Note! I’m going to be generalising a fair amount here! If you think I’ve unfairly generalised something—I know! I just want to get my point across without constantly noting exceptions.

I recently acquired a Macbook Air for my university work. I had originally planned on doing a Windows laptop (like a Thinkpad) instead and then installing Linux on that but I honestly think that would have been a much bigger headache than I had originally anticipated. This is not to say Linux doesn’t work well or anything—after all, it’s been my daily operating system for over 4 years! But you cannot ignore that there is some jank that comes with it.

Here’s the deal—and feel free to disagree: a good chunk of proprietary software works better than open source solutions. Even if they may have worse usability than their open source counterparts, when it comes to getting something done, they’ll generally do it well.

MacOS is an example of this. I get REALLY frustrated with MacOS coming from various Linux distributions. I actually really dislike Finder, window management is atrocious, and there are tiny things here and there that irk me. However! I’ve been able to run about 99% of the apps I want to run (so far) without having to worry about incompatible GPU drivers or missing dependencies or some other random issue I would have on my older computer. It doesn’t matter whether or not I install apps via the App Store, homebrew, .dmg or .pkg files. They’ll all work. And, they’ll all look reasonably correct.

Something I found a bit surprising was the Nicotine+ app. On my old computer, which ran Linux Mint XFCE, this app (which uses Libadwaita) looked a bit broken. In fact, a lot of Libadwaita apps looked a bit broken. But here, on macOS? At the very least, Nicotine+ looks perfect! No problems at all!

On Linux, I’d have liked to make more use of Flathub and Flatpaks, since they’re the closest thing to a Linux counterpart of the App Store (the App Store isn’t great and there are a lot of apps you won’t find there, but you get the point). But I would have so many issues with that application format! Part of that may be because I was using an older computer¹, but I had numerous issues with GPU drivers or apps just not launching no matter what I do. Or if they did work, some looked wonky because they were Libadwaita apps on XFCE, or because they didn’t follow my system theme, or I couldn’t access my files from an app, and would have to go and manually set up permissions for that Flatpak via an app like Flatseal.

Speaking of which, the permissions system on MacOS is something that should make its way to Linux². Sure, it might be a bit annoying, but the fact that MacOS asks me if I want to allow an app to access my Documents folder just simplifies things! I don’t need to fuss around in a seperate app to manage these permissions for the first time.

I think that’s one part of why people use proprietary software: it’s generally not as janky as their open source counterparts. Even if FOSS apps work well enough, or have a wonderful user experience, there’s just gotta be something that doesn’t work well.

The other part of this argument is that there are things that shouldn’t be but unfortunately are. What do I mean by this?

My experiences with filling forms in PDF files has been nothing short of atrocious on pretty much every single open source PDF editor. You know, even if it appears like the form is filling fine (I’m looking at you, Okular), half the contents of the form will just disappear on a different computer! Where am I going with this? PDF files shouldn’t be so difficult to work with. But they are. I need to fill PDF forms, so I’m going to use whatever works best for that purpose. And generally, proprietary PDF editors work better for this purpose! Unfortunately, I’m not going to compromise on the things I do or want to do for the sake of using open source software.

So I’m currently in a bit of a middle ground. I try to use whatever open source apps I can—and some of the major apps I use will be open source (such as my web browser, which are actually pretty much fully jank-free in the open source realm). And I’ll still read through privacy policies and try what I can to minimise data collection and telemetry. But at the end of the day, I’m gonna use whatever I have to to go about my work. Again, things shouldn’t be like this, but they are.

This isn’t to bash on open source software—I appreciate that it exists. But alas, proprietary solutions just seem to be a bit more reliable.