Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) ... can't say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn't wanna work. Making music wasn't really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible ...
megrania
joined 2 years ago
My first ever smartphone (in 2015) was a BQ Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition that came with Ubuntu Phone pre-installed ... a lightweight, 4.5" smartphone ... there wasn't much of an app ecosystem at the time but I didn't miss it because up to that date I used a dumb phone, and the smartphone allowed me to do eMail and use a browser, which was enough for me.
At some point I accidentially dropped it on a hard floor and it broke, and I was quite unhappy that the company didn't continue that line :(
I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as "an alternative". I'm really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.
Luckily I'm not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.
There's also many things that proprietary software just can't do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) ... MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time ...
Second this, I've tried TinkerCAD before and the whole Idea of CSG started to make sense, and then I found that OpenSCAD does something very similar, just with code ... I find it very satisfying ... I guess if you're making highly asymmetrical, organic shapes, you might have some puzzles to solve ... but I'm mostly making loudspeakers, so basically boxed with holes, and it's not a huge problem.
Hmm I think the issue is that Ardour is more focused on recording than electronic music production ... There's more intuitive DAWs out there but I suppose in terms of what it can do it doesn't have to stand back ... compared to ProTools I'd say it's still quite intuitive (not a high bar for sure).
hmm I might be biased because I'm a programmer by trade, and even make music with code, so describing things as code is pretty natural to me ... but I once I got the hang of it I found it easier than TinkerCAD in some sense, because there I would always get lost in the stack of objects ... and FreeCAD ... well, I couldn't even get a basic box designed ... 😅
Meh ... I wish there was a middle ground. Non-corporate, yet effective. Unfortunately, the Fediverse is only the first.
Discovery algorithms can be great, if applied with care. And I really think ActivityPub is not very effective at showing interesting stuff, while from a user perspective it's super intransparent. Personally I'd prefer a centralized user experience to the Fediverse fragmentation any day ... I guess I'm really only here because I'm fed up with corporate bullshit.
OBS for streaming is amazing.
Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There're also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don't have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.
Krita has already been mentioned.
But, I think what strikes me most is that there's a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn't have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it's really fun once you get the hang of it. I don't do this professionally so there's no need for me to learn Fusion360.
Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their "industry standard" (which really just means "the most common product that has been around the longest"), but if you're not bound to that, there's just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.
I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock ... never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.
I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn't have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don't have. I've been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).
It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so ... static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don't feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.