Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.

My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.

Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

The server I set up for my friends is named “Portable Creatures: Exhalation of the Wilderness” for a reason.

I installed KDE Neon on Friday evening and things were going great, everything was testing well, and Saturday game night with the gang went flawlessly, but this morning the VMWare Horizon Linux client spontaneously decided that it didn’t want to accept mouse input anymore, so after ten minutes of troubleshooting I gave up and booted back into Windows so that I can be productive today.

A battle lost, but the war is not over yet.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.

Public universities in the United States haven’t been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students… all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment – for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.

Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they’re a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now – to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they’re gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can’t afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they’ve vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.

However, as you’ve guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair’s actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department’s endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn’t need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.

In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.

From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.

Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.