In the past, most software I used was paid and proprietary and would have some sort of limitation that I would try to get around by any means possible. Sometimes that would be resetting the clock on my computer, disabling the internet, and other times downloading a patch.
But in the past few years I’ve stopped using those things and have focused only on free and open source software (FOSS) to fulfill my needs. I hardly have to worry about privacy problems or trying to lock down a program that calls home. I might be missing out on some things that commercial software delivers, but I’m hardly aware of what they are anymore. It seems like the trend is for commercial software providers to migrate toward online or service models that have the company doing all the computing. I’m opposed to that, since they can take away your service at any time.
What do you do?
Edit: I don’t pirate the mentioned software.
I’d love to use FOSS exclusively, but it’s frankly impossible under certain conditions.
Acrobat is a must. Alternatives such as Evince or their back-end library can’t handle the following situations:
- Formulars, such as calculating a sum based on the preceding fields.
- Field formatting, such as appending .00 to a currency amount conditionally upon field unfocus.
- Everything related to government forms due to the above.
- Large password protected PDF files.
Besides, if anything is wrong, you’re on the hook for not using Acrobat.
Microsoft Office is a must.
- OnlyOffice, WPS free as in free beer, and especially LibreOffice can’t handle anything beyond intermediate documents.
- OnlyOffice and WPS struggle with more advanced features, such as forms.
- LibreOffice notoriously renders Microsoft Office documents incorrectly in my experience.
- Everything in LibreOffice except LibreOffice Writer feels unpolished to me, particularly LibreOffice Calc.
- OnlyOffice supports only few fields.
- OnlyOffice permits free form input for fields that aren’t.
Adobe is a must.
- Alternatives don’t integrate as well with each other as Adobe apps.
- Rendering whatever you have to import that into another app is a slow workflow, compared to Adobe Premiere that embeds Adobe After Effects sequences, for example.
- Alternatives don’t support scripting sometimes. Scripting is necessary to speed up slow and error-prone manual processes.
- Adobe has a rich plugin ecosystem, whereas alternatives don’t support plugins at all, or don’t have any notable plugins.
- Alternatives don’t support Adobe file formats as well as Adobe.
You face similar problems to Adobe with alternatives, such as:
- Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts.
- Inconsistent file format support.
Overall, I’d love to, but can’t. FOSS isn’t good enough.
While I personally haven’t run into the same roadblocks as you when using alternatives, I appreciate the counter-point and reality check.
FOSS in programs and appliances are OPEN SOURCE for a reason, consider many to be ‘models’ used to build upon. Your reason’s are factual down to the specific applications/programs however try appending a new function in MSO or adding your on embeddings in Adobe to change the scaling. For those looking to make their programs work for them and have some experience in programming and time, FOSS is perfect to do so, others that use these apps and haven’t the time to dedicate to customize features, import their own libs and assets and don’t mind paying for it, indeed that may be the better option. 🐈⬛
Formulars, such as calculating a sum based on the preceding fields.
- Field formatting, such as appending .00 to a currency amount
You’re doing it wrong. PDF with embedded javascript is a nightmare and it still doesn’t make PDF equal to excel.
Better generate your documents with your favourite HTML templating engine from your DB and convert them to simple PDF in the last step.
LibreOffice notoriously renders Microsoft Office documents incorrectly in my experience.
Only had that experience with badly designed, macro ridden documents which there’s no excuse for anyway nowadays. I use a lot of print templates (various label printers) and it works flawlessly.
Also, exporting a non MS file format usually imports fine in LibreOffice, even with complex documents.
The ability to quickly edit PDF makes it the office suite of my choice.
Yeah, but if your boss or client sends you a document that doesn’t work you’re not going to tell them “Uh well this is a badly formed document and you shouldn’t embed scripts and it’s your fault that my FOSS alternative application can’t work with this”. At least I hope you’re not.
At least I hope you’re not.
Of course I do and I expect my employees to report such incidents to IT. Such documents are common attack vectors.
In my experience, customers are not aware of failing interoperability or possible security threats and often grateful for such hints.
There’s a reason why libreoffice (and I guess other office suits aswell), evince or antivirus show a big, fat warning when opening such documents. Surely there are cases were macros are useful or necessary, but if they have to leave the company, you’re doing it wrong.
This talk might be interesting for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F2xMw3987I
The accounting department loves you. I’m sure the government will bow down to your demands, respect your security concerns, and adopt a more secure approach swiftly.
If you must deal with an organization that doesn’t give a shit about security, then you’re SOL. We live in the real world. If you don’t submit the government forms how they want you to, they shrug and fine the shit out of you. They couldn’t care less about the security risks their workflow poses on you.
You can mitigate the risks, but you never have absolute control. While Acrobat poses a security risk, not having Acrobat poses a business risk.
We live in the real world. If you don’t submit the government forms how they want you to, they shrug and fine the shit out of you.
Then you just don’t know the law. There is no legislation that enforces Acrobat in any civilized country without alternative.
Quite the opposite: Send macroridden documents to any decently secure infrastructure and you get a big fat warning in the subject if it’s not filtered entirely. Officials LOVE to do that extra call ensuring that this document is really from you before opening it and no phishing attempt…not.
Source: working >25 years in IT, >15 years for government IT
EDIT: we got some real Adobe Acrobat Fanboy here, eh? ;-)
I use non-FOSS for work, but I have a work PC where someone else pays for all of them.
It’s a mix of both. On my windows gaming rig I have ms office, photoshop sketchup and fl studio pirated. I haven’t found a good foss alternative for photoshop, sketchup or flstudio (using gimp is worse than being an actuall gimp ). On my Linux laptop I’ve been using more and more foss. I’m getting use to Libre office but it doesn’t do everything I need. Switched chrome for Firefox, vscodium as a code editor, waydroid for Android apps
What kind of music do you make? It’s still closed source, but if you want to do electronic music on linux, have you tried bitwig?
LMMS also lets you use music using samples, and it’s FOSS
Tbh I haven’t looked into lmms for years because when I first did the UI was terrible, I think it might be worth looking into again
About 20 years ago, I saw this exact same discussion on mozillazine. Everyone was raving about FOSS being nicer, friendlier, and more convenient, and how piracy is bothersome.
Then this guy posted a reply, to the tune of “Yeah, and now imagine your entire OS was like that… you should try it.”
A little later I did, and never looked back. For me, FOSS is convenience.
I use Arch btw.
I use FOSS whenever possible.
FOSS. I don’t even own a Windows partition.
Haven’t used windows in 16 years. People try to get me to fix their computers because I’m a developer, but that shit is foreign to me!
I mostly use FOSS, but most games arent FOSS, so thats the only thing I pirate now.
I don’t pirate software. Usually closed-source, proprietary garbage has a lot of sketchy stuff built in already, and I don’t have the energy to reverse engineer every cracked binary blob I download to make sure it doesn’t have spyware or ransomware or anything. Just pirate media, not software.
What if you were presented with the choice to download a prepatched binary or a file that allowed another program to do the patching? How about if you had the choice between downloading a python CLI keygen or a compiled gui/cli ELF or PE keygen? Granted, that would allow the DRM makers to more easily modify their key validation or obfuscation
If the process was reproducible (i.e. there’s a published checksum for the prepatched binary, and a script that you can run on your local unpatched binary, which creates a binary with the exact same checksum) I would feel pretty good about that.
Run the Keygen in a VM, job done 👍
If there’s a free software alternative to what I want to pirate, I always use that instead. Software is like sex. It’s better when it’s free.
I also use open source options whenever they fulfills my needs. I am not changing to linux yet because of gaming.
I grew up relatively poor, so burning cd-s for each other and trading games was the jam when I was in school. Games I usually still pirate and even when I buy them I have already tried them to an extent, or finished them 5 times. Steam sales are a godsend for multiplayer only titles tho. I have nothing against supporting devs. But ubi, ea and those responsible for games with 0 content and giant day1 patches, season passes and all that crap can get fucked.
I rather spend that money on zero knowledge mail and vpn, maybe a donation to foss devs for things that I can’t live without anymore. I need to get into the habit of donating some at least. Now that I am out of the financial danger zone.
I am not changing to linux yet because of gaming.
I was doing the same thing, but it’s a whole new world out there because of Proton. I play flight sims and niche old games. I just tried dipping my toes into moving to Linux again after a longer stretch of Windows usage.
This 15 year old flight sim called Il-2 1946 runs way better on my Linux desktop with zero configuration than on Windows. On Windows it was a bitch to start up, it crashed all the time, I couldn’t switch windows to put on music, the loading screens were choppy and froze now and then… on a fresh openSUSE install it just works. It’s fast and neat and clean.
My flying setup, joystick, throttles, pedals work just as fine. The only thing I’m worried about is Microsoft Flight Sim, but I’m more of a DCS person anyways. Apparently the Steam Deck has 10k games released for it, it will last me for a while.
Thanks for letting me know that, however I play games with DRM. Whatever my friends are into. And janky stuff like stalker with a bazillion mods.
I don’t feel like juggling 2 OS-es in a dualboot or trying to trick DRMs into thinkig they don’t just run in a VM with a gpu passthrough.
Luckly I don’t have to care about ms office or adobe stuff anymore like in school so one less thing to hold me back. I work in IT where we have OK policies. So work stuff stays on work machine.
I’ll give it a try at some point.
I was doing the same thing, but it’s a whole new world out there because of Proton.
Yep. I’ve been on linux for 20 years now, and haven’t done much PC gaming for that reason, buying consoles instead. A bit of KSP and C:S and other native Linux games, but that’s about it.
Recently got a steamdeck and was like holy shit, almost everything works well now without tweaks.
Went out and bought a GPU for my desktop last week. I’m ready for this era.
I mostly use FOSS, and occasionally I use proprietary if there’s no proper FOSS alternatives.
yes
I just use FOSS. I don’t trust that proprietary garbage. I generally don’t pirate software in general. Its far too easy to trojanize it. I also buy games on steam to support linux/deck and valves investment in the ecosystem, I buy them steeply discounted though. With Roms, sales and free games I have a massive backlog so being patient pays off.
I also find that the quality of the FOSS stuff is better and way more configurable. Not hating on anyone that does pirate software or prefers proprietary stuff, to each their own
I hate proprietary stuff, but sometimes Proprietary is the best option. IDA and Binja have features that Ghidra and Curtter lack, Charles Proxy and Fiddler have more features than mitmproxy, IntelliJ is just better than Eclipese or VSCodium, Autocad and most of the Autodesk suite have no FOSS counterparts. On the flip side, you have Notepad++ that’s better than Sublime, x64dbg is my favorite debugger, and I’ve been using Lunacy for photo editing recently over the multiple m0nkrus packs I have in my torrent client, and Blender is better in a lot of scenarios than Maya or whatever else.
Absolutely grade-A username, my dude. Also, if you haven’t, consider joining us at !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works or !patientgamers@lemmy.ml. I only just learned about one of those because of some kind of new autocomplete feature for federated communities.
I should go.
Haha thanks man, I’m already a member of the lemmy.ml patientgamers ;) . That is cool to know thanks
I agree, there are some insane FOSS apps and programs like NewPipe (kinda uses proprietary but eh, there’s no real replacement for YouTube) that I would always prefer over a pirated version of another, better known app.
Much prefer to use FOSS where I can.
Most people absoljutely do not ‘need’ photoshop or MS Office, but are too lazy to try out free alternatives. Sure they don’t offer 100% of the features, but for most home users they are more than enough What are people using Word for at home anyway? Creating a CV once every few years - its not like they are knocking out documents day after day.
I use FOSS. You can’t ever truly know if a pirated piece of software is back doored or not, so why even risk it?
I use mosly free foss apps. It’s has become a hasle to use programs that force online acounts. Kinda hate it when a app is slowly turned into a weird web app with heavy drm. And exploitive licenses
