If people wanted to pay for shit piracy wouldn't exist.
Right, but they pirate what? They pirate the industry standard. Adobe, Office, Windows. Because people think these commercial packages are more valuable. Even if they just browse the web and occasionally crop a picture. They prefer expensive software, even if pirated, because they think it's more valuable and reliable than something free. This is shifting veeeery slowly.
And a portion of those users will eventually start using that package professionally and pay for it. That's the power of a monopoly.
And I think you are VASTLY underestimating the amount of time it takes to become proficient at a professional level at new software. A week? Get real.
Well I had switched from Photoshop to Gimp in a jiffy, and from Windows to Kubuntu in a weekend. That was 20 years ago when things were much more raw and resources were much more limited than today.
Most software that do similar things are also very similar in nature. The features are mostly the same, the icons are mostly the same, layout is a bit different but understandable or tweakable. It's not learning a completely new skill from scratch. You apply layer masks, filters or curves in the same way regardless of what the program is.
I guess one exception is video editors, but there isn't one standard in that regards anyway. Premiere is not the monopoly there, and people stick to Vegas or Da Vinci Resolve. But you can still move from one to another in a week or so if you know what you want to do.
Yea yea, I know, keyboard shortcuts. Well if you use different kinds of software at the same time, you have different kb shortcuts anyway. Take 3 various programs of different kind (so not just bitmap editors) and take a guess how to deselect a selection. What do we have those big brains for than to figure shit out?
And if we're talking about the top 0.01% of users that can actually use most of the features of such heavy software, well those aren't gonna be satisfied with some vibecoded alpha thing.
I might point out there is huge resistance to changing proprietary software too.
Microsoft doesn't give me that choice.
And here we are. People bitch, but then they comply and adapt. If you "have" to, you'll learn a new UI, you'll use a new file format, use an approved peripheral or you'll throw out your working computer. That's the power of lock-in and the "default options".
If Adobe or MS can completely overhaul UI and people adapt, then clearly it's not that much of a deal, is it?
And I have looked, the problem is all discussions start out with "If you want to do this, use this distro, if you want to do that, use that one."
That's just because everyone has their favorite distro, not that because they're actually that different. That's a Linux-specific thing and doesn't apply to other kinds of software as much.
Most of the time, you have one dominant option even in FOSS that most people will agree on. Office Suite? Libre Office. Graphics editor? Gimp (although it's been going out of favour for a few years). Vector editor? Inkscape. Video editor? KDEnlive. Audio editor? Audacity. Video player? VLC.
But even in terms of a distro, Ubuntu or Mint (same thing really) are generally taken as the default. If you ask ChatGPT how to do something in Linux, it'll default to Ubuntu options.
But hey, remember when MS was offering Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate, Embedded, Fundamentals, plus N and E editions on top of that? Hm, maybe having options isn't that horrible after all. (Most people just ended up pirating Ultimate anyway, because that's the "best".)
I just want to do the stuff I'm doing in Windows, with as little work on my part as possible. And getting a native PhotoShop clone on Linux helps a lot with that, I need Daz Studio and Comic Life to be there too. Without spending half a week figuring out a comparability issue, I want to get comics done.
I think you're placing too much faith in the vibecoded alpha clone that it'll be any better. It may take years for a large program to be fully ported/cloned with feature parity and stability.
WINE on Linux, that I'll look into when I get fully retired, I now have an extra Machine I can try that out on. I still have to juggle that between keeping up my comic output, making changes to my sites, including this one, and frankly real world stuff like cleaning my house. Only so many hours in a day.
I'm not trying to push you into anything, but it's really not that complicated. I had figured it out 20 years ago over one weekend. These days I use Bottles that installs all the frameworks and stuff for me, and can keep a separate environment for every program if you want.
People enormously overestimate how difficult this stuff is.
Of course they are willing to adapt when it is forced upon them.
I'm kind of a loss here. "Of course"? Doesn't that just prove it's doable?
The only other choice is finding alternatives, they've looked, and the other alternatives were way more time consuming.
It depends, but no, usually it's not. Look at MS, how was switching from MS Office to Libre Office more complicated than learning Ribbon form scratch? And how did people suddenly adapt to Google Docs when their employer switched? It's just the "Of course they are willing to adapt when it is forced upon them" bit.
It just looks intimidating if you don't know where to start, so you never do. It's like learning a musical instrument or sports. You think about it, maybe you want to get into something but you don't know how to being or what to pick. Then someone gifts you an old guitar or takes you to play basketball or whatever, and suddenly you have it in your hands, see what's it about and can move from there.
And it takes more than a week. It took me way longer than that to learn to use Photoshop proficiently. Or Daz Studio. Or Comic Life. Or Word Press. Or Xenforo which I am still on a learning curve on.
You're not learning a completely new thing from scratch, that's what I'm telling you. The skillsets are much transferable within some broad category like "graphics" or "programming". It's like when you learn Italian, and you can suddenly understand some of Spanish and French too. Switching to another program within the same category is then like encountering a new accent and learning to understand it.
To be clear, I'm not bashing AI here, it's just funny. These aren't even anywhere close the top models anyway.
