quack

I kind of feel like you just ignored everything I wrote.

I'm not really sure what assumptions you can reasonably make about me or my generation given that you have no idea who I am or how old I am, but I've been working with FOSS in my personal life for about 20 years give or take, a bit less than that in my professional life. I actually used to work in the music industry professionally before changing careers to tech with a FOSS slant during the pandemic, so I've seen both sides of this coin.

I'm genuinely not trying to shit on FOSS tools or say that they're not suitable for creative professionals (my gripes with Darktable are very much personal to me), I love FOSS and the philosophy strongly aligns with my personal values but it's not just about how "good" these tools are on an objective level. This is a cultural problem as much as it is an engineering problem, as you seem to have correctly identified.

You have to understand how ubiquitous something like Pro Tools suite is in the music industry and for how long that has been the case - the Pro Tools session format truly is a global industry standard by anyone's measure. You can walk into just about any professional recording studio on the planet with your session files and the recording engineer will know exactly what to do with them, and so will mastering engineers and record producers. If you go to school for audio engineering, they're teaching you Pro Tools. There are entire companies that produce outboard gear and control surfaces just for use with Pro Tools. You get the idea. The reason for that ubiquity is that Pro Tools, like many other creative software solutions, captured the market in the 90s when every other solution was an utter joke in comparison and they built on it from there. Sure, there's fantastic alternatives now, but when you know Pro Tools like the back of your hand and so do all of your colleagues and collaborators, when all of your hardware and software works with it seamlessly... how likely are you to change?

I'm not suggesting that this isn't a problem by the way - vendor lock-in is a serious bugbear of mine - but it's a very real barrier to getting creative professionals to switch to FOSS alternatives, and in turn to getting software vendors to take FOSS platforms seriously. It's a reality that cannot be hand-waved away by saying that x or y tool works great and that people just need to learn it and switch so that they can use Linux. If you can't run Pro Tools on Linux, that's a whole industry that won't use it. It's that simple.

The problem is that if widespread desktop Linux adoption is the goal, then the tools for amateurs aren’t going to cut it. Not even close. Tools that professionals use need to be available and they need to work like they do on macOS and Windows, it’s pretty much that simple. I think Darktable is fine for me tinkering around with my amateur photos. If I were a professional using it daily I’d probably hate it.

As much as we wish it wasn’t true, most people don’t really give a shit about their OS. It’s the logo that appears when they boot up their computers to work. What they do care about is having their tools available to them, if they can’t use the Adobe Suite, Pro Tools etc (and no, WINE is not a practical solution for most of these people) then Linux of any flavour is functionally useless to them. It’s for this reason that smug people saying “just switch to linux lol” as if it’s an actual solution whenever a Windows user complains about some rabidly anti-consumer bullshit that Microsoft is forcing onto them annoys the hell out of me.

It’s changing somewhat now, but it’s why you’ll find that a lot of people in the creative industries traditionally stick with macOS, because for a long time the options for those professionals were just better on that platform and people tend to stick with what they know.

On the other side of that coin, you have software vendors looking at the single-digit market share that Linux on the desktop “enjoys” and coming to the fairly reasonable conclusion that building packages, fixing bugs and providing support for myriad different distros just isn’t worth the headaches it will inevitably cause for them.

Classic chicken and egg problem.

Complaining about online petitions.

Right, but ActivityPub was right there. The AT Protocol is an open standard, but in its current form it effectively turns Bluesky’s nodes into gatekeepers for the rest of the network. If you want to talk about Meta platforms, even Threads implements ActivityPub.

I need my pocket sized spaceship computer for shitposting and occasionally checking my email

There isn’t one as far as I’m concerned. People moved from one corpo social media platform to another corpo social media platform thinking that the person running the former platform was the problem, when the entire model is designed to prioritise profit over human expression.

It was founded by Jack Dorsey, the same guy who founded Twitter. At this point it does look like it’ll end up the same way.

Did anyone actually expect Bluesky to be different to any other corporate-run social media platform? What was the point of jumping from one to another?

Just more proof that FOSS and proper decentralisation (yes I know that Bluesky is technically federated but this halfway house shit they’re doing is not proper decentralisation) that are the only things that will save us.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure about it at first and it was kind of an impulse buy, but I was hooked after my first couple of runs. Great game for the Steam Deck too.

If you enjoy hockey and roguelites, it’s the game for you.

Me too. I’ve put more hours into Balatro and Tape To Tape than I care to admit…