Blender, Krita, Gimp, LibreOffice...

I think all these are at least as good as their commercial pendants today. If you don't like lock-in via cloud, they are even superior for most users.

But underlying that is so much essential open source software that today is absolutely essential. Without open source software the pipeline for new developers would also be significantly inhibited. It would be a total disaster without it.

Affinity beats Gimp for my type of work at the moment, but it’s cheap enough. I hope GIMP takes a page out of blenders book.

Libreoffice is fine as well, no more need for Office365

Godot is another rising star, 3.3 is great and 4.0 is going to be a leap forward. It uses the Blender model and makes money with Patreon and the like. The user community is absolutely fantastic.

Also, you might moan about cloud lock-in, but collaboratively editing documents in Office 365 is a vast improvement over emailing documents around and clumsy manual version management[0]. I would never go back.

[0] Incidentally, collaboration is the one advantage that GDocs used to have over Microsoft Office, but that's long since gone. Office is so much more capable than GDocs that I find it baffling that people still choose the latter. The only thing Google does better, at least in some ways, is email: becuase Gmail's search is better, and it doesn't bog down overall in the many ways that Outlook does. Teams, as much as it pisses me off on a daily basis (and it really does), is still far better and more reliable than Hangouts.

While I tend to agree, the premise here is mainly 'is a poster child' and not 'is at least as good or better than alternatives'. Just looking at LibreOffice without comparing it, it is quite impressive what it can do. And even when comparing it, in a way it is still fairly impressive if you look at the resource thrown at it vs MS Office.

Pretty much the same goes for Audacity actually: go back 2 decades (well, a bit less) and compare it with the closed-source alternatives which existed back then and for anything but the simplest features it just wasn't usable. But it's steadily getting better and overall: indeed fairly impressive even though it is probably still quite behind professional packages.

That's not to say when LibreOffice is viewed on its own merit's it's not a worthwhile product. And it might well be the best option on Linux... but Linux is a tiny minority of the desktop market.

On Audacity I tend to agree with you. I keep it installed even though I also have Ableton simply because, as a basic sample editor, or where I need to do a format conversion, or a quick top and tail, or some normalisation, it's actually the better tool for those kinds of jobs.

You can even use it as a multitrack recorder and sequencer at a push, but it definitely starts to fall apart as compared to commercial offerings at that point.

Still, as a sample editor, it's a great tool.

I stand corrected, I did misread that.

I think the desktop versions are a different story though, if you have access to those.

Maybe LO is a touch more difficult to use, but in functionality, I would choose it every time over MS Office. Especially the Office 365 versions suck. They are sooo buggy. One example: Move your selected cell in online MS Excel quickly using 2 arrow keys, like down + right or up + right. Sometimes it will simply delete cell content. wtf.

With Libreoffice lacking a proper Outline Mode (no, the Navigator doesn't count), I find style-powered document structuring difficult to do in Libreoffice whereas I pretty much live in Microsoft Word's Outline Mode.

That's what most of the complaints I see about LibreOffice (and many other free software alternatives) end up being, and while I understand why that makes it difficult to switch that's not really a fault of LibreOffice.

Both workflows suck compared to git.

> While Office 2013 and onward have full read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict, Microsoft has not yet implemented the strict non-transitional, or original standard, as the default file format yet due to remaining interoperability concerns.

From the very Wiki article you linked. I guess this means, that when you implement the standard to its fullest, you can still have issues opening MS Office documents, because they themselves do not adhere to the standard.

This is not a good argument against cloud lock-in. All of that could be done and still allow perpetual local use.

I don't understand what's so difficult about writing basic word processing software with an autosave-esque function that doesn't disappear one's thoughts on a digital whim.

Ooh-kayyy...

Losing data is unacceptable.

There, FTFY. HTH.

The issue I find with many OSS projects is that they just kind of copy the features of the professional counterparts instead of focusing on the UX/workflows for each use case. The result is that they remain only kind of poor imitations.

Lately however, I find more and more OSS projects that break out of this pattern. Krita for example has really focused of drawing and animation. While it doesn't have all features of the Photoshop (eg. it can't compete with PS in photography editing or design), it has surpassed PS in many ways for drawing and animation. Powerful and exotic brush engines, perspective tools, proper animation timeline with onion skinning... All of these Krita features are worse or missing in PS.

Blender, since UI redesign in 2.80, has also seriously upped their game and is becoming more viable solution with each release. MuseScore is another OSS project that is on good path to become competitive with professional products soon.

I can't say that for Audacity, Gimp and LibreOffice yet. Maybe some day. Worst offender IMO is LibreOffice. MS office has so many questionable design choices, that LibreOffice could really stand out, if they would deviate further from MS office in regards to UX and workflows.

One thing I find good OSS has in common is innovative funding of the project. They have all found a way to gather funds to pay at least some full time developers, while offering the software for free to end users with source code avaliable. Firefox has a deal with Google for offering it's search engine as default. Krita has had some interesting Kickstarter campaigns, Blender has managed to get funding from some big studios, MuseScore has paid online service etc. Offering paid support or offering another paid product that relies on OSS are also popular ways to gather funds. Anyone knows, if there is any resource on ways how open source projects fund development? They are really interesting business models, where developer are getting paid for their work and the product they create benefits many more people (as anyone can afford it) that in closed source projects.

Right clicking with different tools gives completely different outcomes. It's very difficult to use.

I used Gimp for about 10 years and it never felt natural. I figured out Photoshop in less than a half hour.

I see it a bit differently. I think the tech is as good as, but the UX...not so much.

The problem as I understand it is that, even if a bunch of aspiring UX developers decided to donate their time to these projects, there wouldn't be any extra developer time to implement the new UX. So you have a catch-22 where UX improvements don't get merged, because the people with the UX expertise don't really know how to code, meanwhile the bad UX persists, because the people with the coding expertise either don't know or don't care about UX (or in some cases they actually think the current UX is good).

It was a GUI, developed by people that hate GUI. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the new Linux desktops are really nice. They were obviously designed by people that like GUI.

I agree with this statement but disagree with the next one. Modern Linux GUIs still feel like they were designed by people who don't like GUIs. The only difference is that they now seem to be designed by the same people who design GUIs for more mainstream software... who hate GUIs but love pretty screenshots.

Most of my opinion is based on "over the shoulder" observations.

Also, X11 is ghastly. Anything looks good, compared to that.

LibreOffice vs Microsoft Office discussions invariably prompts someone to mention how much they hate the ribbon interface, usually by mentioning how bad the ribbon from Office 2008 was, as if it hasn't improved at all in the intervening 13 years. I think time has proven that that the ribbon really is a far better interface than the traditional button icons and text menus for office applications. But there are people who still adamantly refuse to accept that just like there were adamant diehards for DOS-based WordPerfect.

Gimp only gained a reasonable amount of dynamic range sometime in the past few years. Photoshop had it close to _thirty years ago_. And the GUI is ... hostile, to put it lightly. I'd love for Gimp to be a contender but I don't see it happening any time soon. Though I can finally use it for some stuff, the Photoshop envy is strong.

And LibreOffice? Oy. It's "ok....ish" for solo work (in that it doesn't actively set my computer on fire) but every time I've attempted to use it in a group setting (coworkers, friends, lawyers) I've had to apologize and fire up MSOffice. I HATE being beholden to evil cloud lock-in but at least Google Docs works. LibreOffice just mutilates formatting and brings shame. :/ Perhaps a mercy killing of Star.. no.. Open... no... LibreOffice would free the shackled developers for more fruitful pursuits.

(I really like Abiword for solo stuff, when I need more than plain text. Limited scope and it actually achieves what it tries to do.)

I think you're immensely right about infrastructure tho -- the "war" is over, F/OSS won. And that pipeline for new developers is a great point too! Plus the fact that F/OSS development is now often funded by for-profit companies who hire employees to do what they need done, and we all benefit. I get to have LLVM, BoringSSL and who knows how many thousands of security fixes for free, yay.

I can't speak to Blender and Krita, I have no experience with them. Maybe they're great and the industry standard in their field.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a miracle that it exists and is free (and Free), but the amount of work and expertise that has gone into Office has to be respected and it is just not possible to duplicate without a lot more money and time for LibreOffice.

But GIMP, I would say they are decades behind and honestly it seems to be actively hostile to users.

Telemetry for Audacity: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

The issue about the Privacy Policy (related to the above): https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213

[1] Description of the fork: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.

It seems more reasonable to try to work diplomatically to get the changes the public wants to see upstream instead of forking and crossing one’s fingers that the fork is kosher.

While the fact that their privacy policy/telemetry infringes on the GPL (since it restricts use for people under 13) might not be enough to warrant a license change (though I guess it should? It's infringing it after all), they have their hands permanently on the rug we're all standing on and they can pull it whenever they want.

Popular example of this happening is Aseprite, it was relicensed from GPL to EULA. The code is still open source, but the FOSS fork cannot just take the new changes and port them over.

And if the people that are now freely contributing code to that project to handle audio decide that they don't want their changes to be licensed in a proprietary way, well, we get a new LibreOffice... people maintaining GPL software for free/cheap seems a lot more likely than maintaining software that is proprietary and owned by some company that is uninterested in sharing the improvements they submit.

Wow, adding a CLA is much more egregious than adding telemetry. I'm disappointed that it hasn't received nearly as much attention on HN.

I wish they'd gone for a DCO.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/12/DCO.html

I can imagine a principled stand which says the fork would not commit any changes driven or informed by telemetry data, though it is not clear how that could be done. Failing that, it sounds more like "don't track me, but I'm happy to benefit from those who are" (which is effectively the same situation as opting-out of the telemetry).

Though... and I say this with a mischievous grin, as someone who writes signal processing code (specializing in audio) for both leisure and employment, I've been wanting to get Audacity squarely in my emacs, and just go nuts, with both mathematically cogent improvements and plenty of unnecessary petty stylistic refactoring, for YEARS (decades).

Now, perhaps I have some protective cover. ;-) (unless Monty beats me to it...)

Audacity is "My First Audio Editor", and people use it primarily because it's free. Quality is not a concern. Audacity is a great entry point for people who are new to audio production, but those users eventually graduate to better, more fit-for-task audio tools.

Software with telemetry is spyware.

I'm OK with telemetry as long as it's not a communications platform and doesn't forward any work (e.g. code, audio files) I do with it. Telemitry like what buttons or keyboard shortcuts I use, summarized into statistics are fine.

I'm not OK with spyware.

Muse Group could have laid down very specific ground rules: telemetry will always be opt-in, you'll be able to audit exactly what is sent, it will never contain low-level keystroke information, it will be anonymized before being saved into our database and be impossible to associate with a cloud user login. That would be the opposite of spyware! But they didn't set these ground rules, and now they have this entire uprising on their hands. I'd like to give them the opportunity to do right and learn from this experience. But they also need a wake-up call that they need to work to earn back the community's trust.

That is spyware. How I use an application should not be anyone's business. It's a hop-skip-and-a-jump to learn private information from how software is used.

For example: do you hover your mouse over an icon? Do you let it linger for a unique amount of time? Do you have a particular writing style? Do you have a particular time between each keystroke? When you crash the application do you just re-open it or go do something different? Do you exit the application cleanly or do you power off the computer? Do you use the application without a license? Does your computer clock magically change? Does your computer location move? Do you travel between cities a lot, or even countries? Do you interact with the application in one location but leave it in the background in another location? Do you talk while the application is in use? Do your eyes follow your cursor? Are your eyes looking at the application while you're using it? Do you talk about other products while using the application?

ALL of this is private information. Telemetry is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump to data mining.

I strongly disagree. The frequency with which I use my mouse to click buttons vs. keyboard shortcuts to invoke functionality in a program is not personal information, and a system that collects it is not spyware.

> For example: do you hover your mouse over an icon?

This is not private information. In fact, about half of the things you indicated are clearly not. What you're describing are points of data collection that could be used for fingerprinting, which is an entirely separate issue, and can be defeated relatively easily (by adding noise, not recording some pieces of data, and aggregating others).

> Does your computer location move? Do you travel between cities a lot, or even countries?

The other half of the things that you describe are actual spying and wouldn't be called telemetry anyway. This is a strawman argument.

> It's a hop-skip-and-a-jump to learn private information from how software is used.

Tell me how the Audacity developers knowing that I press a sequence of three buttons in a row enables them to determine that I'm single, or how tall I am, or that I like Polish TV dramas, or literally any other personal information?

This is an absurd fallacy. Even assuming that the developers somehow managed to sneak in granular enough telemetry (ignoring real keyloggers, because again, we're talking about telemetry) that they could fingerprint you, literally the only thing that allows them to do is identify when a the same person uses Audacity on multiple machines. There's no leakage of actual personal information.

You appear to be setting up a straw-man argument of what "telemetry" is, and then knocking it down again. Let me state it explicitly: "telemetry" does not include any personal data. Programs that collect "telemetry" that includes personal data are lying - and that has nothing to do with an actual argument about telemetry.

Most users are simply incapable of understanding how the data can be used. They cannot agree to something they do not understand. What users do and how is being stolen and used for purposes that they do not agree to.

The definition of private information is anything and everything that the user does. It's not a "data leak". It's straight up theft. Telemetry, by definition, is a theft of private information.

This is absolutely absurd and completely false. It is not private information that I am running a copy of Audacity or Firefox or Emacs (quite the opposite, I want people to know that I use the superior text editor), and neither does the same statement apply in real life - "anything and everything a human does IRL is private" is a similarly obviously false statement.

> Telemetry, by definition, is a theft of private information.

Again, false, because telemetry is defined as non-private data. Neither, in fact, does "telemetry" imply non-consent - you can have opt-out or opt-in telemetry, and either one can have a prompt that is shown to the user on program start-up.

No, it is neither absurd nor false.

> It is not private information that I am running a copy of Audacity or Firefox or Emacs (quite the opposite, I want people to know that I use the superior text editor)

That's your choice. But your choice should not be imposed upon others.

Not everyone wants others to know what software they use. I don't want others to know whether I use Audacity or WinAmp or Clementine or VLC or Firefox or Chrome or Vivaldi or Opera or Emacs or vi or vim or TextEdit unless I specifically choose to tell them so.

> and neither does the same statement apply in real life - "anything and everything a human does IRL is private" is a similarly obviously false statement.

I didn't say anything and everything IRL.

If you're in your own home then everything you do in your home should be private. Likewise when I'm using my own computer then everything I do in that computer should also be private.

Alright, because you don't seem interested in making an argument about this, and merely responding with a "no": provide a commonly-accepted definition for "private information" that fully substantiates your claim.

> That's your choice. But your choice should not be imposed upon others.

Nobody's choice is being imposed upon anybody? I never said that people shouldn't be able to opt-out, and I don't believe that, either.

> I don't want others to know whether I use Audacity or WinAmp or Clementine or VLC or Firefox or Chrome or Vivaldi or Opera or Emacs or vi or vim or TextEdit unless I specifically choose to tell them so.

This is a fallacy - not all of these programs have telemetry.

> I didn't say anything and everything IRL.

That's the real-life equivalent to your unfounded claim about the digital world.

> If you're in your own home then everything you do in your home should be private. Likewise when I'm using my own computer then everything I do in that computer should also be private.

I reject both your analogy, and your claim that things that you do on your computer are always "private" without further qualification. Instead, I ask you to tell me: what is the possible harm that can come from the Audacity developers (not the world in general) knowing that someone, somewhere is using Audacity, and what buttons they're clicking?

You need to improve your reading comprehension.

> provide a commonly-accepted definition for "private information" that fully substantiates your claim

I've already provided a definition of private information. You're rejecting it.

> I never said that people shouldn't be able to opt-out, and I don't believe that, either.

People shouldn't need to opt-out. People should need to opt-in if they want it. Opted-out should be the default state.

> This is a fallacy - not all of these programs have telemetry.

No of course not because some programs actually respect users' privacy.

> what is the possible harm that can come from the Audacity developers (not the world in general) knowing that someone, somewhere is using Audacity, and what buttons they're clicking?

What buttons do you press? There's no harm in telling me. Do you use my music app? If I change the EULA on the app and then send an update to you, what data can I steal from your computer? Can I steal your bank account information? When are you asleep? Can I find out when the best time would be to port your phone number? When are you most likely to be at work and nowhere near home so that I can muck around your home computer without you bothering?

What possible harm can come from Audacity developers holding private information? Clearly nothing at all. NO harm could ever ever come from knowing what software people use, or how they use it. Nope. Notta. Zip. Zilch. It's not harmful in any way. Speaking of which, what buttons do you press to unlock your phone?

It absolutely can be uniquely tied to you. Whether or not it is personal information doesn't matter: it is still spyware.

> This is not private information.

Yes it is. What I do on my own computer is absolutely private information.

> Tell me how the Audacity developers knowing that I press a sequence of three buttons in a row enables them to determine that I'm single, or how tall I am, or that I like Polish TV dramas, or literally any other personal information?

It's not just three buttons in a row. It's every button over the lifetime of the installation. It's uniquely what buttons you press, where, how long you might hold the mouse button down, what songs you listen to, in what order, did you double-click them or drag them to a playlist or go through a menu; do you set a playlist and forget it or do you interact with the playlist often?

Just because you are unable to see how to do it doesn't mean that it can't be done.

It is unquestionably spyware. Any data which leaves my computer without my approval, is spyware.

As others have noted, 20 years ago this was not even remotely a question. Any application sending any data at all that wasn't directly part of its functionality would spark outrage.

It is sad that somehow spyware has become normalized in some circles. It's never ok.

"In software, telemetry is used to gather data on the use and performance of applications and application components, e.g. how often certain features are used, measurements of start-up time and processing time, hardware, application crashes, and general usage statistics and/or user behavior. In some cases, very detailed data is reported like individual window metrics, counts of used features, and individual function timings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry

I would encourage you to re-read my post, if that is how you took it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was. I had a rude version in mind, believe me. My post is very short and the sentence-diagrams not particularly complex, as far as I can tell.

[EDIT] frankly, the "nicer" ways I could think of to say it all felt passive-aggressive as hell no matter how carefully worded, so I stuck with simple and direct. Re-reading the post was apt, respectful advice.

Could the entire OS be considered spyware? Should Win 11, which is expected to have mandatory MSFT account, be considered something worse than spyware?

Look at libreoffice. it is not as good as office or google docs or something else but beyond the 7.0 naming thing, the users are happy with its gradual improvements. i don't care about getting the latest and greatest. I can go to apple for that and pay a bag of cash for it. Instead i commit my time in solving bugs, much like the rest of developers. i am happy with that pace. same for audacity. the software has been going for years at the same pace. as a user, i find that pace perfectly acceptable so when this company takes over the management and wants to run it in their idea of telemetry and not allowing children to use it and "cloud features", i suppose that calls for a fork

It's definitely the flashy brand, so my endorphins go crazy when opening up their packaging, but the actual quality leaves plenty to be desired.

So in a niche situation that I can't quite think of a purpose, it's useful.

Best in class?

For example, "Fixes" is the entire commit message for https://github.com/temporary-audacity/audacity/commit/d9f30b...

Commit messages like these do not inspire a lot of confidence. It would be a lot better (and easier to compare the original and the fork) if the commit message was something like "[Remove-Tracking] Remove SentryHelper.h and sentry ADD_EXCEPTION_CONTEXT usage"

It's really not that big of a deal. When it comes to this sort of thing, the important thing is that the tracking code is actually and fully removed. There is no way to tell that from a commit message. The commit message could be written as you suggest and it could be a lie. With a either good commit message or poor, the code still needs to be verified.

Some pivot.

So "New" Audacity doesn't track you.

Yay for not being tracked and having FOSS.

Even as Google ruins their reputation, we can always fork and abandon our dictator.

Heck I'm already using a Chrome fork.

I have a weird relationship with Google. I'm thankful and disappointed. With Apple/Microsoft/Amazon, I'm just disappointed.