incorrect. currently sporting an ideapad pro that i bought directly from lenovo last year and it came without windows pre-installed.

GIMP etc are not developed by the target consumers is the real problem. affinity exists literally to capitalize on adobe going subscription and their entire effort has been to basically make adobe-but-better at a reasonable end user cost to convert users. As a professional designer, I have successfully migrated to Affinity after years of waiting for GIMP and others to match adobe offering. Even now, I would still use Photopea over GIMP. If one guy can make Photopea in his spare time, then what is stopping the GIMP team from doing the same while being paid? I’ll tell you; because they have no idea what a professional actually needs.

If there was a Publisher (InDesign) and Designer (Illustrator) equivalent just like Photopea - my life would be infinitely better because I’ve long since given up hope on Inkscape etc. I could finally breathe as i leave Windows forever. Sadly, best the world is willing to give me is fucking canva, and now those assholes own Affinity - so in the end, i’m still stuck between a rock and a hard place/

i like the original meaning because it made it a lot easier to point at the bourgeois and their politics (which is currently ruining my country and the proletariat is more than willing to lean even harder into their destructive mandates).

in my country/culture, middle class is (or at least was) anyone who have earned a professional title of high esteem. i.e. a doctor. and socially they were highly respected, regardless of actual wealth status. wealthy people used to be targets of ridicule (because they tried to flaunt their wealth in public. i still remember, 20 years ago, how one of our wealthiest individuals were literally crying on TV how no one respected her for wealth and she much preferred american culture. incidentally and totally unrelated; she launched a bunch of reality tv shows about worshipping wealth after that).

unfortunately american social media and said reality TV shows have radically changed how youth and the younger generation identify “status”. i always hear about how they will be rich one day and buy a super mansion. but if you ask what the purpose of that is; they couldn’t explain it - it’s just what they’re told to desire.

so from my perspective, the next 2-3 generations are on a path to ruin in the name of capital ownership for the few.

i wasn’t aware they redesigned nuclear from the ground up. why did they pick uranium then?

it should perhaps be pointed out that we originally had proposition for both reactors but we ended up with uranium reactors because the US wanted a reason to mine uranium for nuclear bombs and were well aware of the risk difference but didn’t care about the potential lives being lost if something went wrong. later, the cost to develop a thorium reactor had no monetary benefits beyond generating power and keeping people safe so no country wanted to invest in it when the uranium blueprints were available, literally because of capitalism.

I’ve written a few articles in LibreOffice and the things I need to be able to do just can’t be done in order to follow the structure of the zine I was writing for. It’s a hobby zine and the work is free by everyone so they just reformatted it for me; but it still inconveniences others when things aren’t within a certain expected standard. I do blame microsoft for it though; all office apps uses the same standard except microsoft, unfortunately all the users uses microsoft office…

and no, krita, inkscape, gimp, etc. can’t replace Affinity. Affinity itself could barely replace Adobe in their first place. but it still has, for many. so it’s not a learning issue. Affinity is more intuitive than Adobe, so in this case Adobe is just outdated.

but as for the open source, the issue is more than just a lack of features. The UI is at least 15 years out of date.

Professionally the software just isn’t there; and it’s a real shame too, because I feel very uncomfortable using ANY microsoft products (on principle). But as far as Photoshop goes, there is photopea which is a great free browser based clone. Sadly there is no illustrator or indesign browser based clones that can match the quality of photopea, and the only desktop apps up for the job of matching Adobe is currently the Affinity Suite.

Affinity is a one-time fee at around 80€ for a Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator clone that sprang unto existence literally to combat Adobe subscriptions. Except since using Affinity exclusively for a year now, it feels better than Adobe ever did. Much more modern. Only missing a rare few of features that have work-arounds.

But, as OP says. Linux support is sorely missed. Because it’s much smaller than adobe there is a lack of community effort to get it to run on linux and if you manage to make it run, it craps out on you.

Since I work professionally with digital art and print, Krita, GIMP, etc. are sadly nowhere closer viable options (I have tried). Unfortunately I had to give up and install Windows last week solely to run Affinity properly, all other software that I use for work runs smoothly in linux, and like 95% of my preferred games (I too refuse to pay a subscription on principle).

or like the anti-pirate bill from a few years back that had more votes than politicians and no one gave a shit or even remembers that little insane corruption.

Mailspring desktop client has a pretty neat UI imo.

it’s not just america. the entire west had to switch from the keynesian system to the friedman system after america and the uk’s pinochet experiment. unfortunately friedmans system doesn’t work if everyone does it; and the patch is currently to take advantage of the poor as new loan takers are born every day and it’s currently the only way to inject more cash into the economy.

when we (capitalist nations) stopped taxing the rich; it already started going south in the 90ies with the housing crisis and some radical adjustments that had been made to rights of business and the rich vs workers, and they had to find a way to keep re-injecting money into the economy now that infinite growth had come to a crawl because friedmans experiment in chile turned out to not actually work long-term. it’s part of the reason why we had the bank crisis in 2008, and the UK was actually the cause of it, but iceland became the fall guy. they were lending out money that didn’t exist, and the money you paid back was taken as profits. after the crisis, they had to figured out a new way to do it as they couldn’t increase taxes on the rich (thanks reagan), and the new way was by lowering rates, dismantling social housing and similar services, etc. while artificially increasing house costs etc. this way - not only are there no affordable housing; but you are socially encouraged to take loans that you can’t afford. so all these now socially acceptable burdens like house loans, car loans, school loans, etc. have been created solely to keep GDP going up and to re-inject money into the economy now that the rich gets to act like black holes sucking everything up from everyone else.

so, sure, it’s the poors fault that friedman economics put in action by reagan didn’t actually work and they had to patch it by forcing the underclass (new suckers born every day who are eventually forced to take a loan and re-inject into the economy) in an infinite growth economy with finite resources.

i mean, if your not astroturfing then don’t spread disinformation?

this is a bit bigger than joe smoe overspending on his credit cards.

this is the 6th time in the past 2 days i see this argument. blaming the people for using the system that has been forced on us over the past 20 years to bolster GDP.

i smell an attempted narrative change.

it’s called a forced ipo and if’s a thing in the US specifically.

at a certain size companies are required to go public. and indeed, as a public company your first and only responsibility is ensuring shareholders can grow capital based on nonsense quarterly projections.

i wrote a short story a decade ago where people temporarily rent out their brain to act as a global scale bio super computer. and how people were large scale cheated into needing to rent out their brains for the rich to exploit.

i have to find where i put it!

Search’ng?

i setup my old job with linux internally. never had issues. day i quit boss told me to install windows so he can find a replacement employee. sure.

3 years later. boss wants me back. they’ve had nothing but problems. but i’m not allowed to install linux again.

he says, “if windows didn’t have so many problems you would be out of a job.”

they were the only option tho.