I’ll confess to not having compared them in the last 10 years or so, and I’d be happily surprised to be wrong, but I’m betting that “long way” is mostly in terms of features used by casual/home users, not power users who use the software on a professional basis to do professional work. .

I hate that it is the way it is, but OSS “alternatives” are not serious tools for professionals. That said, I’m 100% in favor of nationalizing Adobe and Microsoft, since they’ve created a world where only their tools are good enough to do the job, but that’s not the conversation we’re having here.

Here’s a simple test: take all formatting out of a copy of Ulysses or some other doorstopper of a classic novel so it’s just a giant wall of text. Give two publishing pros each a copy of that wall of text, have one turn it in to a publishable book using the industry standard tools and one do the same task with the OSS “alternatives” and see who’s done first, and which version is the better looking final product.

Wanna place any bets?

Then that’s even worse, because the design of the OSS “alternatives” to everything I use daily for work screams “hobbyist who just needed the basic functions of a word processor and spreadsheet editor for school”.

A vasectomy, mostly. I did try to get into some studies for things like IVD, but that never materialized either.

I was shocked at how easy it was when I got to the NW and just…walked into a Planned Parenthood and scheduled the appointment.

Florida in the late 90s/early 00s was very “unreal”, but it’s gotten worse every time I’ve gone back to visit.

Neither was worth the time it took to uninstall them when they proved almost unusably inferior to the industry standards.

These things are the standard for a reason, OSS hobbyists who are not graphic designers or admin workers generally will never be able to make something that is in the same league for the exact same reason that I couldn’t build a compiler better than the industry standard one, even if I technically had the coding skills to make it, because I haven’t spent decades using one professionally, so I wouldn’t know what an industry pro would want from it.

They’re anything bus serious, but that does appear to be what they’re suggesting, yes. Typical pronatalist nonsense.

As a man who’s been very sure he wanted to remain childfeee since his teens: most surgeons won’t sterilize men on request either. I was told several times to come back after I was married with at least three kids. Had to move to the literal opposite corner of the country to a place where Planned Parenthood isn’t under constant assault to get a vasectomy after decades of chasing one.

Lol, somebody’s never had a coked out bathroom hookup and it’s kinda sad.

Sex can involve that kind of intimacy. So can a really deep conversation while cuddling. Sex doesn’t have to involve that kind of intimacy, and would be far less likely to as a whole if idiots would stop teaching children it’s a special and magical thing that should be sacrosanct if not being used for “creating a stable pair bond”.

This kind of thinking is one half a step removed from “sex is so special and magical that people who have it in a different way than me are perverts and should be imprisoned or executed”, or the flip side of that same impulse: “sex is so special and magical that the women I want to have sex with should be held in a gilded prison guarded by eunuchs to ensure only I ever fuck them”.

So my question stands. I knew what you meant, now explain why sex is a special sphere of human activity that is materially different from any other human interaction without resorting to magical thinking.

only if you essentially do not view sex as any more sacred, or complex and meaningful, than food…

Why on Earth would anyone who isn’t indoctrinated into a religion ever think that sex is more sacred than any other form of human interaction?