• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Okay, so, please forgive me ahead of time for the following rant. To be blunt, you did ask. 😛

    • It often doesn’t use common UI/UX conventions found in most other editors
    • It has no polygon tools.
    • The Lasso tool is called “Free Select” instead of, you know, “Lasso” like every other software under the sun calls it. (Though I admit this in itself is merely a nitpick, it is indicative of the larger trends.)
    • The text tool is so bad. Honestly, I don’t even know how to put how it’s bad into words, but just using it is…painful…in comparison to Paint.\NET, Pinta, or even MS Paint back on Windows. Other people can probably word the problems with it better than I can. Sorry I can’t be more descriptive.
    • It doesn’t have Lanczos resampling for resizing images (tbf neither do many others but still Paint.\NET does and so that’s a point against it. (If you don’t know, Lanczos is visibly superior in maintaining fidelity when downscaling an image, compared to linear, bilinear, cubic, etc.)
    • The currently active layer seems to randomly change, so that one minute you’re doing something and the next nothing is worked, you wonder “what the hell” and then finally after 10 minutes of searching you find out it’s because the layer has changed and now you need to go click on this one obscure option. (I don’t remember what it is. Select > Select None maybe? Anyway, I’ve had it happen where the option doesn’t even do anything.) It completely throws my whole game off and I’ve never once, even once had it happen until I started using GIMP.
    • The default UI/UX is very rough around the edges. Just to make it minimally usable for me, I had to install PhotoGIMP over GIMP and spend 20-30 minutes customizing the layout and keyboard shortcuts. Speaking of…
    • The default keyboard shortcuts are kinda wacko. For example, Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Fit Image in Window (basically zooming in/out but to see the whole image in your window) is +, -, and Shift+Ctrl+E, respectively; while most other programs have it as ctrl++; (and/or ctrl+=), ctrl+- (and/or ctrl+NumpadMinus), and ctrl+0 (and/or ctrl+NumpadEnter). Also, you cannot use tab or ctrl+tab to move to the next or previous tab, respectively, because tab is a excluded key for keyboard shortcuts. (I think I was once told it has to do with a limitation in GTK, but that’s ridiculous as Pinta has been able to do it for years.) There are countless other inane defaults for the keyboard shortcuts as well, frankly.
    • You cannot use LMB or RMB to switch between the primary and secondary colors selected. You have to use X.

    These are only a few of the most severe frustrations, annoyances, and hair-pulling-out moments for me with regards to GIMP. I’d never have even tried it out if Pinta hadn’t made the ass-backwards decision to move to the stupidly minimalistic and less functional GTK4 adwaita UI and if Paint.\NET worked. (I can’t remember why it doesn’t wanna work; I think it has to do with a dependency. I know it’s not the .NET framework since that could be handled by Mono IIRC.)





  • 1 - tap to pay

    I still don’t see why phone-based tap-to-pay is even a good thing. What, I should hand over all my financial credentials to Google or Apple or Microsoft in addition to my bank? I think not. I’ll just keep using a physical card, thank you. (Which, by the way, can often still use tap-to-pay as most modern cards have RFID chips embedded. No different than with your phone, except it’s not tied to one of the big oligarchs, even less so if you use a credit union as opposed to a bank.)

    2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation

    Bog-standard bluetooth is more than enough for me.

    3 - voice assistants

    Why would I need a voice assistant? I can find out information almost as easily just using a search engine. And if I’m driving, I’m not so busy as to be unable to pull over to the side of the road if I absolutely need to check something. Or, you know, get everything ready before I go. At the further risk of yelling at clouds despite my relatively young age (I’m in my early 30s), I think voice assistants and IoT things are largely just fluff that over-complicate things in a world that is already over-complicated.


  • Apple Maps -OSMandMaps. Seems like a good option, but it’s not ready out the box. I need to do more tweaking with it. -Magic Earth. Haven’t tested it yet, seems good. But I’m looking for free options first before I dabble with paid stuff.

    If you like OSM but want a more user-friendly interface (disclaimer: I’m an Android user so I have no idea what OSMandMaps looks like), check out CoMaps! It was forked from Organic Maps due to heavy transparency concerns surrounding the former and uses downloadable OSM maps as a backend! It’s available for iOS too!

    https://www.comaps.app/download/

    Google Docs -OnlyOffice. Seems like it does everything I want.

    I’ve heard OnlyOffice is great, but if you don’t need or want any AI stuff, don’t mind a slightly less-modern UI, and collaboration isn’t a requirement, then LibreOffice is pretty awesome too. Just giving you another option. ;)

    https://www.libreoffice.org/





  • Okay, so, originally, I was going to look it up to prove you wrong, but after looking it up across multiple sources, it seems that you’re right and I’m wrong.....mostly.

    How-To Geek, Proton, and CloudFlare all mirror what you say.

    However, the Wikipedia page section “Definitions” does back me up somewhat. It says:

    The term “end-to-end encryption” originally only meant that the communication is never decrypted during its transport from the sender to the receiver.[23] For example, around 2003, E2EE was proposed as an additional layer of encryption for GSM[24] or TETRA,[25] ... This has been standardized by SFPG for TETRA.[26] Note that in TETRA, the keys are generated by a Key Management Centre (KMC) or a Key Management Facility (KMF), not by the communicating users.[27]

    Later, around 2014, the meaning of “end-to-end encryption” started to evolve when WhatsApp encrypted a portion of its network,[28] requiring that not only the communication stays encrypted during transport,[29] but also that the provider of the communication service is not able to decrypt the communications ... This new meaning is now the widely accepted one.[30]

    (Relevent text is embolded.)

    So, I’m not misunderstanding, just misinformed that the definition changed.

    Make no mistake, of course: I do appreciate you correcting me as I hadn’t realized the definition had changed. Lol.