I just tried pdf craft on fdroid and really liked it, but its on beta and only 2 versions released.
Is it going to be well maintained and become an alternative or just stay unstable ai dlop? It had more stars on github than some other pdf viewers.
Whats your take on that. I am excited to see some decent apps on linux. Especially for .appimage and launching instantly unlike photoshop.
I mean I love that they are sticking it to Adobe but they are slop by nature. If it’s at least useful slop or if you should just use the actual open-source alternatives is debatable, I don’t have any talent with these programs anyway. I’d say learn the open-source alternatives but maybe try the artcraft stuff if you truly can’t do something in the open-source program, but that’s just my uneducated opinion.
The current business model of the big LLM providers is unsustainable. They are burning money to get people hooked. Which means maintaining and developing these applications will become a lot more expensive, once the providers need to make money. If these projects don’t have a solid plan for this event, they’ll probably just get abandoned.
Also unsustainable: the code they generate.
It’s huge, sprawling and messy.
there’s deepseek and a lot of other local models.
Yes sure, local models exist. But somehow the big flashy projects use the big flashy models. Local models are usable, but not as capable as the big cloud models, to which they have tied their development practice.
if you look at benchmarks the difference is almost negligible, and there is nothing tying your development practice to claude or whatever. i constantly switch between agents and nothing stops me or changes my workflow when i do this. a new model can pick up instantly where another left, and once the western model is doomed deepseek will still be there running on your local machine.
My local machine is dead and I can’t afford new ram.
and you owe that to big llm western models run on massive data centers, deepseek is here to disrupt that. once the imperial monoliths fall consumer grade products will become cheaper and you will hopefully be able to get a new machine. i say this from argentina my friend, my country besides being fucked has import restrictions on technology which make buying hardware even more expensive than for people in the anglosphere.
I just hope it will collapse very soon, this whole “let’s burn more fossil fuels to run LLMs” thing is way too depressing. I actually enjoy programming and this timeline makes me sad.
I tried photocraft and it’s certainly usable. The video editor however wouldn’t play anything I added to the timeline at all. I also tried the MS word clone and it’s just janky-looking (like the text formatting seems to change if I click on the page? Hard to explain). I’d take pirated PS over it anyday though. One thing I can say is that photocraft is very fast to launch compared to Photoshop.
I’ve checked its girhub bedore and photocraft has a lot of contributors, over 400. But the apps are made mostly by claude code. Personally id never use these apps but so far theyvebeen receiving updates quickly with humans adding new bugfixes (humans or maybe more vibe coders…).
I installed the flatpak out of curiosity and these artxraft apps receive updates fast in my opinion, a d they add more things like a reverse engineer app or solidcraft thing.
in my opinion, even with human bugfixes and that, its still slop, I trust other foss alternatives.
My tinfoil conspiracy theory is that artcraft is actually a 5d chess move from the “anti-ai” camp to draw bigtech attention and get them to turn against LLMs on principle, or at least get them to implement some sort of anti-app-cloning thing like anthropic recently did for games.
Not really but that’d be funny i suppose.
100% slop
