THANK YOU! Please keep contributing! :)

I find this happening on iOS and it makes me put my phone down in a visually obstructive spot more since I’m not into my camera being active when I didn’t ask it to be. Unfortunately, the more you learn and live, the more you realize the paranoid delusions people used to call “crazy schizo shit” are actually probably true… to varying degrees of course.

iOS sends, what, 11MB of telemetry a day on average? Surely that can include audio and video compressed with those overpowered CPUs.

All I can offer you is what I’d consider vibes. GIMP looks ‘old’. I don’t mind programs looking dated, but I absolutely mind them looking ‘old’ since that, to me, implies a worse experience compared to ‘dated’. It looks like it crawled out of the education software setting intended for mass adoption and only barely did so.

To be more specific, things like proper spacing between UI elements & UI and text spacing go a longer way than I think most FOSS developers that don’t work with UI expect. Everything feels cramped, like it is pressuring me to know what to do; there is a shocking lack of collapsible menu items and visual distinction is very low when parsing things like selected tool settings. Basic features are also somewhat unintuitive; when I go to drag a slider for opacity, for example, as an end user I don’t think that single clicking and dragging will select the actual numerical value of the slider. I expect to have to double click, otherwise I expect the slider to simply do what I want it to when I left click and drag it left or right.

I don’t think anyone reasonable expects to pick up heavily featured photo manipulation software and simply know exactly how to do as they please, but there are some surefire ways GIMP contributors can clean up GIMP’s UI and UX. I mean no ill will by this, because people who contribute to FOSS do so with their free time and money, but I feel like a lot of software developers and highly computer-literate users think ‘good enough to use for everyone I talk to’ means ‘ready for everyone to use’ and this simply is not true. Talk to any ‘normal person’ in a somewhat young* corporate design environment, for example, and they’ll probably scoff at you if you suggest GIMP measures up to anything Affinity or Adobe. Those people are dicks, but their attitude often comes from a place of valuable opinion. It is not keybindings or solid basic features that they feel is missing, it’s… polish, I suppose? ‘Completeness’? I’m unsure of the right word to use but something about GIMP just feels half baked, visually and feeling-wise at least.

Thank you for being responsive, positive, and understanding of the ‘common user’ in this thread. I have seen quite the opposite attitude from other GNOME software contributors.

It is okay to say that GIMP can technically do this, and also that it needs a straight up circle tool. Not having a live preview of what you are doing is not good UX in this situation.

Any recs that use yt-dlp?

I do agree with this in theory. I just don’t know many ‘normal people’ that are going to only ever require those three things. (Totally with you on the AUR bit)

Thank you for verifying!!

Yeah, there’s a ton of people that recommend Cachy when it is really meant for tinkerers IMHO

Make sure to unplug it!

Have a rant, it might help you feel less alone, IDK.

I’m pretty young, in my 20s. For me, COVID hit like a brick, both socially and physically, so I was pretty mortified about everything that was happening. It was probably psychosis, looking back, but I had this fiery intense fear of death. Anything that could kill me was avoided, and I holed into my bedroom in my parents’ house. I have always been scared of being harmed or dying, but this was just different (nowadays I’m medicated for OCD…).

Eventually I developed long COVID, and that certainly didn’t help. I think becoming disabled from that, though, was the biggest catalyst for how I think today, by a long shot; I’m not exactly chilling, per se, but I’ve a better grip on my mortality. It kind of kicked me into gear, especially thinking about how I took my able body for granted.

Anyways, to answer your question, yeah, mostly. My disability can be summed up by, “damn that took every drop of piss outta me permanently”, so since I’m unable to really go out and do much, I came to see every day as an opportunity to either learn or do good. Hell, if nothing else, I’ve got the time, everyone does. Turns out, I really like learning; it is pretty much the only thing that prevents me from excessively thinking about my bodily situation, death, or the cruelty of humanity. Being a really well-informed monkey feels good. I also learned that it feels really, really fucking good to do kind things for other people. Being kind rules. I just can’t explain how good it feels to help and do good. That’s genuinely my motivation to live; by the way, when folks say to “make the world a better place”, that’s what they mean! Something as seemingly insignificant as telling a cashier, “Thank you!”, is part of that!

I don’t think you have to be some prolific artist or anything to have a meaningful life. You’re cosmically insignificant, yes, but I find that line of thinking a tad childish (of course, no offense, just in nature). Your insignificance goes away entirely when you help others have a better experience, no matter the impact. A very small portion of humans alive today will ‘leave their mark’ in a way that is noticed by ‘a lot’ of people, and achieving that really shouldn’t be seen as necessary as it is right now. Your sole goal on this trip around the sun, IMHO, is to find enjoyment and happiness. Have fun, your personal life is literally what you make of it.

If your own personal circumstance feels okay, you’re doing all you need to. A loser is someone who sucks to be around, who drags others’ down with them- that does not seem like you. You seem to be living an average life right now, and that’s okay! Something to consider is that community will make you feel a million times better on a day-to-day basis.

(P.S. I don’t think this is ‘capital D’ depression, but I think your current line of thinking is an easy path towards it. 'Least that’s how I see it.)

Have you tried more than one? I found out thru trial and error that pretty much half of them either do nothing or make me violently suicidal, and apparently those are pretty common side effects.

Normally I’m not fond of complaints with regards to transportation regulation, because there’s usually good safety reason, but sincerely fuck receiving a ticket in the mail I didn’t know I could even receive. I think speed limits help people not die, but there are reasonable ways to do things. Like the person also replying to you said, I am fine if I’m warned, but otherwise I’m legit just getting my pockets ran.

I’d actually like to disagree that they’re disconnected from reality. This is about as realistic as things can get in politics… :(

Personally, I can’t stand using anything but GNOME on a laptop (the touchpad experience on GNOME is much better than KDE), so my personal recommend would have to be something like Fedora Workstation. I find the ~6 month version release cycle very nice, it’s a good balance between rolling and stable.

We, yes we, all go back to the big D eventually…

Thank you, this is a very thoughtful response. I’m currently (still…) fighting for benefits despite more than qualifying for them, so currently there’s nothing stopping me like that unless I wave being able to generate income around like a flag.

I’ve thought about working a call center, I just don’t think I could bring myself to sell things to folks that they don’t need. I refuse to do anything unethical and IMHO that falls squarely under that (I’m starting to think I need to compromise and just apply to a bunch of them…).

Genuinely TY, I wasn’t going to touch Adobe’s website if I didn’t have to. 😭

It’s actually a valid thing to need. If nothing else, circular masks are much easier to do when you don’t have to go and search for a png of a circle for a task that should’ve been over by the time you hit enter in the search bar. I understand GIMP is made with entirely volunteer work, and people shouldn’t be hostile towards anything FOSS unless given good reason, but there are very good reasons people cannot switch to GIMP.

There’s a way to not copy+paste? How?