Vote with your Wallet
Doesn't work, but here's some alternatives to annoying programs!
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One of the things that is touted as the great boon of capitalism (by people who seem to enjoy the texture of boot leather on the tongue) is the ability to vote with your wallet. Sure, there may be companies that operate unethically, but those companies are only able to do those unethical things because the power that people bestow on them through the purchase of their products and services. So, all you need to do is purchase different products and services and would you look at that, the bad company has disappeared through lack of money and good companies reign supreme.
And then Goldilocks and the three bears became friends, Tinkerbell came back to life and they all had a dinner party with the wolf from Red Riding Hood.
At first blush this seems like a fairly reasonable thing to think (the wallet thing, not the fairy tales). One of the benefits of capitalism that even I can agree on is its ability to mediate pricing fluctuations, and in an ideal environment results in competition to produce better products. The fact that it doesn’t do this in practice is multivariant, but largely boils down to companies rent-seeking (ie carving out regulatory exceptions) and predating on competition instead of innovating. I touch on this in my articles about why tech sucks now (part 1/ part 2).
But even in an ideal world, voting with your wallet is a very bad idea, because it means that the person with the biggest wallet gets the most votes. This ability for some people to exert more power in accordance to some arbitrary value is fundamentally undemocratic.
More importantly, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where even the ability to dictate which professional products and services we use is often defined not by our own whim, but by our employers or the computers we purchase, which often include the product that is considered “industry standard”.
This wasn’t always the case. Only a generation or two ago, if you had a particular brand of pen you liked, or a type of notebook that you preferred, or a slide rule that slid just right, you could use that and there would be no change to the operation of the workplace as a whole, or your ability to perform tasks.
Not so these days. Industry standard software is where everything is done. People use Microsoft Teams, despite Slack and Discord being fundamentally better products (before that we used Skype for business, which was an absolute travesty of a software package that deserved to be launched into the sun rather than quietly retired by the pandemic). In architecture we use Revit, which is a program so clunky and bloated that there is an entire cottage industry of BIM managers whose job revolves around tricking the software into doing what it’s supposed to do. Adobe software is still hugely powerful, but subject to an increasingly agressive subscription pricing model that is making it near-impossible for small creatives to maintain legal access if they lose access to company licenses. This forces them to, erm, sale the high seas, as it were.
Even beyond useability, the current tendency of technology companies to push predatory updates and changes to their online hosting services is quite concerning. For example, Google Docs is now feeding your work into its AI generator, and I can’t open Windows without getting blasted with ads, popups and associated other slop.
We have come to live in a world where, despite having increasingly powerful universal turing machines that live in our pocket, the flexibility and usability of those machines seems to be getting ever smaller. It is so strange to me that I feel more hemmed in by my current AMD Ryzen 7700x desktop than I did in the late 1990s with a 100mHz Pentium. The transparency of that desktop and app experience has been replaced with unnecessary bloatware that obfuscates the apps and services I actually want to, y’know, use the computer for.
So what’s a girl to do?
I was recently inspired by the wonderful video “For Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex on Youtube, which is a thorough takedown on the predatory subscription models, as well as TechAltar’s “Software is Evolving Backwards” that talks about the way AI buttons are being thrown at end-users like confetti. These videos were the push I needed for me to divest myself from much of proprietary software I was used to dealing unhappily with.
If you’re working from a home computer, or have the ability to install your own software, you can install any number of these and give them a go. A lot of the time they provide cross-compatibility with the software they replace. Other times they provide similar workflows to the expensive versions
I’ve chosen these software packages because they do what I want them to do: work as described, without needing endless tinkering and coercion to perform as advertised. I’m not a Linux guy - I want as far as possible for my software to be a silent platform from which I can produce work, and I get very little joy from having to command-line my way into basic functionality. I am, at this point, actively using or about to actively use every single one of these that I suggest to some extent or other.
Some disclaimers:
Not all of this software is free, and in fact even if it is I’d suggest throwing some money toward them; development ain’t cheap, and sending a hundred bucks to a small team feels far better to me than shelling out the same each year to a company worth trillions.
Secondly, I’m not going to pretend that this will be a friction-free experience. Learning the foibles of a new software can be a bit of a pain, and in the indie dev environment sometimes you just won’t be able to do the same things as you used to be able to. However, for the vast, vast majority of use cases, you will be able to do the same things you’d always been able to do with the proprietary software. I am not a power user of many of these, but I know my way around them reasonably well, and most solutions have been a short google search away.
And finally - I’m not an expert! I certainly haven’t covered everything here. Like I said, there are tons of options for non-behemoth software. If you have your own suggestions, chuck them in the comments!
The List of Software Bois:
Here’s the stuff that I’m using, and what it’s replacing.
Office/Document Writing
LibreOffice: Free and open-source alternative to Word, Powerpoint, Excel, as well as some fun other ones that aren’t typically included in the Microsoft Suite, like database management. It’s got a few foibles; if you use dark mode in Windows you’ll need to do a bit of tweaking, but for simple word processing tasks and pro-forma stuff, it works a treat.
Scrivener: For long-form projects like novels, research-heavy writing and the like, you really can’t go past sScrivener. It’s a one-time perpetual license of a hundred bucks or so (Australian), and treats projects like a ring-binder. you can drop photos, webpages, and other documents into a research folder, and arrange your project in modules to make it easy to move around.
3D design
Blender: Free and open source 3D mesh modeler par excellence. I’ve seen some incredible work come out of Blender, equaling that of the best I’ve seen from 3DS Max and Maya. I’m still learning this and the curve is steep, but it’s an incredible achievement as a piece of software.
Rhino: Proprietary licensed software but you’ve only gotta buy it once (dirt cheap if you’re a student too). Surface-based NURBS1 modeler. I use this for my Environmental design work, and it’s a great development of the idea of a CAD program. Also comes with the excellent node-based editor Grasshopper, which is a visual scripting language that lets you do all sorts of fun stuff.
Art
Krita: Free and open-source Photoshop replacement painting and design program. I’m no expert at this; I basically use it to add text to artworks for instagram and similar, but it seems powerful and I’m keen to get more acquainted with it.
Publishing and graphic design
Affinity Suite: A proprietary replacement for Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator. This is what I’m hoping to use to lay out my next book. Costs about $250 for the suite of three softwares. NOTE: It does contain AI features, but they’re transparent about not using any data from your own system as training, so they aren’t nicking your IP without your consent. See, Adobe? Was that so hard?
Calibre/ Sigil: For formatting and organising ebooks. This is a pretty niche thing, but programs like Vellum and Atticus are out there and Atticus is one of the worst products I’ve had the misfortune to use. These two have a learning curve but hey, you’re learning html at the same time so that’s great.
Internet
DuckDuckGo Browser/Search: A free Google alternative that isn’t as vulnerable to SEO manipulation. It has a browser that is much better at not selling your data to Mark Zuckerberg and the search engine works quite well.
Neocities: Remember Geocities? they’re back, in Pog form! Instead of paying hundreds of bucks a year for a template from a godaddy or wix website, make your own 90s throwback site built of weirdness and fun. Free to sign up, and you can put it on your own domain. I’m hoping to switch soon. Lucky Calibre taught me how to HTML,
Video Editing:
OBS: If you’ve ever streamed a game or recorded yourself on a webcam, you probably already know about OBS. Free, Flexible and powerful streaming. Not much more to say.
Da Vinci Resolve: Free Proprietary video editing software. I do not understand how this doesn’t cost money, it’s so powerful and I only touch about three per cent of what it can do. I think this is the software they use for major movies but it’s bonkers to me that I’m able to use it without paying. Like, what.
Your whole ass windows desktop
Cairo Desktop: Sick of the Windows taskbar being complete crap? Sick of having annoying popups all the time, and difficulties finding the apps you actually want? Cairo replaces the shell of your desktop to something way simpler. The desktop becomes the browser, and the start menu only includes the software you actually use. no ads, no AI nonsense, and no. I recommend grabbing Aquasnap and Lightshot for window snapping and screenshot purposes (both of which are things I use all the time). I gotta say, I didn’t realise how annoying the Windows Desktop Environment had gotten until I switched to something that just got out of my way.
Thanks for reading. As I said, if you have other suggestions, shout them out!
I’ll see you next time.
Non-Uniform Rational Bezier Spline. Now you know.
DaVinci Resolve is awesome. Thanks for the Scrivener shout; I've been meaning to check it out.