What you won't see me use anytime soon

We might have different opinions about tools, software, and any other things. Whether because they are badly designed, because they don’t feel right for us, or just because we have principles that make us not use tools in any way, no matter what and how they are. Here I’m just gonna ramble about why certain tools are not made for me, and why you won’t see me use them. Of course, don’t forget this is just my opinion. They can be helpful for you to make up your own, but don’t take everything I say as absolute truth. Everyone has opinions, don’t hesitate to confront mine.

Unity

And I mean the game engine. Now of course it’s a great tool. In fact, many of my favorite games are made using Unity (Spiritfarer, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Hollow Knight, or Is This Seat Taken just to name a few). And, contrary to what you might think, the problem is not that it’s a proprietary tool. Because if I wanted to just use free and open source software only, I would just uninstall Steam, which is probably not the good thing to go.

And to tell the truth, the problem for me with Unity started before the Runtime Fee was a thing (I’ll talk about it later on this section). Thing is, no matter what you’d like to make with it, Unity was always meant to be a 3D game engine, even if you set it up for 2D. So if you want to make a 2D game, you still have to be wary about the Z axis and it’s inconsistent behavior, which is not intuitive at all. I ran into many problems like that when trying to make a 2D platform game just to test things out and learn how to make games, where my character just go through a platform because of the Z axis.

And if it was just that, but no. I mentionned it quickly before, but the Runtime Fee controversy is what made me want to quickly switch to Godot and learn GDScript. And well, the first version of the plan was already the point of no return for me. Knowing that you have to pay fees even if you used the free version of the engine, I was like “How about no”. No wonder why the former CEO resigned. Good thing this plan got terminated and replaced by the classical price raise of the current plans. A disguised blessing I guess.

Hyprland

Tiling window manager is one of the best things I got to use on Linux. And paradoxally it’s a sad thing for me, because so far I’ve used only one of them, which is Sway. It only was just recently that I learned about some others, like River for example which is intriguing me. And trust me, I was about to say how cool Hyprland was when I saw it for the first time… until I realized what really lies beneath this project.

Now to give you some context, there is one thing you need to know about me: I’m asexual, panromantic, and most importantly, genderfluid. I go by he/she/it pronouns, but I tend to let people ask me for my pronouns, as they easily change overtime. And I never hid this part of my identity, as it just makes me happy to talk about it. In short, you could say I belong to the transgender umbrella without being fully transgender. And from here, people who got to interact with the Hyprland community can easily tell what I’m going to say. Yep, it’s the “who/cares” controversy.

This controversy alone made me realize how toxic the community is, and I ended up not wanting to be associated with it whatsoever. I know it’s something old, but as someone who wants to protect trans people and their dignity, it is not something I could accept. Now it turns out that Vaxry himself was not the main character of the controversy, but one of his moderator of his Discord server. But the fact that he took that much time to take actions (which AFAIK is muting the moderator responsible for all of this for a while) makes me question his legitimity, even after his apology he posted on his blog.

It’s been 2 years since the controversy, and I hope things have changed. I really do. At some point, I’d love to give this project a chance. But if you want me to use it, you’ll have to wait for a long time before it happens.

Omarchy

For this one, I’m going to be pretty straightforward, as it is a recent project and I can note only one problem I have with it.

I’ve known about DHH thanks to Ruby on Rails, which I got to use for the first time when I was in college. And it’s a great tool. I’m still having fun using it today to gather information from the start.gg API using GraphQL, and I love it. But thing about DHH is that I feel like he’s building great tools at best, interesting at worst, but each time with at least one problem I could quote with them. With Rails for example, I feel like the guide which is in the official website is always outdated, as I always run into errors and problems when I follow it.

And same goes with Omarchy. As an Arch user on my daily basis, I can just congrats DHH for making a ready-to-use OS for development and collaboration. You have the console, Zoom, even LibreOffice… And well I’m personally not a great fan of Neovim, but I can understand people telling me it’s an awesome tool. So what’s the problem here? Well… It uses Hyprland as the default window manager.

I’m not gonna ramble too much about it, you know my opinion about Hyprland at this point. And if DHH makes it so it is not the only default available, I’d be happy to try out this distribution. And trust me, I’d love to.

GitHub

On the other hand, this is an example of something you won’t see me give any second chance. My worries started with the acquisition by Microsoft, and now it has raised to a way too important point to be ignored.

First I’d like to confess something: I hate AI, especially generative ones. I want to have control over my own pieces of code, and letting an AI steal it without my consent nor the respect of my licence is really a no-go. When making free software, I try and make sure that the choice of licence makes it so that no one can claim my work as their own. They didn’t contribute to anything except using the code. And there comes GitHub Copilot.

The idea of AI not caring in the slightest of what anyone can or cannot be with what is submitted to GitHub is really something I can’t stand at all. Not only that, but the fact that anyone is writing meaningless pull requests is another bad thing from AI. And yes, I remember what happened to cURL. I could always continue on, telling you that vibe-coding isn’t the path I’d love to go as it just does everything without consent, even introducing more security breaches to the codebase, but then I’d probably just ramble too much if I do.

So instead, I’m using Codeberg. And it’s cool.