It's just like for Windows , but we're so used to the software that we've learned to work around.

When you switch, you are met with productivity loss and learning new quirks, which makes the experience less than stellar.

In today's context, for the vast majority of people, if it isn't easy to use, they won't use it because pretty much every app and software has become plug and play (except niche software that looks like windows 3.1)

A company I worked for has had such a bad experience with the Microsoft business suite that they actively avoid using any MS products at all costs. They started offboarding a year ago and they STILL haven't managed to get rid of everything

Gimp is great for when you need photoshop, but aren't doing it as your job, and don't want to sail the seven seas.

Also, Fwiw when I want to outline text in gimp i select a text path, make a new layer, select from path, expand the selected area 2px, then fill (oh and move the layer behind the text layer). Unike in photoshop where theres like... one step, iirc.

Krita is also fantastic and better than most closed source drawing software

KiCAD is also getting almost as good as some of the closed source ECAD software and is definitely good enough for small companies not doing flex designs. It is by far the best hobbyist-targeted ECAD

Libre office is perfect now for small companies. It is only missing a couple of small office features. Maybe PowerPoint power users would have a hard time making morph animations

Bitwarden is pretty much the best-in-class password manager for companies too

OBS is the gold standard for streaming

VLC is also the gold standard for media players

Bitwarden is the only one that has SaaS backing and the rest is volunteer driven, but with different funding models.

I hope by 2030 KiCAD and FreeCAD will be much more prolific in the professional space for small companies.

You can easily add an outline around text in gimp once you learn the process.

Give me a minutes, I'll type it out.

I am a very irregular user, but last few times I checked there were much better options to Gimp for people like me. Photopea is where I turn to, but I think there are others. Works from the browser, functions similarly enough that you can find help and tutorials very easily, pretty light.

I'm sure it's different for heavier users, but a lot of the really heavy users will probably prefer the paid tool anyway, as their use makes the price tag less of an issue. So the target for something like gimp might just have dwindled into something too small to get the momentum back. No?

seriously, really helps learn troubleshooting too, not just throw and error number at you and close.

But, this seems to imply that there is no jank in software made by big corporation.

I can think of very few examples where the paid version is better, usually the reason the masses use the paid version is billion dollar marketing campaigns and adopted standards.

More relevant perhaps, corporations are not incentivized to make a good app they are incentivized to be just better than the free version so that enough people don’t switch that the free version becomes the default version, keeping open source code perpetually one step behind because they can always dump 10 billion dollars into improving a minor annoyance as long as it keeps their product the standard de facto product.

It's the dark patterns for me. I recently switched from Plex to Jellyfin for my media server and it was night and day. My server was front and center on the client with absolutely zero bs in Jellyfin, while in Plex it's been buried and shuffled in with a mountain of garbage ad supported content I never wanted

Blender Foundation I think has perfectly balanced the quality that comes from a centrally managed project with the community and adaptability of its open source nature and the support of the community.

They have a managed hub where a lot of fantastic community plug-ins reside but just as many high quality plug-ins are hosted elsewhere. They also do their best to bring in exceptional talent from the community officially into the Foundation like the hiring of the old Animation Nodes plug-in creator to work on Grometry Nodes and revamp all the other node based workflows in Blender.

The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people.

Most advanced software has a learning curve. People who have invested a bunch of time and energy learning Walled Garden OS will find other Walled Garden apps easier to use than folks who grew up in the open-source wilds.

That is a big reason why big OS companies (Microsoft most notoriously) practically give their software away to college kids and junior developers. Gates was even quoted saying something to the effect of "I'd prefer software pirates steal Microsoft Windows today than use a competitor tomorrow"

I prefer OSMand over Organic Maps, because it has much more features, just the map renderer isn't as pretty.

But I mostly use it for pedestrian and bike navigation. But I think car navigation works very well as well.

Also, if the map data isn't so great in your region, you can try playing StreetComplete and help improve it yourself.

OSM is the Wikipedia of map data, and offers likely the most detailed map that we have.

Use Organic Maps