Slightly worse in design, far better in consumer-friendliness!
Slightly worse? I can actually sort and the video player actually works, instead of whatever the FUCK was going on with the other place, for literally ever.
Lemmy is Reddit with more furries and communists
Sometimes the open source equivalent is better. SmartTube is a much better app than the official YouTube app for Google TV / Android TV even though there’s just one developer working on it. Even if it didn’t support ad blocking, I’d still use it. Very nice app.
Similarly, pirate TV/movie apps often have a much better user experience than the legit ones. Compare Weyd, Syncler, or Stremio+Torrentio to the Amazon Prime video app for example. At least on Android (phone, tablet, TV), the Amazon app is garbage even though there’s highly paid employees working on it.
In both cases, the people who work on the independent apps usually care about the user experience and use the app day-to-day themselves, rather than being told to do whatever makes the most money for the company. They have no reason to lock you in or otherwise force you to use the app, and instead compete just by having a better app.
I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?
Meanwhile a bunch of nerds working for free on a passion project are giving away software that is faster and easier to use and often more beautiful to look at.
I guess I’ve simply reiterated what the post image said, so ignore me maybe, but fuck this is depressing and disappointing. All these corporate resources and all they can do is barely achieve what other people do for free in their spare time? What a fucking waste of human life and energy is capitalism.
For real open source projects, it’s a lot of the time not nerds working for free.
All your favorite frameworks and libraries are often developed in house at big companies (angular, react, vue, tensorflow, Kafka, pytorch, k8s, Jenkins, and many many more).
And even then, much of the development on them is done by people who are getting paid to use the frameworks at smaller companies.
There are tons of examples the other way too of course, but even the Linux kernel is mostly corporate commits, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and others.
This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not as cut and dry as people make it out to be.
I want to add, that language development is also often done by companies. Today for example is a Mozilla thing, and while a non profit, the devs aren’t working for free.
That seems like the system working as intended. Once enough work has gone into open source projects, even the profit-driven entities see they will make more money by improving those open source projects instead of following their default plan of reinventing the wheel and keeping it proprietary and locked down.
Honestly, it’s such a compelling point to made for why capitalism is a shit economic system. Regardless of if someone is compelled by communist/anarchist economics, at the very least it should be obvious that capitalism produces only the most profitable products, not the best products.
You need to buy an Apple-branded computer to use it (at least legally). It’s price is just included in the device you buy.
I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?
Not only do I agree with you, I also want to point out the telemetry whackamole for those who care. (And those who don’t care aren’t going to bother with the whackamole, but their privacy is being violated just the same as those who do care.)
