I understand where you’re coming from, but if you dig deeper into the problem, I think that it becomes clearer and clearer that social media is more of a symptom than the cause of the problem. The real issue is that people are becoming more and more aware that the system is failing them - wages are stagnant but prices are soaring, protections against the worst excesses of corporations are eroding, climate change is causing people to lose their homes and livelihoods…

People are desperate for someone to blame and for an alternative. Fascism offers easy answers that let people blame some “others” but just makes things worse. Leftists have uncomfortable answers that require you to admit your complicity in the system before you can begin to dismantle it.

I mean, yeah. Why are people even bothering with piracy on regular, HTTP, web sites? Of course it’ll get taken down, and legal action taken against the owner.

We need to teach the younger generations how to torrent shit

Cloudflare will proxy DNS requests as well, by the way, so I’m not sure how you would get the IP address if all of their host names are proxied through Cloudflare

To be fair, it was probably some hardware issue. I had endless problems with my old Nvidia GTX 580 which I would have been using at the time. And yeah, it was quite a while ago :P

Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.

Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!

Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.

So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.

I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.

I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.

I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.

Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.

Thank you so much for your time :)

We need to stop expecting change to come from our rulers. We need to take change into our own hands.

Israeli lebensraum, not Jewish. Conflating Judaism with Israel is anti-semitic.

You can’t vote to end the genocide. Democracy isn’t real.