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Comment by setzer22 | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: Just to be very sincere and transparent. The content of this post has been removed to avoid further discussion. I do not think my kind of views are welcome in this community.

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I am a huge proponent of libre software, but this is a very naïve view. It's impossible for the average Joe to find a place to work at that will use even 50% FOSS. It's impossible to buy a flagship phone on which you can install a FOSS OS without a ton of technical workarounds. Hell, even today, lots of basic customisation on mainstream GNU/Linux distros require editing files or using the CLI.

I'm sorry, but that's just not practical.

This is a very software view of things. You’d be hard pressed to get by with whatever the FOSS equivalents of CAD/EDA software are.

This is very correct. And this is specific to professional use cases. Hobbyists can get by with FOSS tools.

how about KiCad as replacement for EDA? for CAD, yeah, that is really the last thing to be ported to linux afaik

I do professional electronics design and some mechanical design. I use 100% FLOSS tools. KiCAD nightly is currently slightly less buggy than the closed crap, and about as capable. The major difference is that bugs I report get fixed within days, which I've never experienced with any of the commercial offerings. I use stable KiCAD for most projects, and nightly for things that need advanced functionality. It's absolutely excellent. The mechanical design story is not as great, but FreeCAD is improving at a decent pace and now that Fusion is crippleware a lot of people are looking into FreeCAD, and complaining about how it works, and some are contributing and improving it. KiCAD went through this cycle due to a large influx of Eagle users when Eagle got eaten by the beast, and came out dramatically, shockingly improved. If the same thing happens to FreeCAD in the next few years I doubt we'll have any excuse to go back. So I don't feel "hard pressed to get by" - I feel more productive than before I switched to FLOSS tools.

It’s been years since I’ve tried KiCad but this is the second time someone’s told me it’s come a long way. Sounds like I should give it another try

For most people this "advice" is just as relevant as saying you don't need to use Outlook; just use pen and paper.

I would _love_ to ditch Windows, but it's simply not possible to use the Linux-equivalents everywhere. Client requirements and all that.

For plenty of people if it doesn't support {QuickBooks, Excel, Photoshop, ...} it's not fit for purpose. Even people who are willing to use alternatives can't when all the people they collaborate with don't.

Or if you still want to pay, then there's MacOS. Never got an unwanted update.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/28/macos-ignore-software-u...

It's not quite forced, but you can't explicitly ignore. In practice I'm one accidental click away from an unwanted update now. (Each time need to remember to go one menu level deeper before updating)

I have this alias in my .bashrc and run it when I'm tired of seeing the red dot:

    nocatalina() {
      sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"
      defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
      killall Dock
    }

The first command doesn't work anymore unfortunately. You'll still get it listed and it's a potential footgun.

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