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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, "Whoa, this is amazing!" and got us hooked on the world of open source.

What made you to jump ships? Was it the "free" side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?

For me those products were:

  • Android
  • Firefox
  • VLC
  • Calibre

Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product -- maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source

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[–] 10 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Hah. Yeah, I guess it sucks having learned Photoshop before it was an outright scam, because there is no good alternative.

Let me caveat that: there's actually great art software that's either cheap or free and there are many basic quick photo editing apps. But broad image manipulation and in-depth photo editing? It's GIMP or nothing, and GIMP is definitely not it.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Note that for vector graphics editing, Inkscape is really good. That doesn't help you if you need to edit photos, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yeah, it's just that specific hole in the landscape where GIMP has become the default and nobody else is doing better despite being the part of the ecosystem that Adobe holds with the tightest grip. It's extremely annoying.

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  • [+] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Not a graphic designer either, so I also use it for, say scanning documents and stuff like that. But I'll be honest, if it takes more than that I'll often just load into some mobile app meant for the edit I need to make just to avoid GIMP's backwards UI.

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  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago* (1 child)
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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Yep. You either get the features but not the depth in mobile apps or the depth but not the features on GIMP.

    It genuinely sucks. Because it's not that the technology is proprietary at Adobe and can't be replicated. Like I said, Blender holds up to the best of commercial software and it's just as free. It's that the GIMP guys haven't quite found their way to that qualitative jump Blender took.

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