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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • That really depends on what you mean by privacy. They probably won‘t sell your data or even look at the stuff you‘re doing with your server, if you‘re not disrupting their service. But they definitely will cooperate with law enforcement if your server is used for illegal stuff and someone reports it.

    In the end, you’ll always have to trust your server host to some degree. Some other hosts, like Hetzner, allow you to install your own operating systems on their dedicated servers, so you can set up full disk encryption. But even though this is definitely better than unencrypted disks, it‘s still not a reliable way of preventing access while your server is running.

    So if you’re just wondering if you can host a Nextcloud instance at hostinger without your files being sold by them: Almost certainly, yes. If you, on the other hand, plan to host manuals for building bombs or, even worse, offer downloads of old Nintendo games, they‘re probably not going to respect your privacy for long.



  • And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

    I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

    I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.


  • This isn’t Adobe.

    And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

    I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

    All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

    So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.