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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

    I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

    I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.


  • This isn’t Adobe.

    And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

    I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

    All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

    So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.


  • My educated guess would be that it would require a lot more work for very little benefit.

    Officially supporting another platform is just more work for the developers, QA and the support team. Their games do run very well on Linux using Proton. Diablo 4 has even been marked as Steam Deck Verified before its launch on Steam.

    And they work without them having to implement things like a Vulkan renderer, having to test on even more system configurations and having to teach the support team how to handle issue reports on Linux.

    So I think they‘re okay with how things are right now. Everyone can play their games on Linux, but if something breaks, it‘s not their problem.

    And, having played their games on Linux for many years now, I‘m personally okay with that. Proton, DXVK and all the other tools are so advanced by now, that I don‘t think there would be much of a difference if they offered native game builds for Linux.


  • That really depends on the service you’re looking at and what your needs are. Google probably offers the best all-round package, but depending on your needs, there are often times good or even better alternatives available.

    As far as I know, address completion is supported by almost every alternative. At least I don’t know of one which doesn’t support that.

    The quality of directions not only depends on the product, but also the method of transport you want directions for and the geographic region your targeting. For example, Google is, in my experience, very good for cars, but terrible for cycling. At least in Europe, OSM based maps generally include far more paths and details, which, combined with a good routing engine, results in better routes. I have made very good experiences with OpenRouteService.

    For SteetView-like images you’re unfortunately pretty much limited to Google or Apple. Mapillary exists, but, as it’s crowdsourced, quality and coverage just aren’t all that great.

    I think that there’s a good open alternative for most use cases of embedded maps available, as few of them really need StreetView or traffic-based routing. If that’s the case, though, you’re unfortunately stuck with Google or Apple.



  • I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

    I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.



  • While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

    I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

    Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.





  • I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

    So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.