Why Are Open Source Alternatives So Bad?

if you've ever tried to switch to Linux or maybe you're just tired of paying absurd amounts of money for Adobe products every month I'm sure you've heard of the open source alternatives to Big software like Photoshop or Premiere don't want to use Photoshop just use no Final Cut Pro just use Kaden live tired of paying for illustrator just use inkscape and you've probably tried some of these programs the problem is if you've tried them you've probably been disappointed now I don't mean any disrespect because by themselves these programs are pretty good you definitely can use them successfully to edit photos or videos but we don't only have available if we want to edit images of course we have to compare them to their contemporaries and these tools just get blown away by their competition let's take again as an example in you still can't outline text you can't draw shapes there's no adjustment layers you can't select multiple layers and that's even if you can find where anything is due to the confusing UI and that's not even just comparing it to Photoshop even photop which is a free Photoshop clone that runs in your freaking web browser built by one person is way better than now is fine I use it to make my Youtube thumbnails but there's no denying especially for professional work is basically a toy compared to something like Photoshop a professional would never consider using it's always going to be condemned to hobbyist use and if I want to use I know that it's going to take me longer to make something in it than if I had used Photoshop and this isn't just coming from some hater I've used both Photoshop and in the past for years and one is just objectively easier to use than the other now some people will defend these Alternatives by saying that it's just a different workflow I've even said this in the past and it is true but so many things just take longer and are more inefficient to do compared to their competition it's not just a different workflow it's usually a worse one and that's just one example for years people have complained about the outdated UI missing features or the constant crashes and bugs you run into when using open source Alternatives and software makes a big difference I've heard thousands of times how somebody would love to switch to Linux or Break Free of big Tech but they couldn't leave behind Photoshop Premiere Lightroom or fill in your favorite piece of software here in this video I want to explore why open source software is usually inferior to the closed Source Alternatives but it doesn't have to be this way we'll see how open source software actually can be just as good if not better than the AL atives now if for some reason you don't know what open source is it's software where the source code is open so anyone in the world can contribute if they want right now you can open up your favorite open source applications code fix bugs add features or just take a look this is of course in contrast to proprietary software where the source code is locked up and controlled by one company these open source projects are usually part of the free software movement and it's not just about free software where you don't pay anything for it free software is about respecting users Freedom contrasting with big Tech that wants to harvest all your personal data make you addicted to their product and lock down their users free software lets you do whatever you want with it with open source you can change things or contribute if you don't like the way things are going now open source has come up with tons of great software most great open source software is fairly small and only does a few things but it does them well one example is git a simple command line tool for Version Control and it's used by thousands if not millions of companies around the world there's also open source projects that are run by huge companies but still leave the source code open for other people to use or copy like Firefox for these use cases open source works really well and has produced amazing software used by millions of people but the middle ground between these two is what we're going to be talking about I'm talking about the midsized open source projects for end users they aren't as simple as a command line tool but they don't have a huge organization behind them these are the gimps the Caden lives the inks Scapes and the dark tables of the world and this is where the biggest issues with open source start to show so one reason why these open source projects aren't able to keep up with their competitors is because it's become so much easier to make money with software now before opsource projects were one of the only ways to Stick it to the Man if you wanted to make your own software back then the only people who could easily make money with software were huge companies like Microsoft and so back in the ' 80s and '90s if you wanted to release soft software that can compete with the Giants at the time you probably released it for free and open sourced it but these days anyone with an app idea and a little programming knowledge can create an app over the weekend monetize it with stripe and make thousands of dollars a month the barriers have been broken down and if you want to sell software you don't have to go through the big financial institutions anyone can sign up for a payment processor like stripe or publish it in an app store like apples and have them collect the money for you so independent develop ERS these days are much more likely to sell their software rather than donate their time for free sure you'll have your activist types that believe that software should be free and respect users freedoms but at the end of the day these people still need to put food on the table too and sure there's plenty of people that still contribute to open source but most of the time it's something you do for a hobby or maybe you contribute for a little while after you graduate University to Pat out your resume a little bit but most people don't really stick around because for most projects there's just no money to be made there that's why most independent devs you see these days are more likely to opt for creating their own small closed source application rather than contributing to open source we also have to talk about the UI of Open Source software now I'm sure you know how bad a lot of Open Source software looks in the open source world the '90s never truly ended but it's not only about the Aesthetics if the UI is not laid out in a coherent way it's going to be difficult to even do common tasks or to even find a tool you're looking for all right so we're going to do a little speedrun transforming text in the closed Source photo P versus the open source let's start with photo P go and we just grab this scale it move it grab the text change it and done and now let's do the same thing in starting now so let's move the text and I'm moving the background let's move the text and then rotate it with the rotate tool and text not the background rotate this and grab the scale tool or just the unified transform tool and I'm skewing it um scale it and then we can edit the text but I can't edit the text without losing all of my modifications so what happened here well let me explain most people working on open source projects are developers and they're usually very good at programming but not necessarily much else the problem is that rating good software is not just about having good code sure that's part of it but a great piece of software usually has a team not only of programmers but designers a quality Assurance team to test the software and to deal with bugs and Leadership to have an overarching vision of the project and when there aren't dedicated designers on the team you do get a design but not a purposeful design you get an accidental design more often than not this ends up being a bad design and the problem is there's basically no way for designers or anyone else to join the project easily unless they are also skilled programmers services like GitHub where these products often live are usually built to cater to developers needs and to a non-programmer it's basically impenetrable uh what's GitHub what's a repo where do I submit bugs and even if you want to report a bug or suggest a feature you have to do it the way developers want it done which is great if you're a developer you're used to doing things this way but you know developers have a very let's say tur way of communicating which works for them but normal people aren't going to get it and they're going to leave when this happens you're no longer listening to what the actual users of the software want only to the needs of the developers which may be very different than the end users and since there is only one team the developers there's no design team there's no QA team it's just random people picking a task to do off a checklist fix a bug add a feature tweak a setting with this approach it's easy to see why there isn't always a clear coherent Vision unless you have an organization or company overseeing the project I think for small open source projects like a command line tool or a simple program that does one thing well it's a fine way to do things but for these huge user-facing projects if they actually want to rival big software they need to have some kind of organization and management like it or not they're just too complex to manage the project the same way you would something smaller in scope so the issue with open source Alternatives is that most of them are just subpar yes often times they can still get the job done but for me making a video in an open source alternative like Kaden live takes three times longer longer than doing it in a closed Source software like Da Vinci resolve and it's a big problem for people that want others to try Linux or preach about how open source software is better than proprietary software there is a lot of good about it you can have software free of big Tech and their terrible decisions and selling of your data I agree but it's hard to convince someone to come over to this side of the fence when you expect them to also get by with inferior software and the biggest stumbling block I always hear is how you can't replace photoshop with or live without Outlook for work or edit videos without a proper editor but it doesn't have to be this way open source can be done better I know this because other open source projects have broken the curse let's take a look at one success story blender is a free and open source 3D modeling and animation software that Rivals some of the biggest proprietary software and it's actually good as such it's used all the time by professionals they have a giant page listing tons of huge companies that use their software in commercial projects that you've probably seen before so what's the difference between blender and something like first of all blender has a much better UI than most open source projects I know that one of the biggest complaints about blender is the obtuse UI but it's designed in a cohesive way it's complex but it has to be now I'm not a 3D model or an animator so I'm taking other people at their words but the overall design is coherent and has a high standard of Polish this is because the team behind blender created a dedicated design committee and really standardized the design because because sometimes you just have to do things that other companies are doing every new Photoshop competitor copies photoshop's UI in some way because obviously it works but a lot of open- source devs like to do things differently just because they can which usually leads to unusable software with weird design decisions in an interview with the founder of blender he had this to say about why blender succeeds where other open source projects don't he says that's why a lot of people hate open source projects so much they don't listen to users and they're only interested in their own beautiful nice code and I didn't want that I like to work with artists to get artists on board to work together with the developers to always make sure that whatever we do there's always a user breathing down your neck telling you yeah that's nice but I would like to have working hair I want to have better rendering the things you actually need for production and as such blender is used by tons of big companies they make money and actually have a small organization and some level of management and they make tons of money from professionals and the companies that use it because you know professionals and companies usually have a lot more money than hobbyists as another example the open source email client Thunderbird is also doing better than ever after years of suffering with the same problems that most open source software like this has if you were to take a look at Thunderbird a couple of years back you'd probably agree that it was a pretty subpar email client the UI was dated and it hadn't seen any big improvements for years it was lagging behind almost every other email client out there but over for the past couple of years they've been picked back up by Mozilla and now they have a dedicated team that's actually working on it for all I complain about Mozilla they're doing a pretty good job they've already had a successful redesign with a lot more coming soon it's not perfect yet but they've made good progress they're bringing in tons of money the future looks bright and when you open up Thunderbird they even ask users to donate and it seems to be working because donations are an oldtime high it might be something for other open source projects to take a look at now of course I don't have all the answers I've only ever contributed very little to open source but it is possible to build great open source software for end users now of course I don't mean any disrespect all of the devs that have spent thousands of hours building these tools there are a lot of great tools that have been built by the power of Open Source and I use them all the time but there's no denying that if they want to be more widely used there's a lot of room for improvement and I'll be rooting for them but until then the next time you open up your favorite open source project and see the issues with it you'll know why and maybe you can donate to help them make it a little bit better

Channel: Eric Murphy

Views: 391,071

Keywords: gimp, photoshop, open source, open source software, free software, foss, oss, open source alternatives, photoshop alternatives, kdenlive, premiere, final cut pro, photopea, linux, video editors linux, image editors linux, free alternatives, thunderbird, darktable, inkscape, olive, openshot, shotcut, kde, gnome, libre, bad ui, ui, ux, design, macos, windows, blender, closed source, proprietary, proprietary software, foss software, fsf, alternatives, gimp 3, gimp 3.0, what is gimp, linux video editors

Id: nHQv4blla7g

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024