But in my opinion, treating mass produced books like they're this sacred untouchable object is ridiculous. They're not "source" material, they're just a copy as well, and they're not "priceless" by any means. They're very reasonably priced, perhaps even so cheaply priced that books can be bought in bulk in these amounts. Buying used books and doing whatever you want with them is just legal. Used books, that would probably be just laying in some warehouse, or recycled anyway.
If there's anything to have gripes with, it's the copyright system that makes it easier to take this legal route.
Calligraphy pen/tool is still unusable, messy and less responsive (lower resolution, more angular, etc), much worse than in 0.92, and it's been this way ever since 1.0. It also now requires windows ink to be on, and they removed devices panel so you can't even tell if your device is recognized properly. It's bad with a tablet, but it's still just as bad and much worse in comparison even with the mouse. It's kinda disappointing to see this bad of a regression to just linger there for years. Here's the issue for this problem on their gitlab https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/1473#note_...
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
One thing about pen tool that can be kind of tricky to adjust even in 0.92 is Mass parameter, where even in that version there's not enough granularity literally just between 0, 1 and 2 (it honestly could use about a 100 levels to adjust between just 0 and 2), and the lack of granularity and pen control is made even more severe in 1.x where there's not enough granularity even between just 0 and 1, and even 1 already feels much slower than higher settings in 0.92. Though I'm not sure if fixing that would even be that pressing at all if it was just brought up to 0.92 level of performance.
I don't know if anything is solved in 1.5 dev build yet, but the calligraphy pen there seems to be even worse than before and worse than even in 1.4.4. It's frankly impressive. I take it nobody actually uses that tool for drawing at all (which would explain a lot really), otherwise the issues with it would be immediately glaring a while ago.
It's a dev build for a reason. The canvas itself has performance regressions, especially prominent on Windows. You'd have to wait for the development to happen, otherwise I'd like to see patches.
It's not so much "waiting", but rather semi-curiously checking roughly every year if anything changed whenever there's a new 1.x release popping up somewhere like this, and then promptly going back to the old version that actually works.
I remember my car broke down, it was trash worth maybe 200 in scrap metal at the time. The tow to the yard was like 100 or something. I was screwed and couldn't get rides to work. My buddy lent me a car he had for free. I did not complain once to anyone about the things wrong with that car, and I never will. I even fixed some small issues with it to return the favor. The guy and that car saved my livelihood at the time.
I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.
If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.
Eh. I draw the line in a slightly different place. I think saying that some piece of software is bad is not an attack on the developers. It doesn't imply ill will, or entitlement or any of that. People are allowed to write whatever software they want. And its generally net positive to share that software, for free, with the world.
These things are true at once:
- Good work inkscape developers! Inkscape is used by lots of people. I'm happy for the developers and the users, and I hope inkscape keeps getting better.
- I don't want to use inkscape because when I tried it, it seemed ugly, slow and buggy.
The only problem here is when people equate "this program is junk" with "this person is junk". That's a very dangerous belief to have, because it makes an enemy out of practice. And an enemy out of experimentation. The road to expertise is paved by mistakes. If bad quality work makes you a bad person, you can never learn a new skill.
I think you are right. But I also know what it's like to be on the other side of it. Taking it personally isn't the big issue.
Instead of celebrating a release the top comments are things like "this one thing doesn't work therefore trash, and unusable". Which reads like coercion for the devs to go spend a bunch of time and prioritize their life to satisfy someone at the free all you can download buffet.
The thing that sucks about it is. The devs will go fix that thing. Make a new release. Then the top comment will be some other bug, because all software has them. Then if there are no bugs it will be something else like the devs cousins dogs affiliation the the neighborhood cat. It just gets old to me.
I know what its like to be on the other side of it too. I've had plenty of things I've done posted to HN over the years. I've gotten all sorts of comments.
Honestly, I'm chuffed and always a little surprised when people read what I've written, or when they like my work. If someone says your software has a bug, that means they liked what you're doing enough that they took time out of their day to try it out. It means they care about the problem you're solving enough that they want you to fix it.
I'd take criticism every day over getting no response at all. Criticism of features means you're solving a problem people care about. If the feature they criticise is obscure, it means all the other features are working better.
I don't know if that point of view is teachable though. Even knowing all that, I feel criticism incredibly acutely in person. Stepping on stage and showing your work to a crowd is terrifying. But I think its good for us. It tempers us, somehow. Makes us more real.
As an open-source developer, feedback is about 1% of what I need. Contributions are the other 99%. However, the reality is flipped where what I get is 99% feedback (issues/feature requests in the issue tracker) and 1% contributions. And this is not a "significant regression", I use Inkscape very often for graphics work and it works great for me. And it does not "justify" regressions, but if you are not willing to fix it yourself, you have no right to do anything other than kindly request a fix, not complain about it. And btw, I don't search hacker news for "feedback", I search my issue tracker.
There seems to be pervasive opinion among FOSS enthusiasts that the software being free and volunteer made is kind of get out of jail card for not only criticism, but often simply just feedback.
I deeply appreciate that FOSS exists. But - subjective feeling - in general it always had certain reputation for jankiness and user unfriendliness. Sniping down feedback "because the software is free" certainly contributes to that perception. If I have a choice between free, volunteer made software that's unreliable or doesn't even work for some of my use cases, and a commercial, but non-free product, I will be pragmatic about it and choose the latter.
Because the authors don't owe you anything. You aren't giving them a single thing. They don't have to justify a thing. There is no SLA, no contract, nothing.
Feedback is fine, but there are so comments being things like "ermahgerd I paid nothing for this thing and a feature wasn't working What the actual F!". Go file an issue and fix it yourself buddy.
Users don’t owe the authors anything either. If they want to ignore longstanding complaints, they can toil in obscurity.
Heck the only reason this post made the front page of HN is because of lingering goodwill that was built up when the software was actually decent. Now that it’s regressed into uselessness, the goodwill is drying up. I, frankly, don’t have any interest in the software anymore, since it was rendered unusable. I recommend everyone steer clear of it as well.
I don't think it really matters if they are on the front page of HN. It's free software they don't need to market it right? Maybe it helps them find people willing to contribute to the issues though. So there is that.
You are free to do that. I've only used inkscape like half a dozen times. It was fine for me.
Yeah, I'm keeping it in mind. 0.92 still works great. There's basically nothing that's so severely lacking in 0.92, or anything that would be so enticing in 1.x, so there's no pressure to switch at all, and it may as well stay broken forever.
It's a little odd to me that the tool regressed so badly in 1.x and stayed the same for five years though, even despite some apparent attempts to fix it, for something that i assume is a core tool (it's right there on the toolbar), though maybe not so much if it's so low priority that it stays unaddressed. It's not a situation where people are asking for something new to be added, it's a feature that worked fine before that got broken years ago and stayed broken. It's frankly bizarre to see hot new releases get touted year after year, while a part of core experience just stays broken.
But again, it's kinda fine because the old version is just there, it just makes for a bit of an odd caveat when recommending it to people, for them to stick with the old version because it works better (well, actually works at all). It's a little unfortunate for the new users that might not know that and will just get the latest version and won't experience a feature properly though. (like, if I was a new user to it and picked up any 1.x version and tried the tool there, it would be clear that it's unusable for drawing and it'd be immediately dismissed, even though it actually works pretty great in older versions)
Inkscape is the only software that I see people get so defensive about when criticised. I even had the lead dev appear in my mentions and try and start fighting me on twitter when I complained on my own timeline about the performance on macOS. Weird culture
I think I know who you're talking about then :) Yes, some years has passed and they are no longer active (and we have a leadership committee instead of lead devs now).
Maybe there can be some kinda suggestion box and a voting system for suggestions or existing things? Like an open suggestion box, where people could submit potential entries and vote on whether they belong there and are dead or not. And for existing entries, to vote on whether something is truly dead or not, like 'yep, this is dead', or 'nope, this is still alive' (some things may be less popular, but that's not them being dead/actually completely discontinued and defunct). Not necessarily for ranking or putting it together into one score, but perhaps just showing a number of how many people think either way about something
also, 'Coming up in the graveyard' makes it sound like something's gonna arrive here like it's newly dead, like it's about to be shutdown with a deadline, when it's just anniversaries, which really should be clearer at the top of that box
Especially americans? The popularity and demand for homogenous american products and services (and other similarly homogenous things from other countries) overseas shows that it's not just "especially americans". What point would that even make? If anything the amount of people and customers of such things worldwide could easily outnumber just the people who live in one country, even as big. Desiring a level of service is not really a "uniquely american" thing. Perhaps there's also some impression that there's some "international homogeneity" that blurs things and makes it seem like it's coming from one place (even though it's a mix), but seemingly "cultural and local" things in other countries can be no less homogenous. Going from one japanese ryokan to another you're gonna experience the same level of homogeneity.
All of them are optional and can be disable at the instance-wide level, in addition to some of them having account level opt outs.
They also are still generally bound to an instance's own horizon: there's no global "trending feed" (and it would be really hard to create one), these optional "algorithmic" tools still differ from instance to instance based on what that instance follows and its trading relationship to its neighbors.
File - Overwrite file, that's been there for a while. It can be turned into a hotkey, it's unmapped by default, and I don't think that'd change nor should it change, given how user hostile that'd be, the long history of how it works in editors like that, and with how they lean towards non-destructiveness of it all. Also, that just sounds like perhaps a simpler editor would be a better fit, like Paint.
4) The Bluetooth standard is just kinda bad. Technically there should be enough bandwidth for better quality audio, but the existing profiles like headset mode drop audio quality down to 8-16 kHz sampling rate in mono, not just for mic but for audio you're listening to as well. It's a huge flaw and it's been bad for decades with seemingly no improvement at all (at least certainly not in a way that could be widespread and commonly used).
It's so bad you'd almost wish for a brand new wireless connectivity or wireless audio standard, or even resort to some proprietary 2.4 GHz nonsense, because it's genuinely so horrid. You could have the best most expensive headphones in the world, but because of Bluetooth and its ancient profiles and mic support it's gonna have baseline absolute garbage mic quality no matter what.
If it was a pure communication platform, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Social media as it exists in mainstream life is an advertising platform which happens to have a few methods humans can use to communicate with each other. But that's a bug, not a feature.
Tech companies are involved in lobbying, so maybe it's not as irrelevant or unconnected as you might think. Fees are how they make the money that goes into it.
But in my opinion, treating mass produced books like they're this sacred untouchable object is ridiculous. They're not "source" material, they're just a copy as well, and they're not "priceless" by any means. They're very reasonably priced, perhaps even so cheaply priced that books can be bought in bulk in these amounts. Buying used books and doing whatever you want with them is just legal. Used books, that would probably be just laying in some warehouse, or recycled anyway.
If there's anything to have gripes with, it's the copyright system that makes it easier to take this legal route.