When I make this choice, I also change my expectations. The amount of money that is sloshing around in silicon valley is grotesque, and so of course they can throw whole towns worth of developers at just about any problem. The fit and finish of proprietary software is actually pretty bad considering the resources they have access to.

With FOSS software, a small project might be one or a few developers. But can it be good enough. I generally thing a lot of software has been good enough for a long time. A lot of computer applications are basically solved problems -text editing, search and reading, spreadsheets, forums, live chat, asynchronous mail, etc.

A proportion of FOSS users dropping a little money here and there will never give projects the kind of infinite growth expected in silicon valley, but it absolutely can fund small shops doing good, simple projects. Heck, it might even be more sustainable than the venture-capital-sell cycles that require every company to be perpetually exhibiting exponential growth or die. Yes, I’m aware that the bigger FOSS projects are only solvent because they make money from corporate customers. It is an issue that corporations seem to have nearly all the discretionary spending power, but thats for another discussion.

Aren’t “consume” and “support” different concepts? The article is trash, so I’m not referring to that, but I could take this stance in broader terms.

• My voluntary time and money is limited, so if you keep your work proprietary, I’m not going to provide it to you any more than I absolutely need to in a basic, transactional sense.

If my boss says work on this project -I’ll do it because I’m paid to do that, for the amount of time I’m paid to do it, but no more. If my bank says use this closed source application, okay fine, but I’ll never recommend it to anyone or submit a bug report when it breaks. If my government or library is considering entering into some closed source ecosystem, I’ll go out of my way to recommend against it, but I’ll probably end up having to use it. If I feel like paying for Netflix, I’ll share passwords and use regional VPNs, cancel whenever I feel like it, or whatever and never feel guilty.

If your product is open source, pretty much the opposite of all of the above. That’s what I would consider as “support.”

I was curious and just checked -Trixie dropped with a 1-year-ish old version. Curious if they ever update it.

Git is distributed by design, so I lean into that. I self-host, and use codeberg, and still collaborate with people who won’t leave github. Forgejo has built in pull or push mirrors that make it very easy, but you can also set multiple remotes in your local git repo.

Anything that is topic focussed rather than following individuals is a big difference, and then take away the engagement algorithm and it’s much better.

Facebook was pretty boring before they tried to make money. Still ick, but mostly just people posting pictures of activities with family or friends.

If not, look around, you can buy off-lease corporate laptops and ultra-small desktops that are just old enough to not support 11 for a song. They lack a GPU for good gaming, but they tend to be extremely well supported on Linux and are not slow. For the price of a Windows license, you can have something to learn on without effecting your main computer.

That’s the real problem. You have to be willing to swap out some things. Fortunately, game options seem better than the have ever been, but the old advice was to just game on consoles.

You can try to put the engineering programs in dedicated snapshotted windows VMs and basically time-capsule them as a working tool forever that never changes and works on any machine.

Win 2k pro was best. Fight me;) I hated the fisher price look of XP.