For that goal, really stick by the FSF recommendations, for that, they are perfect as they have strict requirements.

But I think calling other GNU/Linux distros black box only because some drivers are proprietary is a bit too far, some people just prefer a “minimum damage” approach and that’s a compromise everyone needs to decide for themselves. If I were living in China or Iran, however, then I would exclusively run distros like that as well.

Edit: typo

The fact that a custom designed windows running native games is still worse than GNU/Linux and translation for every single operation is astonishing.

This interface looks beautiful. Perfect for a DIY media centre.

I call it media centre because I hate the word Smart TV and everything it stands for.

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.

The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.

Also, I have a rudimentary idea how to fix this. So if anyone who’s more competent than me would like to have a go at it, please do so.

Basically found a non-profit ad agency for free software. Basically the agency would create turnkey ad and branding concepts for certain free software projects that would like to have it and in return they get 5% of their donations, for example. All of the money gets reinvested back into the advertising for the member software projects. Also, it could be very easy, the ad agency would, in broad strokes, just have a competition parity strategy where they essentially do whatever the competition does, in broad strokes, for their advertising and “just” adapt it to what the free software project needs.

Yes, it’s some random “idea guy” on the internet coming up with something that’s coherent and smart sounding. So take it for what you will.

Oh my, YES. Before I entered the world of free software, I was turned off by it. Reason is, I thought to myself, hold on: “If it’s gratis, then it’s going to be at the level of quality of all of these malware-ridden, barely functional, shareware programs.” Luckily I’m smarter now, but free software has a branding problem. It results from these programs often being developed by incredibly competent turbo nerds, the result of this is the advertisement reads like a technical manual or a spec sheet.

Proper advertising is helpful. It informs users about what they can do with the programme. They don’t care about it being programmed in hyper-efficient C, optimised with hardware acceleration or the underlying mathematical principles of how something is being processed. They care about getting the results they want. Instead of darktable, for example, talking about “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers”, instead, they should talk about what users can use Darktable for. Sell the fantasy of belonging to the best, only thanks to Darktable and getting superior results from the programme. Show people the stunning results that real pros got by using Darktable. Show that there is a real community around the programme, and not just a GitHub repo. These things matter.

Darktable, in my opinion, is the best raw editor out there, and yes, the “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers” and other incredibly well thought out features are the reason why that is. But 99% of users wouldn’t know why these things listed as their features are so massively useful and make Darktable so ridiculously superior compared to the competition.

I genuinely think that if more free software projects would invest in proper advertising and branding, that GNU/Linux and free software on it wouldn’t have 3% market share, but would be the monopoly in the computing market.

Edit: GIMP is another perfect example. It has another problem, and not just the name. The website is completely barren. “High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation.”

Gimp has not only more features than Adobe Photoshop, but most of them are significantly better. IMO, they need to communicate this and just bundle the extensions. Gimmic is basically tripling the amount of things you can do with it and resynthesiser is a massively useful function to have. “Normies” don’t want to fiddle around with plugins. IMHO: The extensions are very good, highly stable and should just be integrated.

Darktable sadly has no mobile versions. It is only available on desktops running GNU/Linux, MacOS or Windows. :(

Oops, I accidentally deleted some of the previous message. Here’s what it’s supposed to say. I apologise for that!

And what’s complicating things even more is that the order in which things are applied to the image matter a lot. Darktable uses the same process that colorists from the cinema world use.

Now, while not exclusively text-to-speech, but my favourite programme for that would be Speech Note.

For these requirements, I’d recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.

Congrats on saving your parents’ master of business administration!

The short version is all of them use different processes to get to the final result. And what’s complicating things even more is that the order in which things are processed. Darktable uses the same process colourists from the video and cinema world use. Thanks to that, Darktable is significantly more consistent and predictable than its competitors. Because essentially how other raw editors process a raw is, they target the “casual” audience and they want good looking results fast without any sort of user input. So they essentially just slap a gamma curve and a lut on your file and then you can only make your adjustments on top of that. This is essentially just editing a high quality jpeg at this point. Worst of all, most RAW editors do not even give you control over this base curve or base RAW lu. This is bad because it’s curves upon curves upon curves upon curves, and these errors multiply over each other, so good luck controlling the output.

Now on the other hand, Darktable not only exposes everything from raw black and white points, demosaicking and any sort of other adjustments that you’d like, but also, thanks to the scene-referred process, it defers the Gamma Curve to the last step, which essentially just means that everything happens in scene-linear space and your adjustments are linear and predictable. No curves multiplying errors with curves. Plus, you can fully control the gamma curve and this guarantees that the entire dynamic range of your camera gets output to the display, which is not the case for other raw editors which use the other process with curves, the so called “display referred” process.

All of this may seem very complicated, but using Darktable is really easy, because it by default gives you a well thought out process for handling your raw files, which gives you consistent and predictable results. Darktable is free software and available on GNU,/Linux, macOS and Windows.

TLDR: Darktable hype.

Edit: I accidentally deleted half a sentence and it awkwardly melded two sentences together. I corrected it and I apologise for my mistake!

The first step is decoding the raw, which is usually just a derivative of the TIFF/EP standard with additional metadata fields and proprietary compression. Almost all RAW files are dead simple. They are literally just a TIFF image of the raw mosaic, with additional text describing what the lens was used, what white balance settings were used, etc. The second step is processing the data from the raw file. This is exclusively on the processor and here quality varies quite a bit. Decoding most often is really simple. It’s what you do with the data that you have successfully decoded, this is on the raw processor. Decoder and processor are two entirely different things.

Now the article muddies decoder and processor. If I understood correctly, it was talking about generating previews in the file manager on macOS, and the other one is just a processor. Now, if you were to just decode RAW files, you would essentially just get a green picture, because if you zoom out all the way on a mosaic, what you’re left with is completely green. So, of course, it needs to do some processing that you can actually view it, how it’s meant to look, and not just in false colour.

I just want to say, I find it so goddamn funny that we got Half-Life 3 before Star Citizen. Anyone remembers that?

My recommendation would be Tor and use bridges. Bridges connect to Tor for you, and the IPs of bridges are secret. So no one really knows that you’re connecting to Tor. They can only see you connect to a random IP. For extra security you can use the “tails” OS.

While not foolproof, should be good enough for any sort of “normal” people under mass surveillance. If you’re special enough to have human attention on you, I don’t know sadly.

Finally, pictures of firewalls I can get scammed by!

If I understood correctly, it’s free software anyway, so why the discussion?

1. The “professional” choice: Fujifilm X-H1 with 16-80/4.
2. The “casual” choice: Nikon P7700.

Additional advice: Splurge on the lens, save with the camera, if you’re on low-budget. If you’re just getting into it and you’re on the budget of a kidney stone, Nikon P7700. It supports RAW and has relatively good optics for point-and-shoot camera. Outclasses a phone any day, naturally.

If you want to do studio photography however, lighting first, anything else, second.

Edit: Reason why the 16-80/4 is its optical quality. This thing is incredible and is guaranteed to blow your socks off.

This is incredibly stupid. It will drive up the cost for housing