What matters is that TI has an effective monopoly on scientific and graphic calculators in the US in particular, which means that it’s the platform that matters to most. It’s irrelevant whether or not some alternative is better. It’s also extremely widely supported by software and tutorials.

There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.

Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.

Forks to do this have come and gone.

Oh, absolutely. None of them have any momentum and suffer from 1) long-time Gimp users usually not caring 2) former or present Photoshop users (in the case of PS imitations) rarely hearing about them and 3) those that do being hesitant to commit to them due to both their often half-baked nature and what you said (and also no plugin support, which is one of those things that binds people to Adobe, often against their will).

This is part of a thing with open source, it’s not possible to force something on the developers.

Most open source projects are firmly in the hands of rather conservative people who are doing their thing and really don’t care about what people think. I’ve seen it often enough. I’m essentially saying the same thing as you do, but less kindly. It at least partially explains why so many projects are suffering from severely outdated UI designs, both in good and bad ways. Maybe it’s the lack of economic pressure and competition too, especially with programs like Gimp that aren’t actually competing with commercial tools, even though some of them could if there was enough motivation.

I am totally a freak in my software background

You’ve piqued my curiosity though. Risc OS is one of few operating systems of note I’ve never actually tried (and I have tried some freaky stuff - remember BeOS?). Let’s say I wanted to give it a go today (in a VM) would you recommend it and if you do, which of the two (Open or not) should I choose? What can you actually do with it today?

You have to admit though that your background is quite unusual. I would assume that there are far more people looking for a free alternative to Photoshop after having used Photoshop for a long time (especially in the wake of the switch to a subscription model, but even earlier when prices were increased) instead of coming from an OS and using tools written for an OS that even among techies are extremely niche.

Eh, depends. Windows? Sure, it’s highly inconsistent. Their console UIs? Waste of screen space. Office though? It’s so far ahead of Libre Office, it’s not even funny - and I’m saying this as someone who was using Open and Libre Office for decades. Both feel positively ancient by comparison and anything more complex than basic document formatting (which also works far better in MS Office) is a chore.

Coming from Photoshop 6 (which came out in 2000), Gimp is still playing catch up with that ancient program in terms of basic usability.

These kinds of conversions have been around for decades. They usually don’t survive big version jumps.

Haven’t tried it for quite some time, but does it finally have a UI designed by and for human beings instead of Vogons?

I would recommend turning the brightness down to near zero. Combine this with Dark Reader for websites (Firefox) and using a white or grey on black night reader mode in ebook reader apps. At first, the display will appear almost unreadable, but your eyes will quickly adjust.

This makes this platform next to impossible to recommend to users outside of the US, since credit cards are very uncommon in e.g. Europe.

At this point, it works more reliably than playing Youtube videos in a web browser.

Signal does, by the way.

Because most employees can’t just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don’t want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.

There is still censorship in many instances. Just because it’s transparent doesn’t change anything about the fact that it’s happening. I doubt more than a small fraction of users even regularly look at the modlog.

BBB (Big Blue Button, for those unfamiliar) seems to be the favorite of lots of institutions in Germany. I think a government agency recommended its use, that’s why it’s so widespread.

The app does remind you of updates.