I'm thinking about completely removing non-free software from my life. What will I miss the most? Flash will be the killer, since some services I like use Flash, but oh well.
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Anonymous2015-02-05 4:59
mp3, but everyone should download in flac and convert to other formats themselves, in which case .ogg is free
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Anonymous2015-02-05 5:22
Windows. Linux is complete garbage, from the executable format to the kernel design to the pseudo-Unix philosophy to the hardware support to the users.
Photoshop. Ever tried enlarging your dick in GIMP? Of course not, unless you are a faggot. Enlarging your dick in a gimp? Leave it to the open source community to name their flagshit software after a gay sadomasochistic practice. The name is no misnomer either, if you give your program away for free under the GPL you might as well be Stallman's gimp.
Microsoft Word. Unless you want to ride Oracle's dick and wait for Ellison to sue you for a gazillion dollars in back licensing fees. You could use LibreOffice or whatever the fuck it's called, but you're still using the same garbage the Sun cranked out to show that you could make real programs in Java (while they hoped that everyone ignored that most of the suite wasn't written in Java, and if it were, it would perform like Windows Vista on a TI-82). Libre, as in liberty to use a word processor that willfully ignores the last 15 years in UI design advancements. Just like all other open source shitware, it's going to end up reducing the entire GUI to a single button and expecting you to edit a config file and recompile your kernel to change what it does. Good luck getting any work done.
VMWare. There are a few alternatives put forth by the FLOSS community (odd name, because I haven't met any who showed that they knew how to brush their teeth), but they are all useless. First off there is Xen. Xen's goal is to make you recompile hosts every time you need to update Xen and to use as much resources as possible. Probably a conspiracy to sell more RAM. Next is kEmu. What the fuck is that? Is it something to do with KDE? Moving on is Qemu. Yeah, it does part of what VMWare does, but not even close to a tenth of it. All is good for is emulating Windows for you when some fuckstick decided that he would look smarter if he installed Nigger Linux on a computer you had to use. Then, there's lxvm, and it's use is not to be a good virtual machine, but to cram as many onto the physical hardware as possible so hosts can oversell resource. And to top it all off, I don't even know if it's open source! All I know is that it's garbage and my VPS provider uses it's shittiness as an excuse for why they can't let me mount files as filesystems.
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Anonymous2015-02-05 5:41
I can understand using mainly open software, but going completely without seems overly difficult. Like you said, flash is popular and you'd be missing out on quite a bit by not using it. Plus a lot of drivers are propriety, so you'd either need to buy open hardware or hope there's open drivers that can work for you closed hardware.
The thing that will really get you is when some git sends you a form in a Microsoft Word propriety format that doesn't open properly with LibreOffice. I hate when that happens. I need to go find a Windows computer just to open a damn file.
FOSS more than covers the scope of computing that I'm interested in. Text editing, compiling/debugging, and web browsing make up 99% of my computer time. I use Photoshop once a year maybe, MS Word even less than that. FOSS is not simply a software choice. It's a lifestyle.
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Anonymous2015-02-05 6:07
Flash is an unacceptable security vulnerability regardless if it is closed source or not.
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Anonymous2015-02-05 7:24
>>5 Unless you browse with javashit completely disabled, you're running proprietary software almost every time you access a webpage. Just because you can read the source of said javashit (if it hasn't been "minified" and obfuscated already) doesn't mean you have any more rights to it than you do to a typical binary.
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Anonymous2015-02-05 8:25
It's not enough to simply cut proprietary software out of your life.
More than once in recent years, others have reached the same conclusion as Brooks. Some have tried to impose a kind of sanity, or even to lay down the law formally in the form of technical standards, hoping to bring order and structure to the bazaar. So far they have all failed spectacularly, because the generation of lost dot-com wunderkinder in the bazaar has never seen a cathedral and therefore cannot even imagine why you would want one in the first place, much less what it should look like. It is a sad irony, indeed, that those who most need to read it may find The Design of Design entirely incomprehensible. But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks offers well-reasoned hope that there can be a better way.
"Sex with parrots is natural and beautiful and should be celebrated" ~Richard "The R stands for ``RMS''" M. Stallman
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Anonymous2015-02-06 8:30
>>14 How old are you, kid? 12? 13? Here's some advice: stop shitposting and forget about this textboard. And any other internet forums. It will do you a lot of good in the long run.
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Anonymous2015-02-06 8:36
>>15 Stop spamming the board with my phrases! I have intellectual property on that! U.S. Patent 21317!
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Anonymous2015-02-06 10:20
>>14 I feel that "Uncle Rimmis" would fit that quote better.
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Anonymous2015-02-06 10:39
Excuse me but his actual name is RMS Marx Stalin/GNU. Please use it.