TBH I don’t like FreeCAD - I fell like it’s like recommending Gimp as a serious alternative to Photoshop. With enough effort and deep knowledge you can almost achieve similar results but you have to invest multiple times as much time. The saving in licencing cost is very quickly eastern up by the increased labour cost.

There is an alternative that has come a long way IMHO, though: BlenderBIM. They are still not quite as good as ArchiCAD and such but it runs natively on Linux and is very neat so far.

It indeed is. Why is an article of scientists discussing children’s welfare marked NSFW?

Have not used Standard Notes yet. How does it compare to Obsidian?

The protests last year where activists glued themselves to roads were about this exact thing. The message was “act according to the law”. They were branded terrorists by media and politicians.

Yeah it’s a wicked conundrum of past politic decisions now biting their asses. CDU and SPD made the debt brake law that forbids them to take loans to solve a crisis that is not unforeseeable and short term. Almost all crisises now have been foreseeable and are long term (demographic change, climate crisis, declining work force,…). SPD is part of the government now and the CDU is weaponizing the debt brake. All socially responsible solutions are vetoed by the neoliberal FDP and the opposition uses that to discredit the entire government, mainly shifting the blame to the Greens because they are their main political opponent. This results in a surge of far-right votes, pushing sane solutions even further away.

Agreed. This level of success certainly doesn’t come from the austerity policies dictated by foreign politicians.

I wanted to fully switch to Linux and FOSS for a while now but specialised software like CAD and image editing are either non existent or completely useless for professional purposes in their FOSS versions. What angers me most is that most is them could run on wine easily if the developers did some minor changes so it seems intentional.

Some of the tech they developed and use is open source. But the core tech is closed. For me, that’s good enough as long as they keep up acting with integrity they do.

Been using them for a while before switching to their paid version. Of course they are closed source and a business, so any hype and over the top praise is misplaced. That said they are indeed one of max a handful companies that never did anything to make me feel that my trust is misplaced. Their service is great, the products are well polished and reliable. Development is slow and they aren’t cheap. Their target audience is very security and privacy aware so any betrayal of trust would be punished incredibly hard. In that light, their own self interest should be a good insurance, should you be uncertain.

MacOS, iOS and stock Android, too for that matter. Dark times.

How about they contribute studying in Europe? It’s not like we don’t need skilled workers over here…

FOR SCIENCE!

BTW for the uninitiated: That’s the actual quote from the former federal drug officer. No joke - we wished it was.

The German fascist party AfD is largely bankrolled by Putin. Go figure.

As if that stopped then from implementing harmful laws. Remember article 10, requiring digital upload filters.

The difference is one of them wants change and the others want money.

Orban would vote against that.

How will they buy a family owned private company? That would require the family willing to sell and that’s simply not the case 95% of the time.

The real problem is that those hidden champions can not grow further because they already dominate their small niche. Often they inhabited this position for generations already and are very conservative and don’t really innovate.

I tried to install ArchiCAD via bottles done time ago. At first I thought the DRM inhibits it but they even have native Linux support. And ArchiCAD does have a good MacOS version, too. I don’t get it…

It seems to format documents differently though. That means it scrambled a few files for a co-worker I sent it to who uses MS Office. Stuff like that never happens with LibreOffice although I like the OpenOffice UI better.