Stephen ThomasAn unholy mix of closed software ecosystems, Inkscape being horrible on Mac and Blender’s very lacking support for text objects/fonts is making what should be ultra simple not so simple and frustrating due to knowing how simple this should/could be 😩
Felipe, o motoboy de treta@thecgnerd Apple's to blame here, right? #applesux
@fbobraga Not really. It’s mostly Adobe and how it ties people into their ecosystems. I’m working with designs that use a font that’s on the Creative Cloud, so the designer can’t send over the font with the project files. If I was animating in After Effects, this problem would disappear.
Inkscape not working well on Mac and Blender not supporting variable fonts just add extra hurdles. It’s on projects like this that I can see why most motion designers stick with AE 🫤
@thecgnerd yeap: there's Adobe pressure to alternative software not run well on systems (and sends that Apple fall on that: it's an ugly market move, that can new done only on closed source software world - Microsoft did, and probably still does, something like it with Libreoffice [maybe Apple did it to...])
@thecgnerd the only solution: designers must use an open source OS, where something like it can't happen (and Adobe Software runs well too... And there's no financial cost to migrate, just a small, really small, learning curve)
@fbobraga Aye, that would be nice, but all the designers I've spoken to are very tightly locked in to the Adobe ecosystem. If someone wanted to move to something else, it causes headaches because of compatibility (PS/AI importers often aren't perfect) and other things like my font issue. It's not such a huge issue for animators, but if you're a brand designer, graphic designer or something else in that realm, Adobe's dominance in that field pretty much requires you use their software.
@thecgnerd that's a good motive to avoid Apple stuff in the future: avoid vendor lockin, like this environment is suffering today ^^
@thecgnerd it may be non clear to non tech savvy people, but Apple is, and always was, all about vendor lockins and walled gardens ^^
@thecgnerd all bigtech and DRM are about it, in one way or another (take a look in defectivebydesign.org when you can)
@fbobraga I'm a big fan of Linux, but it's not always the best option. I'm saying this as someone who solely used Ubuntu for a couple of years for my animation work, rarely having to boot into Windows when needed. The long and short of it is though, Linux is still a very techie OS. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't comfortable working in the terminal. It's a lot better than it used to be, but when things go wrong, they can go very wrong, you need a fair bit of expertise to fix things.
@fbobraga As far as Apple and their Macs... Sure... They're more locked down than a PC. But it's the most well catered for Unix distribution out there. There are many many reasons why I choose to use it over Windows and I wish there were fewer reasons to use it over Linux, but right now, I feel like I have a good mix, Mac for animating, Linux for render.
@thecgnerd there`s several hardware that is rock solid today, running something like Debian (do you know de M1/M2 processor thing? Is another try of vendor lockin by Apple...)
@thecgnerd M1/M2 was made exclusively to avoid good support for linux (but Apple marketed that as an "performance issue", which is very untrue....)
@thecgnerd a distribution focusing on it (properly support for these Apple processors) kind of shows my point (that properly support this processors by linux are a PITA)
@fbobraga It's very early days, installation will improve as the project develops. To be fair though, if you dig into it, most hardware manufacturer's support for Linux is spotty at best. Just look at nVidia and how they're messing up the transition to Wayland 🤷 Most peripherals rely on developers reverse engineering to write open source drivers, it's rare that a company will make Linux drivers for their product.
@thecgnerd no, it's not early days: the arch exists for years now
@fbobraga How long would you expect a new Linux distro to take?
@thecgnerd depends totally on Apple's side, in this case: it's not an truly open architecture
@fbobraga but it’s not down to Apple to facilitate other operating systems to run natively on their machines. Just like Microsoft doesn’t actively facilitate installing Linux on surface tablets 🤷 It may be easier on surface, because MS isn’t able to develop their own chips, but still…
@thecgnerd in this case is: is their hardware, the issues related to Linux support are related openness/license (that is provided ONLY by Apple)
@thecgnerd up to today, running Linux on Apple's hardware have "hack" in the name ^^ #hackintosh
@thecgnerd ops, "hackintosh" is the other way around: my mistake
@fbobraga Why is hack a bad thing? I ran a hackintosh for a good couple of years before transitioning to Ubuntu. Hacking should be celebrated in my opinion.
@thecgnerd not a bad thing (and true: must be celebrated), but relates to something not trivial (and not easy to do) :-)
@fbobraga sounds like Linux in general 😂
@fbobraga I'm not sure if the Apple chips are a form of vendor lock-in 🤔 There's even a Linux distro that runs natively on Apple Silicon: @AsahiLinux
@thecgnerd @AsahiLinux Linux proper support for these Apple processors are a real pain in the ass
michael