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Ask Slashdot: Good, Useful Free Software For Gifts?
First time accepted submitter Jeng writes "I'm planning on sending flash drives to friends and family as stocking stuffers. Rather than just send a blank drive, I'm looking for what good useful free software that I can load on it — from system utilities and encryption software to fun little games." We've asked similar questions before, but software keeps getting better, and so do the prices on flash drives. So what would you give as a gift this holiday season?
How about a big collection of free music/ebooks/movies/art, etc? Maybe consider putting together a digital slideshow of photos and movies of family and friends, too.
"nerd ass faggot"
you have a family of cunts.
> Give other people what THEY want, not what YOU think would be cool.
Oh bullpoop. The guy is giving out USB sticks. Very handy things for almost anyone to get in their stocking. He just wants to prepopulate em with some helpful stuff.
Yep.
And...these views are compatible. You can think about what different people might want, and put that on their key.
Me, I would start by putting relevant family & friend photos/videos on everyone's USB stick. Even better, I'd make the effort to organize them into slideshow/video presentations, with a soundtrack and transitions. And configure them up to auto-play on the machines of the less-clueful recipients who have not disabled auto-play. :)
Mom will like that for sure. Then maybe Dad would appreciate some good apps/installers (Firefox, VLC, Abiword, etc)...and Bro would appreciate a collection of freeware/shareware/abandonware games (thinking Humble Bundle, other indies, MAME, etc)...and Sis would appreciate a few favorite DVDs, ripped and transcoded to copy straight to her iPad (gifting the DVDs as well, but doing the work for her).
Frankly it sounds like a great idea, if you think about what your family/friends would appreciate besides just another USB stick.
You don't ask family to jump right in to linux. You tell your semi-geeky friend to try it out.
You give family software that works on what they have and know. And you give them what makes sense for that person. Give the uncle that likes to make mediocre movies for youtube a copy of Lightworks for awesome video editing. Commercial software gone open source. Knocks the socks off of the windows home movie maker bullshit he currently uses.
Paint.net for picture editing to your aunt that likes to touch up family photos, maybe.
For the artsy teenager, Blender and Inkscape, if they're not already using them.
For kids, find a good, bright, well-polished game.
For gods sake, don't give anyone a browser or office suite. People hate software that takes over for something they already have. And stick to the well-finished, good looking stuff. The rest (*) just turns them off to the whole idea of anything "free", as if it's inferior.
* gimp style stuff, powerful but ugly as shit with a [perverse | handicap | offensive] name
Your problem is that this is a selfish, smug, self-serving, "gift." It's the nerd equivalent of giving your Baptist neighbors copies of the Quran for Christmas in the hopes that they'll find it to be a learning experience. It's not a gift so much as an attempt to propagate your own ideological beliefs onto others in the way requiring the least actual pedagogy on your part. It's like asking your teacher how to spell a word, and they crassly tell you to look it up in the dictionary. Only worse. Your family aren't even asking. You're just giving them the dictionary and expecting them to have fun looking up words.
A few years ago, I gave my friends and family gifts like this. They each got a 256 MB USB stick with Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and some other open source software I thought they might find useful. Well, they didn't appreciate it at all.
Right after getting it, one of my nieces threw it back at me, calling it useless, and then she called me a "nerd ass faggot". I found out later that her brothers deleted everything on theirs without even bothering to try them.
My older relatives had no idea at all what they were. Some of them thought they were supposed to put them on their keychains, as decorations!
I'm not sure who, but some of my relatives didn't even bother to bring them home with them after they left the Christmas gathering. I found several of them lying on the floor after everyone had left for the night.
I hoped it would be a learning experience for them, but it was really a learning experience for me. Most people don't give a fuck about open source software. They just don't care. And they surely don't want to receive it as a gift.
the problem is you were trying to give a gift that you liked, not one they liked.
Any normal person would see this. We don't.
This is how far slashdot is disconnected from the real world.