IninewCrow

Great idea because the merch acts as an advertisement to support the project and create awareness. It’s the main reason why corporations like Adobe are so successful - they have a pervasive marketing campaign. We should do the same and wearing a hat, t-shirt or bag would help do that.

Now you got me thinking about what to buy from the projects I like to support. Thanks

Thank God … I’ve been on Gimp and Scribus for the past 15 years, mainly because I could never afford Adobe products for the little bit of work I needed them for.

I was open source a long time ago because I just couldn’t afford paying for stuff for the little time I needed software. Now I’m happy to be fully open source and even contribute with donations to the projects I like the most. I donate annually now to projects like Wikipedia, Libreoffice, Scribus and Fediverse developers and projects.

This is one criticism I’ll always have with open source supporters … if you want open source alternatives, contribute with donations to them. Give anything you can afford … $1, $2, $10 … because they need money to survive and stay engaged and committed to their project.

If we all just stand aside and take advantage of free open software and not give anything, then we are no better than the corporations we were trying to avoid. Instead of corporations taking advantage of us, we are taking advantage of developers.

So if you want these open projects to live and survive, contribute to them with whatever you got. If we all just gave a dollar each to these projects, no matter what they are, the developers would have more than enough to maintain their work.

And whatever you contribute, it will be far less than the hundreds of dollars annually you would have given to a big corporation that would have just counted your money as profit and not directly contribute or support the actual developers.

Throws old man cane to the side and starts dancing

Hooray I’m young again!!!

… breaks hip because he is actually still old

Throws old man cane to the side and starts dancing

Hooray I’m young again!!!

BSOD

Blue Soda Of Death

Can you also install ads if you wanted to?

/s

Exactly … If all you’re going to do is go online and maybe write a document once in a while … a simple distro like Mint or PopOS will just work without issue.

For 90% of the public that is not attached to a major business, corporation or institution … Libreoffice is more than enough.

And even for small offices and small groups or companies, LibreOffice is more than enough.

The only difference comes when you have to set up a mass system with hundreds or thousands or systems and people to interconnect an office system do the big companies opt for Microsoft office.

“We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard”

The previous social model of monetizing everything is also not working and terribly complicated and sends the majority of the profit to those who contributed nothing but their claims to ownership and entitlement. I’d rather live a world where we were constantly debating and discussing while sending the majority of wealth to those people who actually created something.

Human cooperation will never be easy so we have to learn to live with that reality.

This is what I enjoy most about the Linux experience, like you say it is a very human experience that everyone likes to share.

When is the last time you had a noob online or anywhere tell you they booted up their system with a fresh new install of a new to them OS that they found called Microsoft Windows or Mac OS

To me, and I’m just a novice that is capable of knowing enough to destroy my system, any time I hear or read someone new who ditched a commercial OS to become a Linux user is an amazing accomplishment. It means the person who did so went out of their way to use something they had to work for, not with money but with knowledge, experience and trial and error.

Every time I hear that story, it makes me feel good and hopeful for humanity because it’s one more person who broke away from an all powerful corporate master.

I’ll never get tired of hearing these stories or seeing these posts.

I was probably too hasty in my assumptions … simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist

I just thought it made economic sense … why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company’s and country at risk by a foreign power.

Thanks for the correction and insight … I’ll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.

India is the eye opener … an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS … it’s going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there … people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.

Edit: I don’t normally make big corrections or changes to my comments but after rereading this, I think I went a bit too far with my assumptions about another country and culture … thanks @embed_me@programming.dev for putting it to my attention

This one’s for Gnu!

Hannah Montana Linux?

It’s a matter of slow growth. If it all happened fast with a huge user base, things would break and stop functioning in more places and more often … which would drive people away.

It’s better to just grow everything slowly and steadily. It’s better to be reliable, than the biggest and fastest.

I’m here for the long haul. And we’ll probably look back fondly at this time when everything was small and just starting. I’m happy I’m here and I look forward to what is to come.

Cost and price … I could never afford much in terms of tech purchases 20 years ago.

Always collected second hand systems, first learned to find and use cracked windows copies, then when that got too complicated and difficult, found Linux and have never looked back. The amount of money I’ve saved not to paying for proprietary software, went into buying better hardware that I used to install Linux and OSS software.

It’s been so long that the two versions might as well be completely separate different programs at this point.

I’ll probably run both when the new version is available because I’ve become so normalized to GIMP 2.10

It will take me another decade to get used to GIMP 3.0

Time … it will just take time … the same thing happened at reddit, the communities didn’t just blow up overnight and they didn’t have competition either … Lemmy is evolving in an early stage and it is handicapped by a competitor, so it will probably take longer to grow.

I don’t mind it though … we’ll probably talk about it all in four or five years that right now are the good old days of Lemmy.

I got started in Linux about 15 years ago. I’m not skilled nor a techie but knowledgeable enough to make things work. After running endless cracked windows machines I switched to Linux and started distro hopping. But I didn’t have enough money at the time to afford a lot of hard drive space.

I remember going from one distro to another while trying to transfer a couple of GBs worth of work on the same drive. Two GB of data was a big deal to me at the time. At one point late one night after about the tenth distro attempt, I wiped an entire drive worth of my unbacked up work. Worst moment of digital loss I ever had.

I’ve kept double triple and quadruple backups since then … and I still worry about losing data.

What kind of distro is that?