Just recently, I used GIMP 3.0 to create what will become a sticker on the side of a dozen hockey helmets.
It was a small project but it probably went back and forth a dozen times as each version delivered sparked new ideas or new questions on what was possible. Layers, filters, alpha channel, Smart Selection, and working with text and font outlines were all essential.
I don’t do all this stuff all the time. There is no way I would ever pay for Photoshop. Yet, my standard Linux install had everything I needed to get it done. And it was not that hard.
Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.
Agreed. They have a lot of the required plumbing now. There are some non-destructive editing workflows in GIMP.
I think holding back 3.0 for so long was a mistake. It no longer matters though. It is out now and it can be improved dramatically without such a long break between the dev version and stable.
Also, treat hime like he treats you. Just lie to him and never do it. If he ever complains, just say it never happened. Lie to him again to get whatever concessions you want. Repeat.
It is a shame this was so obvious. Even though I saw it a week late, it was so obviously an April Fool’s joke that it was not worth reading past the headline.
I love that RiSC-V is already so well supported in the Linux kernel even though the hardware is not really out there yet. When decent hardware does arrive, a fairly mature ecosystem will be waiting for it.
Compare that to ARM which took quite a while. There is already more of a culture of getting device support into the mainline for RISC-V than for ARM even now.
I do think decent RISC-V kit is coming. The existing players like SciFive are getting there, we know big players like Qualcomm and Samsung have projects, and future disruptors like AheadComputing see RISC-V as their attack vector on the current industry. And for sure China is going to surprise with a decent RISC-V offering at some point—maybe Alibaba, maybe Huawei, or maybe someone else.
I own a computer store. There is a guy outside that shines shoes. I pay him about $30 a year to shine my shoes. Business has been pretty good and I like nice shoes. He never buys a computer from me (says he cannot afford it).
Clearly he is taking advantage of me because we have a huge trade imbalance. Nasty, nasty guy. I am hitting him with tariffs soon.
I use Chimera Linux which is musl based. Compatibility is great. If you have the source, you are probably fine.
It can be a pain for projects that ship binaries as part of the build. Two examples that I have run into:
The Ladybird browser uses vpkg and the version their scripts download assumes Glibc. You can build vpkg itself on musl but the whole process is a pain.
dotnet requires a binary build of dotnet to bootstrap from. There are musl builds available but they assume GCC and Chimera uses Clang. Not really a musl problem now that I think of it.
Anyway, I use a Distrobox of Arch on Chimera. If I do run into something (like the two above), I just pop into that and problem solved.
Flatpak is essentially the same solution as they run in a container and the freedesktop base is Glibc based.
Not only is musl not generally a problem but, these days, it is trivial to work around it.
Older MacBooks and MacBook Airs (pre-2018 or so) make awesome Linux machines and have really come down in price. If you can find one cheap, I highly recommend them.
Intel machines later than that have T2 chips and are still good but take a bit more research.
M1 Macs are pretty well supported now but that is a different universe.
Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.
Why do they?
They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
How do we explain that?
There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.
Why not?
Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.
How about OpenSSH?
It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?
Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?
According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.
The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?
I agree.
Just recently, I used GIMP 3.0 to create what will become a sticker on the side of a dozen hockey helmets.
It was a small project but it probably went back and forth a dozen times as each version delivered sparked new ideas or new questions on what was possible. Layers, filters, alpha channel, Smart Selection, and working with text and font outlines were all essential.
I don’t do all this stuff all the time. There is no way I would ever pay for Photoshop. Yet, my standard Linux install had everything I needed to get it done. And it was not that hard.
Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.