Off the top, Krita and Inkscape. Haven’t transitioned yet, but I have ceased receiving updates. Next OS workflow will no longer involve affinity.

To anyone promoting Affinity, they’ve sold out to Canva, a Venture Capital fueled mega corp looking for a public offering. Enchittification is inevitable.

Please look for FOSS alternatives instead.

I’m not thoroughly aware of their dealings, but these amounts of private investment aren’t going to pay for themselves. If you raise 100 million, investors typically want a billion back, or more.

From the looks of it, Bitwarden might’ve tried to go with the Open Source model to get free development resources, trust (because it’s an open source PASSWORD manager), and general goodwill. But now that they’ve deemed that got enough of a market share (or investors are starting to breathe down their necks), it’s time to start raising the walled garden.

Even if they claim after the fact that it was a “Bug” that the client couldn’t be built without their proprietary sdk. The very fact one exists is a bad enough sign, specially when its influence is spreading.

VC is a devil’s bargain. Raising VC money is NEVER a good sign.

I wonder~ I wonder~ I wonder whyyyy…

I stand in solidarity with Godot.

One very much agrees, the ideals of socialism are certainly interesting. The current model is a bit of a joke, but it is the world we live in, and we have to shift from the status quo if strive towards other ways of doing things.

But moreover, if the system isn’t owned by an organized body whose members chosen by the people. Then who owns it? Who operates it? Who makes the calls on what decisions ought to be made? The people can demand change, but someone needs to heed that change and delegate workers to do the change.

Modern governments (mainly democracies), in THEORY are supposed be a representative of the people. The people vote for politicians that supposedly want the same they do. Law is written, bodies are created and demolished and so the wheels of society spin.

Problem is that accumulation of wealth opens the door by buying the mouths of democracy. If you have friends in mass media, half the work is already done. Humans are lazy and unlikely to act upon politics unless they are directly threatened (and even then, not that frequently)

Again, I agree. It’s just hard to picture a different world. Power generally works best when it’s distributed, but how exactly it’s destributed is critically important, as well as the mechanisms that ensure that it its purpose is not so easily perverted.

This is actually an interesting proposal. In fact, many utilities went the way of nationalization like water and electricity. Searching the internet, socializing and ensuring a fair market are all also things which could in theory be nationalized given they fulfill a basic need.

Of course, as they are, they would grant whichever government they were given untold power over the entire internet and our lives. Which seems rather… unbalanced. Moreover, no government should retain that right given the internet transcends borders. No one owns all of it.

Letting the free market run its course with no breaks clearly didn’t work particularly well either.

Perhaps a third option? Instead of one government ruling all of it. Perhaps they were to be owned by a supranational body where several governments can propose and discuss changes/regulation and keep balances on each other? UN style? Worthy of discussion.

If anyone has other ideas I’d love to hear them.

PS: (Also, when one suggests nationalizations such as this, one does not intend for a nationalized framework to be the ONLY one. Alternatives brought upon by the free market would still certainly compete with any such services.)

The one owned by the state.

I’ve been tired of “modern” security doing nothing but annoy people. Recently, a Portuguese bank “innovated” by exclusively allowing login only on a mobile device. Yes, a clean web browser with 3FA is not “secure” enough, has to be done on a mobile device. Clearly, desktop PCs are too insecure to conduct transactions.

Therefore, because one does not trust their mobile device. One simply spun up a clean Pixel VM, shared my data with Google and just did their work there. Peak security.

I love it when marketing manages to spin Armageddon levels worth of copyright infringement into “spirit of the law” just because a program is magically called “AI”. Machine Learning is just pattern recognition software.

Software that runs on data assembled from petabytes of copyrighted information… And then promptly resold to us.

We may decide later on if it’s okay to do this. But I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t for the labels we’d have legal WW3 happening right about now.

I’ve already tried Linux several times over the years. My problems were mainly poor program compatibility and RTX card related driver issues for the latest attempt. At the time I couldn’t afford to change since critical work related programs did not run at all properly on Linux. Albeit that has changed in time. Also, because of the AI craze, NVIDIA has finally shipped decent drivers to linux land.

What prevents me most nowadays is mainly having to setup everything, which I’d rather do once when upgrading the whole system. The Power User moat has been filling over time and the confy guys upstairs are non the wiser.

It’s the third god damned time I find newly installed MS software doing “something” in the background that I never authorized. I don’t even have Onedrive. I purged that sin from the metal as soon as I had the chance.

I already intend to change OSes. The real question is now if I do it when I decide to upgrade, or in the fast lane. Which is it Microsoft?

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Not strange at all. Even though it was a success, it wasn’t a cash cow and only had limited ability to be milked though micro transactions and other revenue opportunities.

When the axe comes, all that matters is the numbers in the balance sheet. Creativity, enjoyment and artistic value be damned.

Correction, AI in the LLM/Diffusion sense is a decent tutor for cheap. Can cobble together rough temp art, and if used by an actually capable artist, make cool stuff.

Anything else and it’s a garbage firehose, it’s the undisputed king of mediocrity. Which, given the standards of SPAM and the modern web, is exactly what it’s being used for.

What a shame.

If the assignments are in Maya, you’ll have a hard time passing the class in Blender.

Long story short:

• They pledge to keep the status quo. (IE perpetual licenses in new versions)
• Development is going to speed up.
• Subscriptions are 99% coming. (Albeit optional at least at the start)
• Free in schools. (IE training new artists in the Canva ecosystem. So they can be milked later. Here’s a personal anecdote: Maya, the paid 3D alternative to Blender is free in schools. Come out of school and it’s 235$ a month)

&

• Now throw all those pledges out because words mean nothing. This is not a partnership, this is an acquisition, and unless the contract is provided for us, in writing of the agreed upon terms. Nothing else matters but the actions that we’ll see in the near future.

Sigh… Why…? Why is it too hard? Why is it that in this day and age, we can’t simply have something we pay for and keep with no worries. Once I started owning software, Affinity was my choice. They had a long track record of not selling out, retaining high standards and a fairly priced transaction.

You pay for good software, the company works hard to make the software better, and then sells you a better version that you can upgrade at your own choice. Plain, simple and honest.

Nothing lasts in this day and age.

You used to be something Serif, but now you’re in the big leagues along with Adobe, and against them you’re nothing.

Undramatic PS: Affinity Designer is damn solid, like it more than big A’s Illustrator, shame I’m now afraid of pressing the update button >:(

EDIT:

What a straightforward and clear way to put it, thank you kindly!

Been a Windows user for a really long time. A few times I tried to switch over to Linux, but it just wasn’t doable for a myriad of reasons. Windows 11, I have words with it. Many bad ones, but thankfully there are many users like me that for one reason or another did not switch and put time in to beat the badness out of it via mods.

Windows 12… I’m not so sure if I’ll even “upgrade” to it. It really depends on how much Microsoft decides to wire up the OS to their servers. Look, I wouldn’t mind at all if I could have “smart” tools with AI assistance, but the problem for me is the lack of choice. Currently, if you don’t use their crap software, what mostly travels over the wire is telemetry, and if you go offline no harm done. But make no mistake, useful AI models are too fat to run on most computers. Heck I built mine with AI in mind, but will Microsoft even give me the choice of using my own AIs? (Here’s a hint, it starts with N, has a V and ends with an R)

But what if the OS starts requiring it to be online only because of their AI features? Maybe we’ll have to start paying for Windows again in subscriptions to pay for the obligatory AI? Or what about scrubbing options away from the settings so you can’t “misuse” your own device and have to ask nicely to their AI to do it for you?

There is a road here, and I do not like it. Thank goodness Linux is better than it has ever been.

PS: As for the notepad thing, I’m completely in agreement that it should remain without AI. Such a simple tool for scribbling down notes should be kept lean, simple and fast. Things that Microsoft and their engineers have long forgotten how to do.