Ah, sorry, that’ll teach me to read more carefully. Thanks for pointing it out <3

If your main reason for paying premium is for ad blocking, I’d suggest just cancelling it now and using ad blockers. If you want to support creators, I’d say that it’s better to cancel and subscribe to a few patreons - I’d pick some of the smaller creators you like, to spread some of that support around a bit.

If you use iOS devices for watching YouTube, look into side-loading uYou+, it’s basically an edited YouTube app that removes most of the ads. You can stream from your phone to the apple TV, too, also without ads.

Not sure what the android equivalent is, but someone else will know - hopefully they will share in the comments also.

If you want to stop climate change, the only thing we can that has any hope of working is a peaceful revolution.

To start with, join a union or learn how to unionise your workplace. If you can, look into setting up co-operatives. The IWW has some great resources. Anyone can start a union, you don’t need any sort of special qualifications or knowledge. Join the IWW, they have some great free trainings you can join to learn how to make real change at your workplace.

Once enough people are unionised, we can start building a coalition of unions, all of which can work together to tackle larger and larger issues. If we have strong union efforts in each industry then we can protect the working class against the negative effects of striking - for example, if there are unions in the food production industry, then people striking don’t need to worry about going hungry.

This is how a true people’s revolution happens. With the least amount of violence possible, a bottom-up, people-led movement.

If you believe in this in any way, please, join the IWW. I know it seems like a long journey, but it begins with a single step, and that single step is joining the IWW.

I’m sorry for being harsh, but the only reason the democrats exist is to slow down the fascists ever so slightly and then just peacefully hand over power to the fascists when they gain control again.

We need real change, the kind of change that only comes from a revolution. The democrats do not give a shit about you. They serve only the wealthy.

Stop believing their lies. Go out there and unionise!!

It’s obvious to me that we need to have laws to enforce portability of data and interoperability for large platforms.

Dude, who even cares if it’s better? Why would you ever willingly give Microsoft even 1% of a chance to yet again gain some market share that they can abuse?

Fuck Edge, and fuck Chromium, too. Librewolf or Firefox, accept no lesser browsers.

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 :)