Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

I'm not sure I find "we wouldn't be the first victims" all that reassuring.

Hey, someone had to argue for the other side. I tend to agree with this, but my argument is that monopolies are not bad for customers as a whole. Windows and Xbox users would welcome this change because it makes their lives more convenient, with more value for their money. In actual fact, it turns out that monopolies tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers. It's competitors and their customers (or in this case, free software users) that it tends to affect negatively.

Monopolies have produced some great things. Take AT&T and Bell Labs, perhaps the most prolific monopoly in history, which resulted in UNIX, something that continues to have a ricocheting effect on operating systems today.

I don't find that argument very convincing for monopolies in general. AT&T was a kind of monopoly we don't see nowadays: a very highly regulated monopoly with profits limited by law. Those can have positive effects, particularly if, like AT&T, they're so-called "natural monopolies". Bell Labs became a thing because AT&T was able to make far more money than it was allowed to have exist as "profit", so they had to find something to do with it. Although, AT&T had its downsides as well. But if you're going to allow a "natural monopoly" to exist, largely because duplication of infrastructure is inefficient, then it's probably easier and less prone to abuse to just make it public than to try to regulate it effectively enough to stop it from abusing its power.

In general, though, near monopolies only fail to abuse their customers if they are in the process of trying to achieve the real thing. Once they've got a lock, they jack up the prices, slough off the service, and stop innovating. Monopolies do not tend to have positive impacts on a business' customers. It may happen now and then, but it is far from typical, and any positive impacts from structural factors will tend to be swamped by negative impacts, certainly if the monopoly is at all solid. And Microsoft certainly is no exception; Linux and Apple are probably the only reasons Windows doesn't suck far more than it does.

I'll concede that I was wrong to say that "monopolies tend tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers". I should not have implied that, in general, monopolies tend to do more good than they do bad. Good points on AT&T. I agree that, in the long-term, Microsoft's power over the industry would be bad for their customers. However, I don't think that monopolies are bad in every situation. Counter-point: streaming.

While I don't do much streaming myself, I've heard a lot of complaints from people saying that it's so much harder now that every company has its own streaming service, each with its own ever-shrinking pool of shows. When it was just Netflix, costs were far lower, and you got access to far more shows. Now, everyone has pulled their shows off Netflix, Netflix has raised their prices significantly, is trying to integrate draconian monitoring software from Adobe to ensure viewers can't share their logins with people in another house, and in general produces worse original shows. This is because there is a lot more competition now. Back when Netflix had a near-monopoly on the streaming industry, customers paid less, got more shows, and could share their logins with friends. And because of how successful Netflix was, they could attract better talent to produce better originals.

Let's take another example from the anime sphere (in the west, at least) that has gone in the opposite direction. Just two years ago, we used to have Crunchyroll, HiDive, Funimation, and AnimeLab. Each of these companies streamed a mostly-different pool of anime because they tended to deal in exclusive licenses. Many hate HiDive because it's just another streaming platform they have to subscribe to if they want to watch a particular show, even if they have some of the best features in the industry. Now, AnimeLab, Crunchyroll, and Funimation have consolidated into one company. While Crunchyroll has stopped their free tier and slightly increased their prices, this is far better for customers because they get many more shows for a similar amount of money all in one place, save for the occasional shows that HiDive and Netflix 'take hostage'.

Why is all of this an issue, you might ask? Because of a 'creative' monopoly called 'copyright'. When you create a work, you have an exclusive right to commercial exploitation of that work, and streaming companies generally negotiate an exclusive license with the copyright holder to stream that work. Now, you could argue that if the government didn't allow the copyright holder to sell exclusive licenses, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's also not true. If we did that, the environment would greatly favour Disney, because they produce and own much more content than any other one company, and why the hell should they put themselves in a worse position by selling licenses to use their own work to Netflix?

So, the crux of this issue is that copyright exists as a monopoly. Naturally, this argument applies to patents as well. So given that, I'm curious what you think the normal state of affairs should be to improve the situation for customers—should copyright be abolished, or drastically shortened from the death of the author + 75 years? Or is this a scenario in which you would prefer to preserve this 'creative' monopoly and have one company (perhaps government-owned), like Netflix, stream all media? I believe that the copyright period should be a little shorter than what it was before 1926, and that all copyrights should be registered.

(I initially considered including this in my last comment but thought it was quite long already, because this situation is why I believe what I do about monopolies)

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

I'm not sure I find "we wouldn't be the first victims" all that reassuring.

Hey, someone had to argue for the other side. I tend to agree with this, but my argument is that monopolies are not bad for customers as a whole. Windows and Xbox users would welcome this change because it makes their lives more convenient, with more value for their money. In actual fact, it turns out that monopolies tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers. It's competitors and their customers (or in this case, free software users) that it tends to affect negatively.

Monopolies have produced some great things. Take AT&T and Bell Labs, perhaps the most prolific monopoly in history, which resulted in UNIX, something that continues to have a ricocheting effect on operating systems today. Even Microsoft started with a UNIX-based operating system. Bell Labs are responsible for a great many technological innovations, which challenges the common wisdom that monopolies encourage stagnation and discourage innovation. It turns out that AT&T had so much money that they just let their scientific employees do whatever they wanted, because that tended to result in interesting stuff being discovered, which tended to make them more money.

Of course, you could make the argument that thanks to the US Government's antitrust regulations, UNIX followed a path that it otherwise wouldn't have: selling source code licenses to universities, resulting in interesting stuff like Berkley's Software Distribution of UNIX. But ultimately, I don't think it would have made any difference to Linus Torvalds whether UNIX's source was available or not, because it was still extremely expensive, and it certainly didn't help BSD eat the world. Had UNIX been commercially exploited from the start, I think the only difference would be an increased urgency to develop a free software operating system (and a more standardized environment for AT&T customers).

Not all monopolies are good. I can think of a few off the top of my head that make my life worse. But some of them can have a lot of positive impact on customers.

Do I want Microsoft to have this much control over gaming? No, but I certainly wouldn't feel sorry for Microsoft's customers if it happened.

Edit: And if you're familiar with the fable of Microsoft v Netscape, there's a monopoly that ended well for customers everywhere. Thanks to Microsoft, they standardized the idea of browsers everywhere being free-of-charge, which forced Netscape to pivot into Mozilla, which resulted in a great free software browser (that was also free-of-charge) that subsequently took market share from Internet Explorer because it was a better browser that supported open standards (some of which it had invented itself, like JavaScript) better than the competition.

If Netscape won, what would the world look like? Microsoft would have had to charge for Internet Explorer instead of bundling it with Windows 95 and future editions. Netscape wouldn't have been forced to innovate. Mozilla Firefox wouldn't exist, nor would any of Mozilla's other great free software programs.

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QuoteThis consolidation of power is never a good thing for consumers as a whole.

I would challenge this. Windows customers get access to a much larger library of games on Game Pass for the same value, which only has a positive impact on them. There's the worry that companies with so much power over an industry will use their position to enact anti-customer policies, but realistically, what will Microsoft do? Increase the price of Game Pass? The only reason it's so well-loved is its low price, so they can't increase it by that much, and even if they do, it has enough value that it would be warranted. They're a company, in the end, and their mission is to make a profit, so they do actually have to cater to their customers.

Actually, one could argue that Epic challenging Steam's stranglehold on its market has had a negative impact on most customers. They need to go to a separate store, install a separate launcher, and create a new account just to buy an exclusive game they want. Customers actually prefer monopolies because they are more convenient.

Certainly, there's the more practical concern that Microsoft will publish more exclusives, and they're in a great position to do so, but this makes little sense to do right now. Microsoft makes hardly any money out of Windows from the general audience because they usually get it for free; they make money out of Windows licenses through OEMs and more importantly, big businesses. No, money from general audiences comes from software and services. That's why they've made such a large investment in Game Pass, and why they don't care if Steam Deck users buy it as well. The more people that buy their service, the better. Making games exclusive to Windows makes no sense in the current climate, but making them exclusive to Xbox does.

Even then, it seems unlikely Microsoft would stop publishing to the PC market now, because there's a lot of money in it, so it would really mean starving out Sony's Playstation and Nintendo's Switch platforms. That's why they've shifted big name games like Halo to Steam in recent years. I'm not excited about another Amazon, of course. But I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBottles is really nice...I hope they fix the issue with Japanese character encoding, however, because all of the games I play outside of Steam are Japanese visual novels.

As a fellow VN player, Heroic works better for me. It's easy to add games (and have the cover appear), it can use both normal Wine and Proton, and dictating what winepfx to use is easy (so you can use the old guide's prefix which is still the best option for VNs in my experience), plus they have a playtime tracker for me to use when reporting to VNDB and HowLongToBeat as well as auto Add Game to Steam.

I think it's fair if you still prefer Bottles, but Heroic is just more to the point for me.

I think Bottles has a great, nicely-designed interface...although I can't say much more about it because I've never gotten a game to work on it.

Thanks for the Heroic recommendation, that does sound quite nice. I'll give it a shot.

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Bottles is really nice...I hope they fix the issue with Japanese character encoding, however, because all of the games I play outside of Steam are Japanese visual novels.

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Makes me wonder whether Valve will bother to work on a native GNU/Linux version of their next game.

I do love Portal, though. I'll have to give this a shot tonight.

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Quoting: AvikarrI will never understand why people still prefer to spend a lot of money on Adobe, for example, instead of supporting and using open-source solutions.

As much as I share the sentiment, it's because the free software solutions are not equivalent. GIMP is the easiest to pick on, so I suppose I'll start there. GIMP lacks:

• Non-Destructive editing (a crucial aspect of any professional workflow)


• Smart Objects, which Krita implements as File Layers


• The ability to draw a square/circle as a vector object, of course


• Vector shapes in general.


• Preview for a lot of effects, last I checked


• The lack of non-destructive editing means every effect is applied directly to the layer, and to undo a single effect, you need to undo all of the effects you added afterward


• A simple way to anchor the image to the center of the canvas, below an image, etc. I've tried to use the alignment tool, but it breaks my brain. Maybe one of these days. With Affinity Photo, you just hold shift and it'll snap.

One thing I do love about GIMP is that selections have handles.

So, because I despise Adobe's rent model and invasive watchdog software, and Affinity's suite is not free software, I've donated to Zemarmot to help get these features implemented faster (and to help get floating selections axed). And the near future is looking quite bright with GIMP 3.0 finally, actually, around the corner. But I'll be using Photoshop/Affinity Photo for the foreseeable future, at least for work.

I've tried every free software NLE available. I've tried Cinelerra-GG, Blender VSE, Kdenlive, and Olive. Cinelerra-GG has the most features by far (like NVENC), but the interface is the wonkiest thing imaginable. And it also seems to get colors wrong unless you really know what you're doing. The fade transitions are...not fun to use. And it's not cross-platform. Olive's transitions are broken currently and it lacks sophisticated color grading controls. Blender VSE is so unoptimised that I end up needing to do extra work I don't have to do in other NLEs, like specifically converting layers to use Alpha so video layers like lower thirds retain their transparency. Kdenlive is probably the best all-rounder, but their interface is also a bit jank and cumbersome to use. They recently had a fundraiser where one of their goals is to fix that, so I have high hopes.

Unfortunately, Kdenlive is prone to crashing under not that much load. Don't import too many videos at once, or it'll crash. Don't add too many keyframes to unstable effects or it'll crash (which ones are unstable, you will only find out after the fact).

In the meantime, I'll be using DaVinci Resolve...on macOS. Because of H.264/AAC patents. And using Kdenlive where I can.

Natron is a nice node-based editor, but there are far fewer templates on the market to work with. If you just want to get something nice done quickly and cheaply, After Effects is far better simply because of how many templates are available. DaVinci Resolve's node editor Fusion is viable for the same reason. Also, Natron had even fewer developers than GIMP for quite some time, so they've been stuck on Qt4. Hopefully, that's changing in recent times with some new contributors coming through the door.

There are no free software PDF editors that come close to Acrobat Pro. Somehow.

Scribus might be good print layout software, but we use inDesign. That's hundreds of books that we can't just convert over to another software; these clients might (probably will) come back some day and we'll have to pull out the Adobe subscription and get to work making changes. Same argument goes for most of the software on this list, by the way. Before the argument is made that Adobe's formats are not interoperable, I know that at least .PSD is an open format, freely available. The primary issue is, why should unpaid or underpaid volunteers spend so much of their energy supporting a file format from another program?

Inkscape is nice, and with .eps, you can work on files between different programs. I like darktable well enough, but I've only used it a few times. I am not an artist, so my usage of Krita has been limited (mainly for smart object support), but I've heard great things about it from quite mainstream artists. It follows closely behind Blender in reputation, and while they have nowhere near as much funding as Blender, Krita is most likely second on this list.

EDIT: Audacity is also great. They recently got non-destructive editing! And they're working on using a more modern toolkit. Audacity was already great, but it's getting better.

Blender is the exception, not the rule. I'm not a 3D artist myself, but Blender is very impressive. It seems like professionals are actually using it for relatively big productions, too. It also gets millions of dollars in funding every year, and has a whole foundation setup to support full-time development and maintenance of features. But even Blender didn't start this way. It was just as jank as the rest of the software on this list 20 years ago. But it's one of the rare examples of free software that was able to achieve sustainable funding - right from the beginning, even, when that fateful 2002 fundraiser was run (the Blender story is really interesting, by the way).

And if that weren't enough, even if all of these free software solutions were fantastic, bug-free software full of amazing features even Adobe doesn't have, you would still need to hire people who know how to use them. Or potentially spend thousands of dollars retraining them. The fact is, Adobe provides a lot of value to businesses by creating a popular industry standard. Businesses can hire from a large pool of creatives that know how to use Adobe software, which is really not that expensive even for a small business when compared to the amount of money you can make with the products you use these tools to produce.

But I am definitely excited about Blender getting even better. I really love some of the open movies they've produced (Sprite Fright is my favorite by far) so I wonder when this year's one will release.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualbut for professionals, there is a big gap because some software is not available—namely, Adobe/Affinity Suite. If OEMs like ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Acer teamed up to work on WINE for a limited number of important creative software like Adobe, Affinity, Ableton Pro, Microsoft Office etc., that gap could be closed in a similar way (essentially what CrossOver does, but more successful). The problem is that the hardest thing to get working is often the DRM, not the actual functions of the software...so Adobe would be the hardest. And it also seems...unlikely to happen. But that's what it would take.

Well, I quite agree there. I myself found, while I was working from home during pandemic closure of my workplace, that while for the most part I had no trouble using my Linux desktop for work (documents on LibreOffice were fine and our specialized library stuff is browser-based), wrangling .pdfs without Adobe stuff was really bad or just couldn't be done, depending what I was trying to do.

Well, maybe if System76 get big enough, they'll collab with CrossOver about pushing that.

As someone who regularly works with .psd, .aep and .indd files for work, there is no replacement for Adobe software for me. Just supporting Adobe software (all ~5 of the big ones, PS, AI, PR, AE, IND, LR) would make GNU/Linux viable for a lot of professionals. Of course, this is far from easy. There was a time when CrossOver supported Photoshop, back in the CS2 days, and Google SoC was helping with this. That time is long gone. Adobe's DRM is among some of the most complicated and invasive on the market today. As close to an official statement as you'll get on supporting DRM in WINE:

Quoting: WINEIn an effort to make copy protection more effective (i.e. resistant to cracks), the methods used by many copy protection products have become complex, difficult to understand (obfuscated), and hard to debug. In some cases Wine would need to be altered to allow for almost rootkit-like functionality of programs to get some of these copy protection schemes to work. To support copy protection Wine developers have to contend with undocumented interfaces, code obfuscation, and maintaining compatibility with *nix security models.

So while it might be possible, I think it's going to require a lot of resources to support and maintain as Adobe continues to make it harder to support.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIn the end, most manufacturers of the ill-fated netbook switched over to Windows. Predominantly because Microsoft offered Windows licenses for less than they do on more powerful devices.

Microsoft made Windows free for those OEMs (while forcing an insipid specs list that would ensure netbooks lost out to tablets), and had a concerted FUD campaign about customer hostility to Linux.

But for manufacturers to consider doing something like that, or other things using Linux that I have not thought of, generally requires a bit of momentum, an example showing the possibilities that gives them the confidence that this isn't an insane doomed idea. The Steam Deck represents that example and momentum, so I think it creates a moment where doing Linux stuff on specialized computers is significantly more business-possible.

It's very frustrating to learn that Microsoft murdered GNU/Linux on netbooks, leaving the market open for Google to move in with ChromeOS when there was still a good deal of time for mainline distributions to mature on that architecture. Likely the first time GNU/Linux came close to achieving its original goal of powering a desktop computing device in any significant way.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyConsider the way, before the Deck came out, even here on GoL lots of people were saying well, all the users will rip Linux out and install Windows. It didn't happen, like at all, and now that idea as a general piece of "what happens when you sell devices with Linux on them" lore is significantly weakened.

I would expect most people to just stop using the device over installing another operating system on it. It's just not something most people are comfortable with—even the more technical audience that the Steam Deck is aimed at. I think this opinion was misguided even assuming the Steam Deck was this massive failure it didn't end up being.

For a personal computer, ChromeOS or GNU/Linux make similar sense, though you at least know Google has your back with ChromeOS, but for professionals, there is a big gap because some software is not available—namely, Adobe/Affinity Suite. If OEMs like ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Acer teamed up to work on WINE for a limited number of important creative software like Adobe, Affinity, Ableton Pro, Microsoft Office etc., that gap could be closed in a similar way (essentially what CrossOver does, but more successful). The problem is that the hardest thing to get working is often the DRM, not the actual functions of the software...so Adobe would be the hardest. And it also seems...unlikely to happen. But that's what it would take.

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Quoting: omeganebula

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAs for why ffmpeg's x264/x265 can be freely used by free software media players that distribute their software to users like VLC, it has been suggested that France cares less about software patents than other countries (I don't know how true this is).

It's true. France couldn't care less, since there are no software patents in the European Union. This is not country-specific or a softer attitude, but an explicit rejection of the entire concept of software patents. Nobody pays software patent fees here.

I researched this at the time but could not find a clear-cut answer. See, for example, this page on the End Software Patents wiki: https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/Software_patents_exist_in_Europe,_kinda

And this page: https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/Do_software_patents_exist_in_my_area

Quoting: endsoftwarepatentsFor example, the European Patent Office grants software patents. Courts in Germany have mostly rejected them, but courts in the UK have upheld some. This uncertainty reduces the problem: although there are 70,000 EPO granted software patents, the patent holders rarely go to court because they're afraid their patent will be invalidated.

This doesn't prevent the harm. Software patent holders in the EU can still threaten software developers, and they can demand sums of money. If the victim doesn't have enough money to defend themselves in court, then the patent holder might "win" and thus get money or market control even though their patent is probably invalid.

For France specifically, it's listed as part of a patent pool for H.264/AVC: https://web.archive.org/web/20110114054025/http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx

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