That is true and the reason for that is not capitalism, of course. Most projects don’t have UI experts and when someone wants to help, devs usually don’t listen. Sometimes there are technical obstacles too (old framework, hardcoded UI), but probably not in web or Electron apps.
compared to their paid alternative
Keep in mind that Libre Software can be commercial too, so you really mean proprietary alternatives.
As a UI developer I consider GNOME 4 to be one of the best desktop UIs. But some people prefer to live in the past and use 30 years old designs than try anything new, even if it might be better for them long term.
Nothing prevents Libre Software developers from making commercial products. They can sell their software just like everyone else.
Can I start with Gentoo or is that too easy?
I would say that security and privacy are also very important. That’s something you can’t get with Windows.
Congratulations! Next you might want to learn about the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM
So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.
Windows has spyware, so that should be enough reason to not use it for someone like you. You will have to spend some time to learn GNU/Linux, but for most office tasks it shouldn’t be difficult, especially if you are good with computers. Most popular distros already come with a PDF viewer and Libre Office, so it should be able to do almost everything you want out of the box. VLC player can play all common video types and is easy to install. Libre Office might have issues with some Word documents though, so you might need to look into that. A web browser (usually Firefox) and probably some email client will be preinstalled as well.
You might need to check if your printer and scanner will be supported out of the box or if extra drivers from the manufacturer are needed (then check if they are available on their website). I think printers will probably work fine out of the box, but scanners might require extra drivers (this depends on the model - there are models that don’t).
If you need more motivation, look into the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM
GNOME also has an app that lets you do encrypted incremental backups very easily.
Yes, I do.
Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter
Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.
Freedom requires sacrifices. I research if a game will run before buying it. I don’t but the ones that won’t, because freedom is more important to me.
This is why I’ll still use Win 11 as my daily.
I think your goal should be to do the opposite. Run GNU/Linux as your daily and switch to Windows only when you have to. Eventually you will become better at solving issues and will be able to run more games without using Windows. Maybe in a few years you will even decide that you no longer care about those remaining games that don’t run and ditch Windows entirely.
That won’t convince a lot of people
That’s fine. Most people don’t care about freedom, security and privacy, so they aren’t willing to spend the extra effort to get those things. But it also means that publishers don’t have a good reason to stop abusing their users with DRM and spyware, since people will buy those games anyway. They don’t have to publish for GNU/Linux, because people are fine with running Windows and not being in control of their computers.
For GTA VC for example people list some workarounds: https://www.protondb.com/app/12110.
You could also try using WINE: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=18567
Edit: Usually the only hardware that matters is the GPU. The software is also important: GPU drivers (mostly for Nvidia users), version of Proton/WINE, Wayland vs Xorg, dxvk and extra libraries that a game might need.
Ah, I see. So you are an expert in psychology, marketing and statistics. That is truly amazing. It’s completely irrelevant to the topic of our discussion (which is about privacy and software), but very cool.
Fun fact: both facebook.com and twitter.com have a Tor site to make it harder to censor them.
Yes, there are many things that people should be taught at school. Technology is just one area. All of the things you said are also very important, but it doesn’t make what I said invalid.
Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:
But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.
Fooled by what exactly? A distributed ledger or machine learning? I think it’s a simple fact that those technologies are becoming more popular.
You make it sound like the problem is technology.
The post is about privacy and software. It’s important for people to be educated in other areas as well, but they weren’t the topic of this discussion. So there was no point for me to mention them.
You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse.
I make software, so I talk about software. I’m not an expert in the other areas that you mentioned.
Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can’t spy on people and insert ads?!!!!!!!1111
You think it was just a fake promise? I haven’t thought about it, but it’s certainly possible.
Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.
So you see no problem in living in a world where everything is recorded. That’s crazy.
I know, I just wanted to explain the real reason why their UIs often suck. I agree that it has nothing to do with capitalism.
Lemmy is a perfect example of such project, btw. The devs can’t design a good UI themselves and they ignore people’s proposals, so users make their own themes and browser addons to fix it.
We can have nice software, people just need to care.