a few they definitely start from a similar, "you should know all this already" place. Except there's one great big difference: You don't have to pay anything to obtain or use the GIMP. That's the biggest difference!
They're both image editing tools but they were designed with different use cases in mind. Photoshop was made for professional photographers and digital artists working for business. This is why Adobe put great efforts into making sure that certain "workflows" go very smoothly... Because they're the most common in business.
If you try to use Photoshop with a different workflow than what it was designed for you're going to have a bad time! For example, let's say you wanted to perform a series of manipulations and add some text to tens of thousands of photos; a great big directory of .jpeg files. You might search up how to do this in Photoshop (using macros) and you'll quickly come to realize that it was definitely not made for this task!
However, if you searched for how to do the same thing in GIMP well, it actually was made to support that! It's another one of those things where you'll have to learn a new skill but it's doable. It's a use case the GIMP developers had in mind when they made it.
From the perspective of batch editing Photoshop is basically useless. Anyone who tries would find it, "very not-user-friendly" because it was made for a specific purpose and that's not it.
The GIMP was made as a much more general-purpose graphics editing tool. So much so that it can be completely re-skinned to make it look like Photoshop or even operated entirely from the command line. You can even automate very sophisticated workflows with GIMP using Python!
This same sort of argument can be made for nearly every open source tool that is commonly bitched about, LOL! They generalize that FOSS isn't user friendly, completely forgetting or ignoring 7zip, Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice, Notepad++, OBS, Keepass, Greenshot, Ditto, Audacity, etc or any of the many thousands of very popular/common FOSS packages that get used on people's desktops every day.