#there is a faline san video playing in the background.

[ivlymonii]

I HAVE A SORE THROAT

WHY AM I COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS ON TUMBLR

FUCK I HAVE ANOTHER WEEK OF SCH BEFORE SUMMER BREAK STARTS FUCKING SHIT.

I DONT WANNA DEAL WITH MY DT END OF YEAR PROJECT OR MY MUSIC END OF YEAR.

IM ASIAN WHY AM I SUCH A FAILURE

[quailfence]

[Image description: Three photos of a knitted red dragon plush. Under the cut are three panels from the manga showing Falin interacting with a baby dragon. End description.]

[Plain text: PSA: Free Software

Reading this may really save your time, privacy, and money! Reblog or share to spread awareness!

Feel free to recommend more libre software in the tags, replies, comments, or whatever you freaks like to do!

Some Libre Software I Personally Enjoy… End plain text]

[Image descriptions taken from alt: Image 1: The first slide of LibreOffice Impress's "Growing Liberty" template, but I customized two lines of text to "This is the only piece of text I customized." and "Just Kidding - Tricked You".

Image 2: OpenShot Video Editor open to my Minecraft character chroma-keyed onto of the star background from the Space Jam website.

Image 3: the program GIMP open to an image of a bell pepper (which is an included brush for some reason) overlayed with the Comic Sans text "This is GIMP!" End description.]

[Plain text: (Be sure to go to Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Colors. I have no idea why that's not enabled by default.) End plain text.]

[Image descriptions taken from alt: Image 1: Audacity open to a message about how my mic isn't working, as well as a track of "Home" from Undertale, which is playing.

Image 2: 7-Zip displaying the contents of the Minecraft mod "Earth2Java" by Slexom.

Image 3: Firefox with a purple night sky theme open to the draft of this post.

Image 4: The previous image, except with uBlock Origin's menu open. It has blocked 266 requests so far. The number keeps increasing. As of writing this alt text, it's 292.

Image 5: Linux Mint's desktop. It has a bar with applications at the bottom and a menu open at the bottom-left resembling Windows's Start Menu.

Image 6: Raspberry Pi OS's desktop. It has a bar with applications at the top and a menu open at the top-left listing more applications and options, similar to an older (better) Windows Start Menu.

Image 7: Arch, by the way.

Image 8: Pop!_OS's desktop. It has a (centered) bar with applications at the bottom, a bar at the top with widgets and status information, and a menu open in the middle of the screen resembling MacOS's Launchpad (but with categories). End description.]

[Plain text: Happy computering! End plain text.]

@a-captions-blog

PSA: Free Software

Reading this may really save your time, privacy, and money! Reblog or share to spread awareness!

Folks often use software that’s expensive and sometimes even inferior because they don’t know there are alternatives. So to those unfamiliar: basically, free and open-source (FOSS) or "libre" software is free to use and anyone can access the original code to make their own version or work on fixing problems.

That does not mean anyone can randomly add a virus and give it to everyone—any respectable libre project has checks in place to make sure changes to the official version are good! Libre software is typically developed by communities who really care about the quality of the software as a goal in itself.

There are libre alternatives to many well-known programs that do everything an average user needs (find out more under the cut!) for free with no DRM, license keys, or subscriptions.

Using libre software when possible is an easy way to fight against and free yourself from corporate greed while actually being more convenient in many cases! If you need an app to do something, perhaps try searching online for things like:

foss [whatever it is]

libre [whatever it is]

open source [whatever it is]

Feel free to recommend more libre software in the tags, replies, comments, or whatever you freaks like to do!

Some Libre Software I Personally Enjoy…

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an office suite, much like Microsoft Office. It includes equivalents for apps like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, which can view and edit files created for those apps.

I can't say I've used it much myself yet. I do not personally like using office software except when I have to for school.

OpenShot

OpenShot Video Editor is, as the name suggests, a video editing program. It has industry-standard features like splicing, layering, transitions, and greenscreen.

I've only made one video with it so far, but I'm already very happy with it. I had already paid for a video editor (Cyberlink PowerDirector Pro), but I needed to reinstall it and I didn't remember how. Out of desperation, I searched up "FOSS video editor" and I'm so glad I did. There's no launcher, there's no promotion of other apps and asset packs—it's just a video editor with a normal installer.

GIMP

GNU Image Manipulation Program is an image editor, much like Photoshop. Originally created for Linux but also available for Windows and MacOS, it provides plenty of functionality for editing images. It is a bit unintuitive to learn at first, though.

I've used it to create and modify images for years, including logos, really bad traceover art, and Minecraft textures. It doesn't have certain advanced tech like AI paint-in, but it has served my purposes well and it might just work for yours!

(Be sure to go to Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Colors. I have no idea why that's not enabled by default.)

Audacity

Audacity is an audio editing program. It can record, load, splice, and layer audio files and apply effects to them.

Audacity is another program I've used for a long time. It is not designed to compose music, but it is great for podcasts, simple edits, and loading legacy MS Paint to hear cool noises.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a file manager and archive tool. It supports many archive types including ZIP, RAR, TAR, and its own format, 7Z. It can view and modify the contents of archives, encrypt and decrypt archives, and all that good stuff.

Personally, I use 7-Zip to look inside JAR files for Minecraft reasons. I must admit that its UI is ugly.

Firefox

Firefox is an internet browser, much like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Safari. While browsers are free, many of them include tracking or other anti-consumer practices. For example, Google plans to release an update to Chromium (the base that most browsers are built from these days) that makes ad blockers less effective by removing the APIs they currently rely on.

Aside from fighting monopolies, benefits include: support for animated themes (the one in the picture is Purple Night Theme), good ad blockers forever, an (albeit hidden) compact UI option (available on about:config), and a cute fox icon.

uBlock Origin

As far as I know, uBlock Origin is one of the best ad blockers there is.

I was on a sketchy website with my brother, and he was using Opera GX's ad blocker. Much of the time when he clicked on anything, it would take us to a random sponsored page. I suggested that he try uBlock Origin, and with uBlock Origin, that didn't happen anymore.

Linux

Linux is a kernel, but the term is often used to refer to operating systems (much like Windows or MacOS) built on it. There are many different Linux-based operating systems (or "distros") to choose from, but apps made for Linux usually work on most popular distros. You can also use many normally Windows-only apps on Linux through compatibility layers like WINE.

I don't have all four of these, so the images are from Wikipedia. I tried to show a variety of Linux distros made for different kinds of users.

If you want to replace your operating system, I recommend being very careful because you can end up breaking things. Many computer manufacturers don't care about supporting Linux, meaning that things may not work (Nvidia graphic cards notoriously have issues on Linux, for example).

Personally, I tried installing Pop!_OS on a laptop, and the sound output mysteriously doesn't work. I may try switching to Arch Linux, since it is extremely customizable and I might be able to experiment until I find a configuration where the audio works.

Many Linux distros offer "Live USB" functionality, which works as both a demo and an installer. You should thoroughly test your distro on a Live USB session before you actually install it to be absolutely sure that everything works. Even if it seems fine, you should probably look into dual-booting with your existing operating system, just in case you need it for some reason.

Happy computering!