Very interesting video, and definitely food for thought for those still hanging on to Microsoft's apron strings!

The YouTube comments for THE VIDEO are as telling as the video itself as to what OS the majority of us will be using in the future. To be honest I'd use it even if it weren't faster, but the fact that it's like getting a double-speed computer upgrade for free, might convince others, especially when they read the YouTube comments!

This is a very good, very revealing video, so miss it at your peril ... muahahahahahahahahah!

Yes, I've seen that video. However, he doesn't seem to mention that there are some conflicting stories of driver support and bugs in Linux environments when it comes to Nvidia GPU hardware/drivers, and even AMD's driver support on some Linux distros doesn't make me fully confident in making a leap away from Windows at this time. I'm sure others will testify to the reliability and speed as shown in that video, but to others, I think a word of caution could be warranted. Especially if you have a lot of money invested in a business or hardware.

To be fair though, Lux, if there are any issues with nVidia cards, then nVidia are to blame for not open sourcing their drivers. The situation is no different on Linux than it is on Windows in that sense, cause if you rely on closed-source drivers, you rely on the company that makes them to update them. Not so with open source drivers.

I really just posted the video for a heads-up on the performance gains, but that's not why I personally moved to Linux. I moved over because I will not tolerate being dictated to by Apple or Microsoft, nor will I tolerate their utterly monstrous privacy abuse.

Anyway, at least the guy had the sense to compare using a super-popular version of Linux in his video, and I would have used the same I think. It just pleases me when I see such videos getting enthusiastic support on YouTube, cause one good thing about YouTube is that the comments are a very good indicator of where things are actually going.

It's a interesting video, and I do thank you for posting. I'm sure there are some people out there who will benefit from it. Another interesting idea to some folks like myself, who need to continue on Windows, might be to set up a render-only computer with Linux that has the same version of Blender you may have on a workstation, and either use it as your render box or as part of the network render.

The beauty of Blender over other packages is that scene files themselves are platform-independent. You can save a .blend file on a Linux system and open it on a Windows or Mac system if you need to. This typically isn't recommended in other packages, like Maya. 3dsmax is another software I still use (although I have mostly migrated my workflow entirely to Blender now since the 2.8 release). 3dsmax, unfortunately, is tightly bound to certain windows VB components that aren't available for any other OS, so Max is not available for Mac or Linux. I have other software that I use which is also tied to Windows directly in that way too. I could use dual boot options, but again that's just extra stuff that isn't actually beneficial to my workflow. A Linux render box dedicated to Blender could be very useful though.

Retrowave posted at 10:53PM Mon, 10 February 2020 - #4379814

To be fair though, Lux, if there are any issues with nVidia cards, then nVidia are to blame for not open sourcing their drivers.

You're ... wrong. The blame should fall on whoever chose to use Linux on Nvidia hardware, its their fault for choosing a niche OS. I'm being sarcastic ... mostly.

Not terribly helpful to try and assign "blame", when hardware doesn't work with software, it doesn't really matter who is to blame, its a gonna be hassle. At the end of the day it really comes down to the fact that Windows has a vastly larger market share than Linux, so a lot of developers will focus on that first with anything else second. Unfortunately, the same reason why Windows has more malware/viruses than other OS, it just makes more sense to develop for a larger market.

That said, if I recall, last fall Nvidia did make some documents for two or three of their chip architectures[?] publicly available to help with writing open source drivers. And I think there was something at the time about more coming this spring. There's likely to be a much larger push for better GPU drivers on Linux going forward than there has been, now that Steam has a Linux version and has made some titles available on Linux with plans for more, and, if I recall, Stadia [google's game streaming service ... if it survives] is built on Linux/Vulkan. So its possible [likely?] you'll see more from Nvidia in that regard going forward.

Getting back on topic! That's an interesting video, perhaps a bit deceptive, tho I don't think intentionally so as he does touch on something later in the video, that I thought was a bit of a flaw in his testing, and that's the time it takes to initialize the render, "building the BVH" as he called it in the video. That's something that can give you big gains in terms of speed when looked at in isolation, but can result in little net gain overall. For example, if your base line for "building the scene" to render is 10 seconds in one scenario, but 20 seconds in another, that saved 10 seconds becomes rather moot when the time spent actually rending that scene/sequence, is in the hours and you only go thru that initial build sequence once [note the results of the BMW scene, which he said required the least of the building phase]. Unfortunately, that makes it really easy to say "this frame that took 15 seconds before, only takes 7 seconds now, that's twice as fast!" ... I mean it is, sure, but that's not quite be the whole story.

I suspect he might see less performance gains were he rendering multi-frame sequences rather than one off frames because of that. You can get similar performance gains [or losses] in that "scene building" phase from different chip architectures, different sequential versions of the same program or even different versions of Windows for that matter, whilst the actual render times themselves when long enough, vary very little. If I had to wager a guess, I'd suspect that might be part of why the fluid sim was so heavily skewed as well; I'd guess that the fluid sim calculations may run a process similar to, if not the same as that "scene building" process for each frame so it makes sense you'd see a lot more gain from that on Linux if that's the case.

Some of the real time improvements he showed in that video might be nice. I have to wonder tho, when he's getting 2 fps on Windows and 4 fps on Linux, how's that translate to something more workable/applicable; does somethings that's giving you 15fps on Windows become 30fps on Linux, or does 15fps become something more like 18-19fps? [...and with better GPU drivers down the road possibly, might that be an even greater gain?] No matter how you slice it, working with a frame rate in the single digits is going to be beyond painful, doesn't matter if its 3 or 9 when you're that low, its going to feel awful and performance gains between the two scenarios are more academic than they are any practical benefit. If you have frame rates like that, you need to be looking for ways to work smarter, not harder, cause you're not getting much done at 4fps.

One of what I think would be the more beneficial/practical gains, which he couldn't benchmark, but mentioned toward the end of the video would be selecting and manipulating objects in a crowded scene. Speed improvements on "active work" processes like that can be a huge quality of life sort of thing, more so than shaving a few seconds off renders here and there.

There's certainly performance gains to be had with Linux. At this point Windows is so heavily laden with multi-dozens of concurrent processes [long gone are the days of NT/2000 that you could strip it down to 4 or 5 process running at any given time] that it'd be almost impossible to imagine not seeing an improvement,. I think I'd have to echo Lux's word of caution; switching to Linux probably isn't something that should be done without careful consideration, but I suspect there are certainly benefits if you can make that switch. I'd be interested in seeing some more in depth benchmarks/comparisons, especially longer scenarios. I think 11 vs 14 minutes was the longest he had in the video, which is a nice gain but I'd want benchmarks from much longer [and multi-frame] scenarios before trying to make claims like "49% faster" the way he does in the video.

Personally, I've wanted to make the switch several times myself, but I'm a LightWave user first and foremost, and that's not available on Linux [unless you want to run it under a VM like WINE, at which point you're probably sacrificing all performance gains and then some]. If I'm ever in a scenario that leaves me with a reasonably current, but otherwise superfluous PC, its almost certainly going to get a Linux install.

Well I'm glad to hear nVidia might finally open-up their hardware architecture. I still don't trust nVidia though, cause surely, if they are prepared to release documentation on the hardware to enable the writing of open source drivers, they should have no problem with simply open-sourcing their current drivers. Such behaviour suggests (to me anyway) that they are intent on hiding something their closed-source drivers are doing, and since a display driver can see everything at any time, I've got a pretty good idea what that is.

Providing documentation for the writing of open source drivers while hiding the source they, themselves are using, suggests to me that they are hiding parts of the hardware architecture they have no intention of including in the hardware documentation they intend to give out. I reckon that open sourcing their own drivers would reveal communication with parts of the hardware that they have no intention of revealing. Yeah I know, it all sounds very tin hat and all of that, but the whole point in me moving to a Linux based system was to escape the abuse that is being practiced by these mega-corporations, and I thoroughly intend to make their abusive activities impossible (or at least as hard as possible) by doing so.

That aside, please bear in mind that the video demonstrates Linux performance using an nVidia card, so there you go, I mean that's a fancy new RTX nVidia card he's using on Linux right there, so it's not as if people should worry too much on that front. While I do see your point in some respects, I could never caution against Linux, though I would caution against Windows (and MacOS) without hesitation. I am never going back to a commercially owned and developed OS no matter what they tempt us with.

Nevertheless, I hope my tin hat is unfounded on the nVidia drivers thing, and it is great news to hear that open source developers will hopefully be able to work on them in the near future. At the very least, them caving in to the pressure shows there must be a mammoth amount of pressure for them to do so. It'll go kinda like Blender did, where there's a slow uptake at first, but then something will happen to trigger an exponential rise in the uptake of Linux (especially Ubuntu since it's already super-popular).

I don't think being open source has much of an impact on the popularity of any software outside of niche markets and enthusiasts communities. The massive uptick in Blender users since 2.8 and the penetration it is now seeing in the professional markets have a lot to do with multi-faceted reasoning by major CG studios and professional users. Of course, the changes to the UI were sorely needed and is the #1 reason everyone is now testing out Blender in their pipelines. That had always been the one thing that kept Blender form greater market penetration. The other reason is obviously the price. Populating a studio with 100 seats of Blender is more or less free, while Autodesk and other companies still have absorbant licensing fees. The fact it is open-source is not really a reason behind Blender's popular success now. It helps, of course, in some ways that it is open-source, but Blender has been around since the '90s, and never really had any footing in the industry until it started to use industry-standard UI elements, even though it was always open source.

Being open-source, in some ways may have even hurt Blender's popularity to some degree because there had never been a cohesive design path for the software until recently. Addons weren't always unified in how they dealt with each other and native features of the software, and it was sometimes confusing as there were so many builds out there to pick from.

@Retrowave sounds like you've got yourself some industrial strength tin-foil there! I don't know as Nvidia's ever been particularly secretive about the telemetry they collect, some of which is necessary for their products to work/improve, and the rest is pretty optional if you don't install their "GeForce Experience" software, but just the drivers instead. I doubt they have secret hidden code that's doing anything nefarious at the least.

I've always wondered, cause I've considered going down the "privacy rabbit hole" myself, but always settled on the conclusion that, just because something is open-source, doesn't mean its really any "safer". I'm not compiling it myself, and even if I were, I wouldn't have a clue what I'm looking at/for in the code anyway. Unless you're reading code for everything you use line by line, and can code well enough yourself to understand it, are you ever really sure? You're still just taking someone, or at least a collective group of someones/strangers word that it is "safe", and that's only marginally better than using closed source.

Its kinda like wikipedia, sure, there's a lot of good information there, lots of fact checked, cited material, and its accurate until someone comes along and changes something, then its "right", until someone else comes along and catches it. So the open source stuff I use, I use because it makes the most sense to me, rather than trying regain any sense of privacy in the every decreasing world we're building. As I said, I'd definitely like to try Linux, but it'd be more of a preference for a streamlined/simplified OS than anything else at this point.

To Lux's point about the UI, that certainly makes a HUGE difference. GIMP, which is probably still a bit further behind PhotoShop than Blender is to its counterparts, but has had a standardized UI for a LONG time, is a really easy transition. When I first looked at that, it was pretty much a case of install it, launch it, poke around a bit, try a few things, and I was good to go. It couldn't do everything PS could, but it did enough, and I was able to adapt immediately. Blender on the other hand, some of those earlier versions could really make your head spin even if they were nearly as capable as their closed-source analogs.

I'd add that one of the major reasons companies are slow to adopt open-source solutions isn't that the software isn't capable enough, its a matter of support. When there's money on the line, most companies would rather pay for a product that comes with support that they can get on a phone and work with when something isn't working. Feature breaking bugs that could be show-stoppers are going to be a lot less common and addressed a lot more quickly when both sides have money on the line. With open-source, you've either got to fix it yourself, or hope someone gets to it and another builds drops in a time frame that works for you. Support falls [almost] entirely on the user/company, and their IT department's willingness/ability to deep dive random internet forums for a solution or work-around in that event, NOT a scenario you want to be facing with a million dollar contract on the line. I'm sure you can find hundreds of cases of companies using pretty objectively inferior software simply because it comes with a support safety net that the better software might not.

Open-source software can be a bit of a fickle market as well. Open-source projects come and go as new or different stuff comes along and markets shift, or the developer who's project it was originally moves onto something else, gets hired somewhere, etc, maybe a few people will keep developing it for a little while after but don't have the passion or knowledge the creator did, and eventually it goes stagnant. Once its been around a long enough to develop a track record of stable, quality releases and build a reasonable expectation that there will be future, and consistent versions making it something worth investing time into. then you'll see it start to gain some traction, and I think Blender reached that tipping point. Companies aren't fond of investing large amounts of time in to training employees on software, that may or may not still be actively developed a year or two down the road.

I have to wonder if the push toward subscription based software [I think Adobe and AutoDesk are both subscription only now?] hasn't/won't help to fuel more of a shift toward open-source software, at least for smaller production houses, and freelancers. I know myself, depending on what I'm working on, I might go a month or three where I don't open one or more of the programs in my "pipeline", or if I do, its not more than a two or three times for an hour or two. I know you can [usually] activate/cancel your subscription on a monthly basis as needed, but how practical is that really? Maybe I use GIMP once a week to dump some progress/screen shots or something during a month while I'm heavily into the modelling phase of a project. If I were carrying a PShop subscription, would I suspend it for that month, and use something else, if I have to have and be familiar enough with to use something else as a backup for those periods, at what point is it just more practical to switch full time?

Larger studios its probably not as much of a problem, they've likely got multiple artists working in all phases of the pipeline at all times, likely on multiple concurrent projects, and a few floating licenses can cover any spillover, but for smaller studios that might only have a handful of artists and only be working on a single project, with most/all of them on the same phase at same time? Seems like a good fit for a few open-source solutions in their pipeline.

Also, I don't think you can understate the impact the open-movie projects from Blender had as far as "putting it on the map". I think those projects going back to "Elephant's Dream" and "Big Buck Bunny" really made a statement for Blender. Prior to those, you only had some individual or small group projects that only gave a glimpse of Blender's potential, and those weren't widely distributed, generally limited to a forum or two here or there. When they started organizing and producing the open-movie projects I think it helped generate a lot of buzz for Blender, and really showed that it was a lot more than a hobbiest grade program. Making the projects files available so anyone could download and have a look, and realize "wow, hey, that really WAS done with Blender" helped a lot as well I'm sure.

I'd dabbled with Blender prior to seeing those films [I could never get the MAYA PLE version to work], but Blender always felt clunkly and I just wasn't convinced it was capable enough compared to the closed source packages. Had I been, maybe 5-7 years later to things, post-release of some of those early film projects, I probably would have invested myself a lot more into Blender, rather than semi-dismissing it, and using it only for a few areas that LightWave doesn't cover well enough.

Sorry if that's a bit verbose, but the whole open-source idea has always been an area of interest to me, for one reason or another.

@Lux & Warlock - For me personally, it's blatant refusal to be dictated to by anyone or anything as to what I can and cannot do on my own hardware. That, along with the monstrous privacy abuse practiced by both Apple and Microsoft is why I will not use their operating systems. Their practices should be outlawed permanently in a written constitution. It might seem as if I'm all for Linux strictly for it being open source, but that aspect of it is really just a very welcome bonus to me.

It's true, being open source does not mean it is safe, but being open source means that it's integrity is verifiable, and to me that is the most important aspect. As Richard Stallman points out, unless the code can be read, there is no such thing as security, since there can be no guarantee of security when using something that is hidden from scrutiny.

One of the biggies for people wanting to move to linux, but don't, is hanging onto Photoshop etc. It's laughable, because GIMP is so customisable you can pretty much replicate Photoshop's interface. And even for those who simply don't like GIMP, there is also Krita, and I am very aware that a lot of those sticking to Windows due to Photoshop, are not even aware of Krita.

Places like this, for example, could make a real difference there. Clarkie pointed out to me just the other day that Renderosity doesn't even have a GIMP forum, never mind a Krita forum. How on earth can a website as relevant to CG artists as Renderosity is, not even have a GIMP and Krita forum?

It makes me wonder if they have any idea how many people use GIMP and Krita as their image editor! GIMP and Krita must be as popular in 2D, as Blender is in 3D; the amount of tutorials on YouTube alone demonstrate this. In fact, better than giving them a separate forum, I personally would rename the Photoshop forum to "GIMP, Krita, and Photoshop", as it would cause the Photoshop-using onlookers to realise that they do not need Photoshop when there is GIMP or Krita.

You might wonder, why might Renderosity want to do that? Well it's simple, cause the money Renderosity members are currently paying out to Adobe on subscriptions, would suddenly cease, meaning more money to spend at Renderosity! Getting into tactics there, I know, but it strikes me as idiotic to support something that is likely effecting their profits, while completely ignoring the very products that would indirectly help to increase their profits.

Yikes. I for one do not want to get into a philosophical or ethical debate about open-source software. Personally, I'm not convinced that open source is a good way to go for everything. Again, I cite the confusion and potentially infinite "branches" that can develop from open source as something which can actually hinder the adoption and cause overall confusion to users. Things tend to get really tricky and convoluted when dealing with open source because every programmer and their mom want to step in and contribute to the code. Some of it is good (or great), but some of it leads you down a path of empty promises. I can't tell you how many open source apps I've used that just ceased to exist one day because the dev team moved on to something else or lost interest. That wouldn't be the case with Blender, obviously, I'm just talking in general.

As far as privacy concerns go, I think the biggest offender there is Google, yet everyone always opts in to having their information shared because it's just so convenient. Apple and Google are the real reason Microsoft is doing what they do in Win 10. If they don't, then they've just handed off the keys to those other companies as far as the future OS dominance is concerned.

Anyway, that's as far as I'll go in discussing my stand on open source. Suffice to say I'm not concerned with what Microsoft is doing so much as I am concerned with the direction of technology in general.

Was just replying to the posts above. It's actually irrelevant to me what OS other people use, doesn't effect me or my choice in the slightest. I posted the thread as a heads-up about the performance gains to be had from switching to Linux, and he's demonstrating that using Blender, so thought I'd post it.

The privacy benefits of using Linux is not the reason for the thread, but is nevertheless another benefit of switching to Linux.

Retrowave posted at 7:39PM Wed, 12 February 2020 - #4380130

Was just replying to the posts above. It's actually irrelevant to me what OS other people use, doesn't effect me or my choice in the slightest. I posted the thread as a heads-up about the performance gains to be had from switching to Linux, and he's demonstrating that using Blender, so thought I'd post it.

The privacy benefits of using Linux is not the reason for the thread, but is nevertheless another benefit of switching to Linux.

Oh no, I'm glad you posted it and I appreciate your point of view on the matter. @Warlock279 I agree with a lot of what you said. Regarding image editors, have you tried Pixlr? That' what I typically go to when I just need to quickly adjust screencaps or do minor resizing or color adjustments on static images. I usually don't keep any photo editing software locally on my system except for those I would require for more serious work. Static image editing isn't something I tend to do anymore, except for the aforementioned screencaps or for product preview renders. Pixlr is decent in a pinch and doesn't take up any local space.

Retrowave posted at 4:49PM Wed, 12 February 2020 - #4380097

@Lux & Warlock - For me personally, it's blatant refusal to be dictated to by anyone or anything as to what I can and cannot do on my own hardware. That, along with the monstrous privacy abuse practiced by both Apple and Microsoft is why I will not use their operating systems. Their practices should be outlawed permanently in a written constitution. It might seem as if I'm all for Linux strictly for it being open source, but that aspect of it is really just a very welcome bonus to me.

It's true, being open source does not mean it is safe, but being open source means that it's integrity is verifiable, and to me that is the most important aspect. As Richard Stallman points out, unless the code can be read, there is no such thing as security, since there can be no guarantee of security when using something that is hidden from scrutiny.

One of the biggies for people wanting to move to linux, but don't, is hanging onto Photoshop etc. It's laughable, because GIMP is so customisable you can pretty much replicate Photoshop's interface. And even for those who simply don't like GIMP, there is also Krita, and I am very aware that a lot of those sticking to Windows due to Photoshop, are not even aware of Krita.

Places like this, for example, could make a real difference there. Clarkie pointed out to me just the other day that Renderosity doesn't even have a GIMP forum, never mind a Krita forum. How on earth can a website as relevant to CG artists as Renderosity is, not even have a GIMP and Krita forum?

It makes me wonder if they have any idea how many people use GIMP and Krita as their image editor! GIMP and Krita must be as popular in 2D, as Blender is in 3D; the amount of tutorials on YouTube alone demonstrate this. In fact, better than giving them a separate forum, I personally would rename the Photoshop forum to "GIMP, Krita, and Photoshop", as it would cause the Photoshop-using onlookers to realise that they do not need Photoshop when there is GIMP or Krita.

You might wonder, why might Renderosity want to do that? Well it's simple, cause the money Renderosity members are currently paying out to Adobe on subscriptions, would suddenly cease, meaning more money to spend at Renderosity! Getting into tactics there, I know, but it strikes me as idiotic to support something that is likely effecting their profits, while completely ignoring the very products that would indirectly help to increase their profits.

Sure, that something's integrity is verifiable, is important, unfortunately, if you're not doing that verification yourself, its a bit of a half measure, in my mind anyway. :/

GIMP is pretty good, I've been using it for, about 15 years now, give or take a few months. I haven't used PhotoShop since, v6, maybe 7, whenever that was, but I can't pretend its on par with PhotoShop. There's a number of plug-ins for PhotoShop that can be integral to a 3D pipeline, that there's simply nothing similar to for GIMP. Replicating the interface is one thing, but if there's features you need, GIMP might not cut it. If I were 2D first [or only!] I could see a strong case for still using PhohoShop over GIMP. [Worth noting the "GimpShop" branch of GIMP has been on pseudo life-support for several years now, I don't believe its seen an update since early 2.8.] Would I recommend GIMP to someone looking for a PS alternative, sure, and I'd absolutely recommend it to hobbyists as well, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to be paying PS prices in that use case. I probably wouldn't try to convert someone that uses primarily PS professionally tho. I think people should give GIMP a good hard, honest look, but I'd have a hard time faulting any serious PS user's choice to stick with PS [and I loathe Adobe's business model].

GIMP, unfortunately, hasn't had anywhere near the development success that Blender has. We've been waiting on the GIMP 3.0 update with the GTK 3+ port [as well as improvements for Wacom tablet support, etc] for ... 8 years? I think it was originally road-mapped for late summer 2012 [or was that when 2.8 dropped with 3.0 being next/"imminent"]? In any case, its been a minute! Some of the stuff originally slated for 3.0 [that doesn't rely on the GTK port] did get rolled in to 2.10, but still, its been ... slow. GIMP would have to get their development focused and tightened up the way Blender has. Recent stuff I've seen from GIMP, post 2.10 does seem like they're moving in the right direction, but its not where it needs to be yet, not to be a serious contender like Blender has become.

Krita, isn't a good analog for PhotoShop, I'd group it more with Corel Painter. A lot of the more technical image editing/manipulation stuff you're just not going to get done with Krita, at least not, anywhere near as quickly, easily or precisely as you would with PS or even GIMP, its just not built for that kind of stuff. Krita's solid for painting tho, I prefer it over Painter, tho that could be cause Painter's always been sluggish on my machine. The timeline/animation features in Krita are pretty solid as well, and something I'd like to really push with a project sometime. Krita's really solid, I like it, use it pretty regularly, I look forward to its development, but its not a PhotoShop replacement, I don't know what their future plans are. Personally, I'd rather see it develop as the best digital painting app it can be, rather than risk spreading development resources too thin trying to compete with PS as an image editor.

I think its a safe wager that GIMP/Krita aren't anywhere near as popular as Blender is, relative to their respective markets, simply because in the 3D market, you've got a dozen or so fairly sizable players, Max, Maya, LW, Softimage Xsi, C4D, Strata, Zbrush, Mudbox, Modo. Houdinini, etc, etc [some of which have come and gone or been bought up by a conglomerate, sure, but there's still more active players, and a lot of them fill niches]; in the 2D market, there is ONLY PhotoShop [maybe the Corel Graphics Suite? Which aside from Painter, the CorelDraw Suite doesn't seem to have a lot of market penetration]. I literally can't even name another serious 2D package [surely, its just my memory failing me?], let alone a competitor for PS, PaintTool Sai? Proejct DogWaffle? ... probably not. Nothing against them, they're perfectly usable, but PhotoShop they are not. Its a lot easier to grab market shares when there's more options to begin with and the users in that market are already likely using more than one software package. When its a monopoly, you have to make a major impact to crack a monopoly and GIMP hasn't done that yet.

A GIMP/Krita forum around here might seem like a nice idea, but lets be realistic, MOST of the forums around here aren't seeing much life these days, and they did close or merge several last year due to inactivity, it'd seem unlikely that they'd look to start new ones, at least not until unless there's a push in the 2D forum for one of them, and there's not much going on there either. Until you see some interest in the generic 2D forum for either, you're probably not going to see a lot of consideration given to GIMP/Krita, unfortunately, and maybe rightfully so. Maybe we can get some GIMP/Krita conversations going in the 2D forum and go from there? They did at least add a GIMP section to the galleries a year or so ago, for what that's worth!

LuxXeon posted at 6:35PM Wed, 12 February 2020 - #4380115

Yikes. I for one do not want to get into a philosophical or ethical debate about open-source software. Personally, I'm not convinced that open source is a good way to go for everything. Again, I cite the confusion and potentially infinite "branches" that can develop from open source as something which can actually hinder the adoption and cause overall confusion to users. Things tend to get really tricky and convoluted when dealing with open source because every programmer and their mom want to step in and contribute to the code. Some of it is good (or great), but some of it leads you down a path of empty promises. I can't tell you how many open source apps I've used that just ceased to exist one day because the dev team moved on to something else or lost interest. That wouldn't be the case with Blender, obviously, I'm just talking in general.

As far as privacy concerns go, I think the biggest offender there is Google, yet everyone always opts in to having their information shared because it's just so convenient. Apple and Google are the real reason Microsoft is doing what they do in Win 10. If they don't, then they've just handed off the keys to those other companies as far as the future OS dominance is concerned.

Anyway, that's as far as I'll go in discussing my stand on open source. Suffice to say I'm not concerned with what Microsoft is doing so much as I am concerned with the direction of technology in general.

Indeed, open-source needs a strong central development core/leadership/direction to be really successful I think. Blender seems to have that now, it hasn't always, and there's certainly no shortage of other open-source projects that have suffered from a lack of direction as well.

Yep, can't tell you how many pieces of software I've seen early development on, thought "hey, that looks promising, I'll check back on that in a few months" and you find its all but dead when you do, or there's been one or two news posts about plans, that are now six months old and nothing released, I wonder if there's not a potential for a crowdsourcing avenue that could get some of that stuff over the initial hurdles into a working program, and into a development cycle of some sort.

Ha, Google! Oy! Any telemetry your GPU might be feeding back to Nvidia, surely pales in comparison to what people are happily giving their Google+ accounts, etc. You're right tho, its not really what any singular entity is doing with regards to privacy, its the virtual arms race to push boundaries and gather as much information as possible by all them that's the truly scary part.