Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else f***ing works - very long piece about open source and trying to keep parity with commercial options. (Along with some bits that bring to mind the old trope "Linux is only free if your time has no value", along with the general improbability of learning the guts of a piece of OSS well enough to make customizations you want.)
Specifically the focus is on Figma, and the punchline is the headline - that sometimes it's better just to give up and use the commercial options. But I was also struck by a tension between precision and responsive design: It's funny because Figma can create friction in web work because it is still is very not HTML native. That flow from its multi-platform nature (like Android or iOS have different layout paradigms, and of course print wants absolute control of everything in a way HTML doesn't) but still, if like 90%+ of what you do in Figma is for web and mobile web, it's not clear the balance is optimal (Figma updates this summer start to get working a bit more responsive-design-erly, but still.) But interestingly, for the article's author, Figma's competitor Penpot's actually-do-things-in-the-CSS-model is a bug not a feature, because of him wanting more precision. (The article links to this piece by one of Figma's inventors that points out where it innovated.)
But the article is less about that and more about the pain of installing server-based OSS stuff - and reminds me of some other domains where, as reviled as the language is, PHP-based systems have a far lower bar to deployment and modification (specifically I'm thinking of Convention scheduling tool Zambia vs its Ruby on Rails competitor Planorama) I've been retooling to do more of my side project full stack work on more Enterprise-smelling platforms, but sometimes I question if it's a good tradeoff - as always the questions are of scaling for performance and managing complexity over time, but I think the legacy stuff I still sometimes turn to can be better on those fronts than many people assume.
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