I have to admit to a rising fascination with open-source.
This comes in no small part because I have felt really alienated from the internet and technology lately. As someone who grew up with technology being a tool and an escape and an accelerator, watching the rapid enshittification of everything has sucked. It’s felt like watching the neighbourhood I grew up in get gentrified. The murals are painted over, the initials scratched into the sidewalks when they were first poured are jackhammered out and replaced by smooth cement. People have moved away, or they’re just one face in an increasingly dense crowd. What once were landmarks aren’t, and what once were institutions are shadows of their former selves. Public art replaced by billboards and signage. Forget the internet – even my own computer feels more hostile. Windows serves ads and content to me constantly. This is to say nothing of the effects of AI on both the internet and my day-to-day computing experience. Increasingly, the algorithm-driven Internet and even my own computer are trying to tell me who and what is important, what I want to do, what I want to say, how I want to say it, and by extension, what to think. It’s insulting.
I’m writing this in LibreOffice on my beloved Surface Pro 3, which as of late 2024 no longer runs Windows. It’s a bit of a cursed computer. It was designed for Windows, and in many ways Windows was increasingly designed for the Surface line, for a long time. When it was announced that Windows 10 support would end in October of 2025, I experimented with trying to force Windows 11 on this computer, but it simply wouldn’t work as intended. When I discovered that there was a whole project to make Linux run – and run well – on Surface hardware, I had to explore it.
It’s given this computer a whole new lease on life. Windows was increasingly sluggish and despite loving the Surface hardware, I was less and less inclined to grab it as a secondary device. Ubuntu has made it feel fresh – and I enjoy using it as a desktop OS. I am not that interested in operating in the command line. I want to boot my computer and use it as a tool, not as a project. And I’d like it to be slick and joyful to use. Ubuntu’s default interface, in dark mode with orange highlights, pushes the happy button in my brain. I like Windows 11 more than most, but Ubuntu feels like technology now, and Windows feels like an appliance.
This has been my experience with so many open-source projects. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but at some point in the last five years, so many projects that I’ve been following for years have hit an incredible stride. My Framework laptop is more and more open-source all the time. Blender is the obvious one with its massive 4.0 release (and I have just started using it and love it).
Inkscape, which I’ve been an advocate for a long time, hit 1.0. GIMP’s 3.0 release has alleviated so many pain points for me (while also baffling me with some continued lack of attention to some basic functions). LibreOffice sneakily stopped being annoying to me. ShotCut continues to be my lightweight video editor of choice. OBS is my streaming software of choice, and it seems to be the choice for most other people as well, and it’s great.
I don’t use it yet, but I keep seeing people talking about FreeCAD hitting 1.0 and finally becoming a meaningful competitor to Fusion 360. Krita continues to be Krita, a painting app that people really like. Following the destruction of Twitter, Mastodon has become my favourite social media app by a wide margin, for its novel approach of it shows me who and what I say I want to see. Also it’s full of weird, beautiful nerds. And I fell in love – in love, I say! – with GDevelop, the free and open-source no-code game engine in which I’m building my game bHopper. It’s been growing in leaps and bounds even in just the year that I’ve been using it.
Maybe it’s just that these projects are now at a level of maturity and have generated enough buy-in that they have reached a critical mass, and are pushing more and more towards feature parity with the bigger corporate players. They’re all still weird and idiosyncratic in their ways, but they are doing their things better than they ever have, and have begun to turn their attention towards usability and quality of life in addition to features and stability. And they are getting better, fast. With more and more people switching (including at the scale of the civil service, like Denmark’s push towards “digital sovereignty” and away from corporate software) I can only imagine that pace will continue to increase.
And none of them are serving me ads or trying to tell me what to think and say while I’m using them.
More and more I think I can live my digital life in open source. I’m using it to build a better digital neighbourhood. I’m enjoying following these projects and watching them grow and evolve in realtime far more than I’ve ever enjoyed glossy product announcements and keynotes. I feel the presence of people in the code in a way that I’ve long stopped feeling from the Adobes and FAANGs and Microsofts of the world. The community is clearly both the developer and the audience for open-source software projects.
But here’s the thing. These projects live or die by their community, and I’m not in it yet. I don’t have the disposable cash to support most of these projects financially right now. I’m not a developer – I simply don’t code. I need to figure out how to contribute in some measure to these projects. Because if I’m going to live here, I’m going to be a good neighbour.
Maybe there’s a role for me to play in testing, or documentation. Funding, eventually. But maybe the first step is just to do what I have been doing in my Twitch streams and social media posts – to be an evangelist for the concept. bHopper is a project I am loving, and in it I get to show off many of these tools. I design graphics in Inkscape and textures in GIMP and models in Blender and build the game in GDevelop and cut video in ShotCut and record audio in Audacity and make it known that the game is fully built in free and open-source tools. It is an exercise and an experiment as much as it is a project.
For now, I’m still keeping my production machine – my Framework, ironically – as a Windows machine. I’m too bought into that ecosystem to simply jettison it overnight. And frankly, I still find Linux to be more of a project OS than a viable production machine – for now. (Maybe finally dual-booting on my Framework will nudge me more in that direction.) So I’m keeping an apartment in this gentrified, enshittified, increasingly hostile and overbearing neighbourhood. But I’m spending more and more of my time in this other place. Maybe you already live there full-time. If so, hey, neighbour – it’s nice to meet you. Maybe you don’t, though. In which case – come visit open source for a bit. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s nice here, and getting nicer all the time.
As always, folks, paddle your own canoe.
– Trevor
