Open Source Enjoyment

There is certainly a lot of convenience to be had when it comes to using things from big companies. What are the tradeoffs though?

I've been a pretty big advocate for a long time of trying to use open source alternatives for things. I think it pre-dates my time here on Hive, although it wasn't as prevalent as it is now. I was exposed to Linux as a kid through my friends dad who I've talked about a little bit on here, who used to fix computers. I wasn't very skilled at it, but I knew some very basic navigational things.

Fast forward many years to today, and I'm really enjoying getting into and familiar with the open source alternatives that are out there! I've been using a Windows laptop for many years for work, and I'm certainly used to that. I have my own personal laptop and have been a Windows user on that since I got it, so it's been what I've been using through and through. I have been adding open source programs to the lineup on it instead of paying for the nefarious centralized entities like Microsoft, Adobe and others. This has been a fun journey for me, in a nerdy way!

Recently I was in the need of getting a Microsoft Office alternative because I needed to do some Excel work and some PDF stuff. I hadn't really had a need for it before because I would just use my work laptop but I've been making a big push of late to really separate my work laptop from my personal stuff. These days, privacy is really important for me as it is for millions of other people. Not that I have anything to hide from the company I work for, but they also don't need to know EVERY single detail about me and the things I do when I'm not working. Sounds weird to some.. but I think more people will hopefully adopt this mindset.

So with that in mind, I ended up going with OpenOffice as an alternative and I have been really enjoying it! I haven't gone nuts and did something complicated like Power Query or complicated operations on it, but it's served my very basic needs and it's been a wonderful addition to my suite of software.

Of course I've been using GIMP photo editing software for many years now, considering that I refuse to pay for the expensive Adobe stuff. I'm even more glad that I don't do that considering what they are doing with AI data mining of the stuff that people use their software for. I get data mining, but if I am paying for a service and you are mining my data, profiting off it and selling it, then I should deserve a fucking discount. Sadly these companies are not at all in that mindset right now, but hopefully sometime in the future.

I also recently was messing around with a PDF I needed to email for something and found that I can password protect the PDF so that it was safe in transit! This was a really wonderful thing because we all know how stuff gets stolen via unsecured email these days, and even the risk of sending it unsecure is more than I wanted. It was a snap to just protect it the way you could do it in Excel or Word, which was amazing!

People get scared when it comes to changing themselves over to Open Source for their software options but the thing about it is that the developers that work on these things are just a few months or years behind the big companies in terms of releasing features to their products. I don't mind adding some personal security to the mix by going with these alternatives over the big companies, and also not have to pay for it either. That's an easy win for me!

What about you, do you try to use Open Source software at all? If not, why? Let me know in the comments!