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Like Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, VLC, Mplayer, K3b, Libre Office

and Windows shareware is noted for its excellence? "

Most of the Firefox, Thunderbird developers work for Mozilla.

GIMP, VLC, Mplayer are developers get their money from other sources and lets be honest they are way off what professionals expect.

Nero runs circles around K3b.

Libre Office only got so far thanks to Sun's money.

As for shareware it depends where you look.

So Nero stopped sucking again? Last time I used it, it was an overly complex resource hog.

I'm also not sure what you imagine "professionals" expect from video playing applications. MPlayer and VLC are popular for what they are, not for how well they work in some imaginary professional video watching market. Microsoft's and Apple's offerings aren't nearly as good.

What is it that professionals expect from a video player? Frankly VLC plays far more files, and is far more tolerant than something like QT. I know lots of professionals that use VLC. Show me a better proprietary video player that supports all the options from VLC.


Recently Nero has been turning into horrible trash (especially the interface). Plus I don't know of anybody that uses the more advanced features from nero. K3B is far better if you just want a simple interface that just works.


I'm not entirely disputing your previous point, but the examples I just mentioned really don't count.

Edited 2012-07-22 10:50 UTC

You make a reasonable point, Lunduke has being saying similar things on the Linux action show. I agree Open-source development is likely to be faster / better if funding is more obvious and available.

Then you blow it out of the water by saying Open-source software is crap (sorry you specify desktop) as presumably you realize that your argument would immediately fail if we considered server software. Now VLC / Mplayer being crap, I believe not, I can think of many proprietary media players that are far worse Winamp, Realplayer or even Windows media player. GIMP is good it may not be as good as Photoshop but is better than most proprietary graphics editors. Last time I used Nero it sucked, maybe it has improved but for the burning I do I don't need or want bloatware or the rest of the crap that comes with Nero.

Finally you make a reasonable point about how Libre office has made good progress due to funding from Sun - raising the point that funding is important.

Good luck with the finding of quality Windows shareware sorting through the maleware and porn, personally I pleased it's something I don't do anymore.

With the difference that Nero Linux will not been developed anymore.