That’s a good question, I’m not too sure since I work in IT/Software as well and am currently using kakoune. I think a lot of efficiency upgrades in other industries are typically a cost gap instead of an understanding gap. For example, a carpenter could start out with a tool like a hand saw, and then later upgrade to a band saw, but they need to pay a lot more for and find space for the more efficient tool. This can kind of exist in software as well, but the funny thing is that a lot of the time these days I find the FOSS stuff better overall, which I think sets this phenomenon apart from other industries and whatnot.

Mine are liking Mint quite a lot. They say they feel its easier to find stuff than windows.

I have used inkscape though it has been some time. I felt as though it was not super featureful at the time so the UI felt slightly barren compared to something like Adobe Illustrator, but I don’t recall having the same kind of trouble with it that I do with GIMP honestly.

I only see one on your previous comment, but it could be because blender has recently started getting a better reputation for usability/learnability.

6 years ago I touched it and I was horrified, but I touched it a few times this year and found they had made some good improvements.

That is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.

I think what you are thinking of is the ellipse selection tool, and yes this exists and can be used - however I am referring to the tool class of geometric shapes which is quite common among other software. Basically it creates a vector (In most cases I think) shape with options for stroke and fill, and controls the same way that the ellipse selection tool does (constraints etc.).

GIMP does not have this, instead you have to go through a decent amount of trouble to get simple geometric shapes drawn to the screen, and at that I believe they are always raster.

Take these procedures as an example for GIMP.

https://www.alphr.com/make-shapes-gimp/

This makes GIMP difficult if you want to use it for some niche uses such as making a quick flow diagram, or a quick vector mask which can be changed later.

True, but I prefer intuition over efficiency when I pick something up for the first time, second time, and third time, until I eventually have a good enough understanding to begin worrying about efficiency.

There are use cases for Libre office writer, just as there are for vim, even though they are both capable of producing text documents. One is arguably more intuitive while one is arguably more efficient, but if I didn’t know anything about word processing/text editing and had to pick between the two, I would pick writer.

Same goes for anything else, and it’s also why a decent number of text editors/software support emacs/vim bindings - so that you can use the software intuitively, and then once you understand it, you can become more efficient by using modal bindings. Same goes for GIMP versus other software. The thing about other softwares in the same genre is that they can be learned relatively easily and can also be used efficiently. GIMP I find harder to learn, even if it is efficient later.

For anyone who is new who has to make a choice as well - very few people would pick vim to start out with.

Furthermore, in this instance, I do have a decent amount of photo editing experience and have used multiple softwares to do it, but even after that, the problem I have with GIMP is that a lot of this knowledge does not transfer to GIMP like it does for other software. If I learn photoshop, I can get away with using affinity, krita, corel draw, clip studio, and other software - but not nearly as easily GIMP.

I would also argue that efficiency is equally dependent upon the software as it is the task. The workflow for digital painting, animation, and photo editing are all quite different, and no one UX/UI is the most efficient at all of them. This is why most of these softwares have modular interfaces, which is good, but I simply find the modular interface of GIMP harder to use or understand versus the rest.

Haha, yes the feeling is similar there, though I think I personally still had an easier time learning blenders current workflow.

Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I’m also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.

If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I’m sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu’s and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.

The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.

Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.

In the mean time, I’ve just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.

I finally just blew up my gmail the other week and not a moment to soon as it seems. Much happier with my new swiss provider.

It’s when people try to have LLM’s generate code and then try to assemble the pieces produced into semi-functional, usually really bad, software I think.

I used to perform data analysis of robotics firmware logs which would generate several million log lines per hour and that was my second job out of college.

I don’t know how you fuck up 60k lines that bad. Is he nesting 150 for loops and loading a copy of the data set in each one while mining crypto??

One time on Amazon, I purchased an air conditioner. The model they sent was not the model I bought so I went for a refund and to send it back the to the seller.

The seller representative basically tried to spin it as though the model I received was actually better than what I had tried to buy.

I told him that I didn’t care, it is not what I bought, that this “better model” is twice the width of what I wanted and it states in its manual that it needs to be on its own dedicated circuit.

The fucking guy kept this up over a few messages. I told him that if he didn’t take it back, I would just charge back my credit card because this was clearly a bait and switch

The next message the guy sends, he says that me “threatening” him by saying I’ll charge back the card is immoral of me, and makes an allegory equating it to murdering someone by shooting them.

At this point I contact amazon proper, and give them the entire message log. The amazon rep is fucking horrified and says that they will investigate the seller.

The fucking guy sends me a message telling me that I shouldn’t talk to amazon, because my correspondence with them gets CC’d to him.

I forward that message to the amazon rep as well.

The guy loses his fucking shit, starts making guesses at where I live, what I do for work, a bunch of shit. He says that he has a double major in marketing for some reason.

I demand that I never have to interact with him again. In his last message to me he tells me not to leave a bad review as it is a family owned business.

I leave a lengthy and scathing review, noting that someone with a double major in marketing who acts like this must have wasted a lot of money on their post secondary education.

I get connected to someone else who isn’t insane who in their first message sends me the slip to mail this fucking air conditioner back, and I get my refund.

Indeed, and welcome to you.

I can’t share it all here for reasons I can’t detail.

I may do a second write up at some point for public distribution and if so, I will share it with you here.

It may depend on when you purchased, but my win11 pro USB I purchased still has the ability to skip the MS account creation with OOBE /bypassnro.

I think they made the timing you had to run this and reboot trickier though because too soon into the setup or too late and it will not work.

You also have to straight up yank the Ethernet cable at some point.

I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.

I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.

The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:

• How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
• How to correctly configure and use a VPN
• How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
• How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
• A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
• Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here

I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to distribute materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.

It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them “If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let’s say it is the side of a bank”.

One said “tits”, one said “flowers”, one said “a fox”.

Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.

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I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.

I have heard that phrase before, but I am unsure what it denotes specifically.