I'm surprised, I never managed to use it efficiently for that purpose. Perhaps AffinityPhoto spoiled me a bit. I love Krita for illustration work though, nothing compares... As far as commercial alternatives go, I haven't tried Clip Paint although everybody praises it- but I don't really feel the need to. Apparently it's excellent?
Yes if you're just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports.... or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I've just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
it's pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can't get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
unfortunately "pretty good" is not "guaranteed", which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I'll still use the libreoffice options if i'm, say, already logged into my Linux install and don't want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well... I just use it.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
I don't need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I'm looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don't know any good MS Access alternative.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous "collaboration" is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I'll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
If you're using git to track document changes then you're almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I've used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I've seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
Again, just my opinion, but I prefer Krita to any FLOSS alternative. I've been designing professionally for over a decade, using Adobe for most of it; Krita is my preferred FLOSS tool for photo editing, and I've tried them all.
I remember people saying "3.0 is right around the corner" several years ago.
I categorize GIMP 3.0 the same as ASOIAF, Star Citizen, and the Google Drive client for Linux. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I see it, but I ain't holding my breath.
If you're talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It's close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
Darktable is pretty much a Lightroom replica in terms of the workflow. Its main issue is that Darktable reacts to slider changes in an unpredictable way. Small value differences lead to overblown changes to the image. Fine tuning the result is near impossible.
Photoshop is one i cannot shake too. If I need to make a graphic to post on social media for my shop, Photoshop does it. If I need to edit a picture, Photoshop.
I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It's unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.
The most recent one is, of course, Sync for Lemmy. It may just be muscle memory at this point, but I find the experience a step improvement in browsing.
On my home server front, I would mention Plex despite Jellyfin's massive improvements over the past 2 years. Plexamp is just a magical piece of software.
For the most part, though, I think I'd reverse the question. Most of the time, I prefer OSS.
Try reiverr, its a jellyfin ui made by a lemmy user that integrates with the arr suite and tvmd so you can easily find new things to watch https://github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
I agree about Plex. But I don't get the love for Sync.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks some features many of the other apps have. Personally, I'm liking Thunder right now, but I'm excited for Boost to come out.
Sync has ads unless you pay, it's not open source, and I haven't actually found anything superior about it.
It's missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn't big though, and most of them aren't a big deal.
I'm not sure why you think Thunder is ugly though. The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
I was unable to get the font sizes right, to change only the base font to affect all proportions, and to colorize the indented comments the way I like them. Maybe I just wasn't able to find the settings, though.
What features am I missing out on with Sync? I came from Sync for Reddit and love the app. There are several settings I immediately changed upon downloading sync for Lemmy though, including colorful comments, one tap comment collapse including the parent comment, and the swipe actions.
It's missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn't big though, and most of them aren't a big deal.
The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
Overall, there's not a huge difference, except the fact that Thunder doesn't have ads and I don't have windows getting stuck sometimes.
So i bought plex pass a while ago and i keep hearing about plexamp, I dont really understand why is it considered so good, could you elaborate on why you like it? Does it do more than play music from my home server?
I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I've still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I've found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
The Jetbrains suite of IDE's. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform ~~they are all ~~ many of them are built on is open source though, and you can get free licenses for all of their products if you are using them to develop open source software!
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
That's a bit of a silly statement. Once you've installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included.
Just because it's modular and not "batteries included" doesn't make it incomparable.
Sure. But I didn't say it was either. I only pointed out that it's silly to say "there's no comparison", when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it's not even difficult.
Edit: In fairness, I did say "it's effectively an IDE", but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I'm doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.
Edit 2: I feel I've gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they're not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they're totally comparable.
I guess it depends on your goals. I install Intellij, or WebStorm, or PyCharm, or RubyMine, and I get a working environment right out of the box. I don't have to figure out what functionality is missing, then go search for the most maintained and up to date plugin, hoping that it has all the features I need. It just works. I use VS Code a lot, every day, but it's sorely lacking, even with all of the plugins it has, in basic stuff like refactoring an entire codebase, or just regular old code cleanup. I'll give a few examples, they might have equivalents in the vs code ecosystem, but I have not been able to find them.
Inspect Code
In JB products I can choose Code > Inspect Code, from the menu bar, and have it show everything wrong with the project, including code that is never hit, code that is duplicated, Control Flow issues, Data Flow issues, typos, probable bugs, Security issues (including in your dependencies), migration aids, the list goes on and on and on. And it doesn't just do it for one language in your repo, it does it for every file type. So you don't have to install a plugin that finds security issues in your poms, and then one that finds them in package.json, and then another for your gemfile, etc.
A conventional search process does not take into account the syntax and semantics of the source code. Even if you use regular expressions, IntelliJ IDEA still treats your code as a regular text. The structural search and replace (SSR) actions let you search for a particular code pattern or grammatical construct in your code considering your code structure.
IntelliJ IDEA finds and replaces fragments of source code, based on the search templates that you create and conditions you apply.
There are a ton of things that I can't find equivalents for in VS Code, but these are two major ones.
It's that's fine that you've got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn't.
But I'm not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I'm arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.
I agree that JB's search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.
But you can get a lot of JB's functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).
Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).
I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).
For electrical engineering there is KiCad, which is pretty good overall. Only reason I'm still using proprietary software is because I'd have to recreate my libraries and it will be a huge pita.
For mechanical design there is FreeCad, which is usable for simple geometries, but if you come from a proprietary CAD software you may find it lacking.
I got into the 3D printing hobby a few months ago and FreeCAD is pretty much useless. I can be more productive by writing JavaScript code with Three.js library, lol.
OpenSCAD has its uses, but would hardly classify it as full CAD software. Prusa, I believe, used OpenSCAD for a while but they even moved to Fusion360. FreeCAD would be great if the devs would stop trying to reinvent the wheel in their UI. There is a ton of potential, but it simply isn't where it needs to be yet.
Fusion360 or SolidWorks are very well established in that space and their shitty license models reflect that.
Still, as a free alternative, FreeCAD is where it's at. You just really need to understand if it will suit all of your needs and for me, it doesn't.
Not really. Blender is NOT a CAD. It doesn't ensure that your bodies are solid, it doesn't provide any analysis tools, it doesn't support working with blueprints/sketches, it's not parametric, etc. Basically, it doesn't do anything CAD at all.
I had this idea for a while to build a Frankenstein monster of a 3D software that uses real time graphics and has a multi step build process covering CAD, wireframe manipulation and voxel workflows. If I ever actually make it, your concerns will be heard despite being probably not the best softwsre to do your work in :)
CAD system must be reliable. It is simply unacceptable to have math issues which cause unpredictable geometries.
CAD system should have a good UI. This is a big issue for open source software in general as UI and UX is usually an afterthought.
CAD system should be fast and use hardware acceleration. Running single threaded python scripts on CPU to do complex computations kills the productivity. Designing real life objects is already a mentally taxing task, the whole purpose of CAD is to remove the computational bottleneck of a human.
CAD should be object aware. If I draw two gears and put them next to each other, I should be able to rotate one and see the other moving accordingly.
This is a bare minimum, I'm not even talking about computational modelling, stress testing, etc.
That is a question too hard to answer in a comment and one that depends on the use case of the software. Few users need the power and features of CATIA or NX, but those who need it can't accept anything lesser. SolidWorks is a good spot in terms of flexibility and features if it could be easier for the average person to use. You need proper accurate parametric modeling (e.g. a NURBS kernel) for solid models and surfacing. Hearing things like wireframe and voxel indicates it isn't suitable to me.
I have ONE contact who uses Signal. Yes, it's a shame but at this point I think that I could convert more people to using Linux than to switching to Signal.
Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else's but still.
As a workaround, you can bridge most services to Matrix. I currently bridge Telegram, Signal and SMS to my Matrix server and only need Element on my phone and desktop.
Unfortunately Element is fairly focused on business users, would be cool if they could host bridges for individuals to make the barrier of entry easier.
DaVinci Resolve is much better than any open source NLE. Generally, most closed source media production software is better than their open source counterparts except Blender. Blender is incredible and it gives me hope that other open source software can be just as successful in the media industry.
No. It's free to use for the standard version with most features available for free. There's a paid "studio" license which unlocks all the features. Neither have their source code available for the public.
Lol you will find out its not when trying to install it on Linux. They only support CentOS, which actually doesnt exist anymore, and there is nearly no info about needed things. A Flatpak? No way. Appimage? Dream on.
I mean opening the install guide PDF file you got when you downloaded the installer from their website isn't that hard.
In most cases, you only need to left-click the installer anyways so you will probably not need it.
I just installed Resolve 18.5 on my Kubuntu laptop which worked very well except that Resolve apparently needs a dedicated GPU to work (at least on Linux, dunno about Windows).
A Flatpak would be welcome of course, but it's not needed.
Btw they support Rocky Linux, Centos 8 and RHEL 8 but the installation works well on presumably every distro.
For Rocky Linux, they even got an ISO for quick deployment and standardisation of the OS and Resolve in a company.
Inkscape works good on Windows too, but its UI... It's like it was made by monkeys for dinosaurs. I'm not sure that Inkscape devs ever tried to use it themselves.
The UI isn't the best, but is it really that bad? I've used some adobe software as well, and I don't really find Inkscape's UI that hard to use in comparison. Whether it's pretty is another question.
I agree that it's bad for editing anything more than a page, didn't think of that as I only really use it to make figures, which I think it's pretty great for.
Idk about you but I thought this was the case as well, since the last time I used Inkscape was probably like 6 years ago, and at the time, the UI was super dated looking (don't get me wrong, it was still functional).
The different is night and day now, I honestly couldn't tell that it was the same software. UI looks super clean and modern.
Version 1.3 has introduced a shape builder tool, always nice to have that. Overall, it seems that is has improved quite a bit in the last few years, so that's good to see
They revamped the entire interface, it's based on GTK3 and feels honestly very modern. I don't use it every day so take my feedback with a grain of salt
What issues have you run into on macOS? I use inkscape on my quite new mac very often, and don't have any issues. The command line tools for inkscape are also pretty good I think, and work without any issues (I get some critical warning's every now and then though, but nothing has affected output yet).
Photoshop, Fences, Plex, Steam, Unraid. I just highly prefer them to any alternatives I have tried. And believe me, I have tried every alternative to Photoshop and Fences that I could find. They just don't do it. And because of those two in particular, I have to add Windows to the list.
Oh, and I guess Sync for Lemmy. The only reason I even know what Lemmy is, is the fact that the Sync for Reddit app stopped working and basically said, "Yeah, move to Lemmy, idiot."
I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop. And it’s still more comfortable to use than Windows IMO (no forced updates that slow down the shutting down process!).
Affinity is the best non Adobe image editing suite. The Foss stuff just doesn't compare, imo. Even if feature parity, the UI of Foss image editing softwares is hotshit.
FL studio is beating out LMMS. However, I pirate FL, so it's still free to me.
It's just plain better than any other alternative. Better UI, better UX, better features, better customization, support for Monet... I could go on all day.
At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.
That's the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough "enough" to replace discord.
Yeah I feel the same way. I just can't get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they're two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It's annoying
Dude's getting downvoted but there's not much of an integrated development environment in a glorified text editor with plugins once you realize the competition really gives you all the tools you need to never ever really need to leave the environment.
I tried installing this new "Files Community", kinda shady software even though opensource, and it didnt even install due to some libraries missing I guess...
Do you mind expanding a little on Directory Opus ? I always have four or five explorer windows open and I am constantly annoyed with the clunkiness of Windows explorer. I know there are a few alternatives but not sure how they compare.
Yeah, I dont think there's a dual tree in Free Commander... It's just the one tree for both panes. But there's a favourite list and that should cover most of my needs. Let's see. Cheers !
Excel. There's just basic stuff with LibreOffice and OnlyOffice that work like crap. Like why in LibreOffice when I type =sum then hit tab does it think I'm done with the formula instead of adding the ( and letting me put in the first input. It's awful.
Visual studio code. There's nothing else that's anywhere near as good that doesn't cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don't do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can't remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.
If you told me I had to go 100% FOSS tomorrow, I could do it pretty easily, except for those two apps.
95% of my games are through Steam, and 95% of all my friends, family, and online community are in Discord. I could probably even dump Discord and convince some of my closest friends and FAM to switch to a Matrix client or something. But giving up Steam would mean I would basically be giving up nearly all gaming in my life.
And contrary to many other FOSS enthusiasts, I actually think Steam and Discord are great apps. I've rarely had issues with them, especially Steam. The UI is decent, the features are great, (Steam game join, Workshop mods, etc.) And Discord works really well on Linux for me, and GrapheneOS on my phone.
Of those two, I'd rather dump Discord. Valve is generally a very FOSS friendly company and pretty consumer friendly compared to most multi-billion dollar corpos. And what they've done recently for Linux gaming over the last few years with Proton, the Steam Deck, etc has has made gaming on Linux a wonderful experience for me.
Recently I have been trying to get into more FOSS games and GoG DRM-free games as an insurance policy for what I know is coming down the line one day. Gabe will either retire, pass away, or be bought out by a corpo/capital investment firm and Valve will become victim to the enshitification effect like all other proprietary software.
There is a small hope I have, idk if this is even possible, but what if Gabe chooses to open source some or all of the Steam code instead of letting it get bought out or taken over by somebody else? That would allow for the FOSS community to fork it and build a FOSS Steam.
Like I said though, a pipe dream for now. Long live FOSS!
This will get me loads of downvotes, but Windows 10 Mail and Calendar (not Outlook) is simple yet works flawlessly and is miles ahead of Thunderbird by usability, stability and user-friendliness. On the other hand though, Ubuntu Evolution is even better and is open-source.
Apple would get so much more money out of me charging $20 a month to use imessage on windows/android vs waiting for me to replace my iphone. I get I am the rare user but by golly I wish they would go multi platform.
Google Maps, there is not even 1 good alternative for maps osm is there but it will take a lot more users and volunteers to perform as well as google maps and i dont think thats gonna happen
Google maps don't have any foss frontend too and i dont know if its possible to make one
MS Office > LibreOffice, it's not even remotely a contest. This is not because of any personal preferences, nor because of functionality. I'd just be an asshole for being the guy who breaks interoperability, which we have long established. Since this is squarely a work-first product, and everyone is just trying to get through they day and go home to their families, I won't make their day worse. Hence, MS Office preferred.
Photoshop > GIMP. The latter is good for simple edits, but anything even moderately complex is not only far easier in Photoshop, it's also flat out faster, owing to far better hardware utilization.
Google Maps > any alternative really but specifically OSM, for cars and public transit (I don't hike much but I heard good things about OSM for hiking though there are of course specialized apps for that since you want to bring specialized hardware for serious trips). While I can make OSM work, it's just such a hassle, and often so buggy and wrong I might as well just wing it entirely without navigation then. In particular for public transit.
I really care about my privacy. But I just can't break from SwiftKey keyboard. It's just so good. It's really unfortunate that it's owned by Microsoft.
Adobe Acrobat. I have tried at least 5 other PDF readers and editors for windows, and none of them are remotely close. Either they don't have any document editing at all and are just PDF readers, or their editing capabilities are VERY clunky, not feature rich, or just don't work.
I haven't ever found another program that let's me directly edit text in a PDF that already exists.
I don't need to edit PDFs much but when I do it's usually quite important, and Adobe is by far the easiest and quickest to do it in.
I hate that that's the case, because I really don't like Adobe as a company and would rather not have to use their software, but there it is.
I highly recommend pdf-exchange editor. It's not FOSS either, BUT it does offer a perpetual offline license, has a portable version and works even better. They do have a free reader version, so you can try out if you like their UI before you buy the full version.
Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it's modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn't like it either (but then, I also didn't really like Illustrator all that much, it's really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don't have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode ("persona") that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn't want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it's truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.
My really obvious one, and a huge source of problems for me, is Discord. But the biggest one was a wild one:
Irfanview
It is a super-fast image viewer and simple image editor. Supports every format I've ever thrown at it. Bulk conversion and resize works like a charm. Hell, it's half the reason I haven't moved to Linux for my daily use.
I prefer paint.net for asbuilts in underground construction. I use GIMP when I'm on Linux / MacOS but paint.net is a nice simple in between from basic paint-> photoshop.
GIMP is a lot closer to photoshop. Don't get me wrong - it's a great software but paint.net fills that role a little better for what I need to do.
I paid for and use parallels on my apple silicon laptop just for oaint.net
Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.
Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I've not yet found an open source game I've enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.
1Password - password manager with cross platform sync.
I've used Bitwarden but it's very barbones. In the past I always used 1Passsword because it's full featured but I was on Mac at the time and 1Password was Mac only.
I then moved to Linux and used Enpass, then Bitwarden. At last 1Password realised they needed to go cross platform and they have a native Linux client. So I moved back to them
Easily the best and most secure and full featured password manager that's ever existed. I highly, highly recommend it if you haven't tried it.
For me personally there is no open source calculator on android that even comes close to Hiper Calc Pro. Having actual expressions and physical constants makes things so much easier and makes the app better than most physical scientific calculators.
Windows over Linux based OSes. The support (albeit via mass adoption) is much better. I can run almost any old software, including games. Plug in anything that's plug and play and not worry about driver compatibility. Things tend to just work and I'm not one accidental sudo away from wrecking the whole OS.
I just disable ads, put a custom start menu in place, and I'm golden.
I'm not saying Windows doesn't have issues, but for me personally it's likely far less than a Linux OS.
Zbrush is better for sculpting than Blender. (Although Blender is not sculpting specific, so it's really good as a general 3d suite tool, capable of things ZBrush can't do).
If you know of a FOSS 3d sculpting tool that is as good as Zbrush, let me know.
Might be that I'm an old fart who started on 3ds max back in the 00s, but I cannot get used to how different blender is from the normal modeling software paradigm.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely applaud and appreciate all that the Blender Foundation has done for 3d modelling and all the industries it touches, but it's just not for me.
I'm lucky enough to be in a position where the cost of my software of choice (Modo) isn't a problem, but I get kind of anxious as the idea of being forced to really use blender to do actual work.
I have a Maya background only, so I can't compare to Modo or 3dsMax. But I found bridging over to blender not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes time to get accustomed to the interface and some of its quirks. UV tools seem weak and the outliner hierarchies still leave me stumped, along with their pivot points system, but I'm hopeful I'll get around those eventually.
If you haven't tried Blender 3.5+ I'd recommend you give it a go, perhaps it is not as bad as you may remember. Or not, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze in your case, I don't know.
I recently tried coming back to sculpting and damn, zbrush honestly feels horrible, the thing doesnt even have proper HiDPI scaling so its all blurry on my screen (paid product BTW), not to mention the awful UX. Tried using blender for sculpting and honestly, I got suprised on how good it is. Some defaults are messy and it lacks layers but other than that its pretty decent.
For now, REAPER for Linux over Ardour. REAPER is cheap, and while it is absolutely not free software, it is about as close as you can get while still being proprietary. You can use the trial for as long as you want without paying, and other than a nag screen, it is fully functional. You can rewrite some of the built-in effects, and there are several options for writing your own audio plugins and extensions.
Frankly...I vibe with REAPER, and I don't vibe (yet) with Ardour. I'm still reading the manual, and I'm still going to try keep trying it out, but there are a couple choices REAPER made that I prefer. For example, REAPER doesn't distinguish between MIDI and Audio tracks. This is really useful to write lines in MIDI before I know how to play them on a real instrument, then seamlessly use the original signal chain after the MIDI instrument. According to what I've read and worked with so far, Ardour has a few different track types.
I've been using REAPER for several years. It's been rock solid, it has all the options I ever needed, and Cockos has stayed out of my way as I transferred my license to almost a dozen computers. I wish they would open-source the software, but it's one of the few software purchases I don't regret.
What I need to clarify is that it is good in spite of its proprietary-ness, not because of it!
Same for all daws for me. I tried to get along with foss ones but they pale in comparison. Ardour crashed a lot for me, especially when the project got large with many plugins so I moved to reaper and had no such issues. On bitwig now and I can't really think of anything even comparable that's foss, let alone easier/better.
It's not that I prefer it per se, rather I have better things to do then e.g. spend 2 hours messing with my font rendering to end up with a result half as good as Windows is out of the box.
Steam and Spotify, I just can't get rid of them. I tried to download some music from YouTube, but the way to discover new songs is just way easier on Spotify than doing it yourself. Steam seems obvious, to play games, you should buy it, to thank the dev's.
I do my absolute best to avoid proprietary software. I can only think of three I use consistently. Those are Obsidian, Steam, and the Nvidia drivers.
Obsidian is a weird one; there are loads of note taking/pim/personal wiki options out there. And don't get me wrong, stuff like Standard Notes, Joplin, and Trillium are great. But for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, Obsidian is the only one that clicks for me.
Steam isn't so much an "I prefer," it's more of a "I have a huge game library I'm not willing to abandon." Without Steam, I can't play Terraria, Hades, Core Keeper, and more than 200 others. It might be a sunk cost fallacy thing, but I'm not giving up my Fallout New Vegas.
The Nvidia thing is an extension of the Steam thing. My next computer will have an AMD card, though, so that's kind of a "for now."
Jetbrains IntelliJ is a big contender, but I get along just fine in other, FOSS IDEs. I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, actually, but that may just be a case where I learned photo manipulation on GIMP and didn't touch Photoshop until far later.
My final answer has to be in image processing/photo editing software. CaptureOne Pro is leagues ahead of anything FOSS I've ever tried. DarkTable, RawTherapee, ART, none of it can come close to comparing right now. No matter how much time I give it, I just... Can never make the transition. Which sucks, because CaptureOne is not available on Linux and it's pretty well impossible to get it running. 🥲
Petal is my favourite, it has some features that google and Waze don't have, like free drive mode. The open-source map alternatives unfortunately dosn't even come close.
And being able to have the navigation app on half the screen and Spotify/Jellyfin on the bottom half is just golden.
I know that the CCP owns Petal, and I'm not proud of using it, but the experience is great.
Google is also ass when it comes to privacy, but being able to quickly check the reviews of nearby restaurants/parks is amazing.
Waze isn't great either, but checking if there are any traffic jams before jumping in the car is also cool. (I know that both Google and Petal have this feature but Waze is just superior).
Additionally, I haven't found a Bluetooth tracking alternative to Tile.
Adobe Illustrator over Inkscape. I thought I'd save some money and learn Inkscape but it's just too weird an un-intuitive, sometimes buggy too. Key combinations couldn't be mapped to work like Illustrator which I was used to, so it's frustrating to work with because you know what it should be able to do, but now to have to figure out what Inkscape calls the feature and what menu that might be in.
Same for Photoshop over Paint.NET or anything else. Photoshop is still the master at layered image manipulation for all sorts of things. I use it for Web/UI mockup designs, and for photo editing in some cases. Nothing else can do this as well, and again it's because I'm so familiar with it and it's key combinations and features. Plus, now the new AI features are doing way more than I ever thought possible, it's pretty impressive stuff really!
FL Studio, Ableton, and many VST. Yes, a know about Ardour, many LV2 plugins, and I tried it, and in somewhere moment, me liked it more, then proprietary analog. Some plugins is awesome, DrumGizmo is very well, Vitalium and helm too have good sound, and many another software is good, but for easy, fast, and really quality sound it easier make in proprietary analogs. It ones cause, why I have windows in dualboot (and yes, in Wine I haved large latency and another problems).
P.S But sometimes I still working on my music projects in GNU/Linux.
Games, Steam, firmware, fopnu, darkmx, "Skype" (relatives), WhatsApp (relatives), Telegram (relatives and work, I don't care if the client is open), Opera Presto (sometimes for nostalgy).
As much as I love to hate ESRI, Arcpy just works and has solid documentation. Sure I could use a strictly geopandas solution but when the customer wants to have the product in a file geodatabase, noting beats the built in export method.
Finale vs Lilypond. I'm convinced only the Borg actually uses Lilypond. It's obscure, terrifying and difficult to use. Maybe it's because I've been using finale for over 14 years but it's hard for me to even conceptualize how to make music in Lilypond, whereas Finale just does whatever I ask of it.
Musescore is also a good FOSS alternative but I still stick by finale.
Adobe lightroom vs darktable. Don't get me wrong, I still use darktable instead of lightroon,, but my god, it is incredibly unstable and everything is just harder to do.
I'm still a widow of robo3t. I still use it over any alternative but every time I need to setup a new machine I find it harder to download than before. It's also throwing a lot of errors with newer mongo versions.
Both studio 3t and compass have an interface that just doesn't feel right to me.
For CAD and 3d design in general, I oreger Rhino. The grasshopper addition is phenominal,.and I've been using Rhino for almost.. 20 years now. I really enjoy the look and feel if it, I know basically every relevant command line input and input option etc. I use Revit and AutoCAD at work, but convinced them to get my Rhino for developing 3d models and converting them to 2D.
The only truly free program that competes with Rhino is Blender, which is an amazing program in a whole bunch of regards, but I've never liked the GUI at all.
Speaking of things Blender can also do, I prefer Photoshop to popular free alternatives such as GIMP or Blender. I'm very familiar with the tools and how they work, and the Beta improvements are mind boggling. I do however prefer Inkscape for vector work.
Speaking more about things Blender can also do, I prefer DaVinci Resolve as a free movie editor. However, I did purchase the basic license becuase I thought the program was that good. I'm blown away that they make it free with so many things enabled still.
Speaking ...Blender.. you get the idea.. digital sculpting is much nicer in Zbrush, to me. Took me forever to not hate the GUI (cough -- ok I still Hate it), but I really love some of the tools and plug-ins. It's also phenominal at mesh repair in general. Which is a subtasks I prefer Netfabb Basic for, which I think is also paid for now, but I think suspect it's included in my Autodesk license package..
The moral of the story is if you like to do any of these things go check out blender before you get used to a paid program, and save yourself decades of costs lol.
StylusLabs Write. I've tried all the FOSS hand-written note taking apps and none of them is practical to use.
Write just works. Produces SVGs that you can view in any browser and efficiently sync via git. Amazing.
It looks like an android app from 2012 and could really use some updates in other areas too.
I also don't get why it's closed source. It's free (as in beer) and there isn't even a way to donate.
Apples Notes because nothing else has the perfect amount of formatting, alongside exceptional sync.
Also Apple Mail for the same simplicity reason - Geary on Gnome is close-ish, but goes too far down the simple route. How does it not have a refresh button??
Also Logic Pro, mainly because there aren't any fully FOSS alternatives that even attempt a full-featured DAW, let alone with Drummer etc.
I also 'prefer' Apple's productivity suite over everything else, because it has by far the best UX, but I'm totally fine with LibreOffice too.
Yea, the workflow is a bit different. Not having a concept of fill opacity as separate from layer opacity forced me to change the way I do certain things, and having certain retouching tools grouped with the brushes was confusing at first.
For years, I didn't use anything besides Adobe CC, because it's "industry standard," so I've never given anything like Affinity a go in earnest.
With all FLOSS design tools, I had to have a bit of a reckoning with myself; like most people, at first I thought they were unintuitive, until I was able to have a bit of objectivity and found that most of the issues I had with them didn't arise because they were unintuitive; it was just because they didn't work like Adobe tools, which are themselves complex tools that you really can't just pick up on your own without some degree of instruction.
There's a few open source front ends for Twitch that I've tried but I've had the occasional issue with video playback either stopping and being unable to reload or if I'm watching a VOD it won't consistently remember my position so I'd say I prefer the official app.
Normally I use open source ones when possible such as NewPipe or Invidious for YouTube for example.
I really wish there was a FOSS alternative that supported the autodownload of transactions across my plethora of banks/accounts (some I even chose specifically for better integration) but its sooo incestuous that theres really not much and what alternatives are available are usually cloud based where you cant guarantee the security of all your financial data.
Kdenlive is still not up to pro standards. I make do with it, but if/when i'm editing for someone else i'll have to switch to a proprietary solution.
And that's besides the fact that everyone else is using it, which is usually the reason to prefer proprietary over FOSS. It's the reason i still have Photoshop installed alongside Krita.
Much to my chagrin, SVP is still better than MPV+VapourSynth in the realm of frame rate upscaling. Worst part? SVP is, in fact, based on the same code that VapourSynth uses, just with their own proprietary additions that should honestly have gone back to the community.
macOS over Ubuntu (don't get me started on Windows). I use macOS on my MacBook Air and it's just so well thought out. Ubuntu is decent but I wouldn't want to use it for my daily work.
I love Obsidian and use it to manage my Markdown files and I'm in awe. Checked out Logseq as well but it didn't work for me.
VS Code. As much as I hate Microsoft, this is great. I'll likely look for a community-supported version without the creepy telemetry shit though.
I'm surprised, I never managed to use it efficiently for that purpose. Perhaps AffinityPhoto spoiled me a bit. I love Krita for illustration work though, nothing compares... As far as commercial alternatives go, I haven't tried Clip Paint although everybody praises it- but I don't really feel the need to. Apparently it's excellent?
Honestly, its gotta be the MS Office suite.
Yes if you're just writing your own simple documents libreoffice/OpenOffice will work, but if you have to do anything more complex than a single page spreadsheet, text-on-white presentations, or 3 page MLA book reports.... or, even worse, have to interact with documents and spreadsheets created by basically any other person on the planet, I've just never had a good consistent experience with any of the free options.
Disagree. Libreoffice is pretty capable for most use cases nowadays.
Compatibility is also pretty good with Microsoft formats despite Microsoft‘s best efforts.
OpenOffice is dead.
it's pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can't get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.
And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.
unfortunately "pretty good" is not "guaranteed", which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I'll still use the libreoffice options if i'm, say, already logged into my Linux install and don't want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well... I just use it.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
I hate Office365 with passion. It's extremely unproductive and alternatives like Quip are much better.
I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
Quip is very lightweight. It's not clogged with 200 features I'm never going to use.
That's why I don't use any of the real "365" web apps, only their desktop apps which do keep the bullshit to some minimum.
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
Unfortunately industry and academia does not view it in such a manner... those microsoft contracts are too appealing for them lol
I don't need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I'm looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don't know any good MS Access alternative.
Disagree but collaboration is horrible. Online Office sucks too though, they dont even try. They want people to use Windows.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous "collaboration" is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I'll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
Yeah wow thats not better. Never used that, but finishing off formatting on a complex Paper is not really possible
Eh, beamer is more than enough for most presentations. If your slideshow needs to be that flashy, you probably need more substance.
git puts track changes to shame.
You're absolutely right about compatibility though.
If you're using git to track document changes then you're almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I've used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I've seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
I've used beamer before but honestly LaTeX is awful to use. It's the standard tool so I have to use it for my work but I hate every minute of it.
Photoshop is easier to use than gimp. I don’t pay for photoshop, but if I needed something like that I would.
Krita is closer to Photoshop than Gimp, although still not up to it. Just in case you ever need PS, try krita first.
Thanks I’ll remember that just in case!
Photopea is good for most tasks
Krita is excellent for painting, not very good for image editing though.
Hard disagree. I use it all the time for photo editing.
Well, there's better tools out there
Again, just my opinion, but I prefer Krita to any FLOSS alternative. I've been designing professionally for over a decade, using Adobe for most of it; Krita is my preferred FLOSS tool for photo editing, and I've tried them all.
Krita has g'mic and it's open source. It's photoshop that is still not up to there
Krita is a drawing program not really a photo editor like PS/Gimp. Paint.net was a pretty good PSlite last time I tried it
I wouldn't say Photoshop is easy but Gimp is horrendous.
It's usable with photogimp, but Photoshop still has better tools and filters.
Hard to compare.
The two apps just have a different workflow..
Well yeah I was answering for me though, not the whole internet.
Gimp has a work flow that I can’t get into, photoshop clicks better. For you, it could be the opposite and that’s great.
I’m not selling photoshop, I don’t even use either anymore. It would be stupid not to try to make gimp work for you first.
Depends if you learn gimp or PS first.
Like if you start life with Linux, windows seems weird
Idk, I learned GIMP first for years, and kept being annoying how unintuitive it was.
Then I tried Photoshop on a friend's computer for a week, and found how much easier it was to use.
I don't use Photoshop though since I use Linux
They aim to introduce that in version 3.0, which they say will be a complete overhaul of the app.
Non-destructive editing through live adjustment layers is definitely the single most useful feature any editing software can have.
That alone makes life so much easier.
I remember people saying "3.0 is right around the corner" several years ago.
I categorize GIMP 3.0 the same as ASOIAF, Star Citizen, and the Google Drive client for Linux. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I see it, but I ain't holding my breath.
I imagine by the time it releases I'll have bought Affinity v3 already
Well yeah, that’s the whole point. It’s harder to learn another workflow when you’re already in the mindset of the other.
If you're talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It's close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
Same with Inkscape vs Affinity Designer.
I really wanted Inkscape to work for me, though I was constantly fighting the UI and some weird artifacting Inkscape produced exporting SVG files.
Affinity Designer was, and still is, especially since their licenses are perpetual/non-subscription, well worth the price and is a dream to use.
Same with Lightroom vs Darktable.
Darktable is pretty much a Lightroom replica in terms of the workflow. Its main issue is that Darktable reacts to slider changes in an unpredictable way. Small value differences lead to overblown changes to the image. Fine tuning the result is near impossible.
Does it have a good panorama sticker or HDR merger? Those are the tools I absolutely need from Lightroom
Not sure, never used these features.
How does Rawtherapee compare to that? Many people seem to prefer it over Darktable
I tried it once a very long time ago. It was super slow and buggy. It's easier to get used to Darktable quirks.
It's very good and I prefer it to Darktable.
Ah, might be! It's been 10+ years since I tried it. Back then I found it very hard to navigate
Photoshop is one i cannot shake too. If I need to make a graphic to post on social media for my shop, Photoshop does it. If I need to edit a picture, Photoshop.
I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know about that.
Also Photoshop, along with DxO PureRaw.
My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It's unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
The most recent one is, of course, Sync for Lemmy. It may just be muscle memory at this point, but I find the experience a step improvement in browsing.
On my home server front, I would mention Plex despite Jellyfin's massive improvements over the past 2 years. Plexamp is just a magical piece of software.
For the most part, though, I think I'd reverse the question. Most of the time, I prefer OSS.
Try reiverr, its a jellyfin ui made by a lemmy user that integrates with the arr suite and tvmd so you can easily find new things to watch https://github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
It definitely looks promising, but I still don't think Jellyfin and Reiverr are quite ready to compete with Plex yet.
I agree about Plex. But I don't get the love for Sync.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks some features many of the other apps have. Personally, I'm liking Thunder right now, but I'm excited for Boost to come out.
Sync has ads unless you pay, it's not open source, and I haven't actually found anything superior about it.
Care to mention some? I've used Thunder but I find it unbearably ugly and not as visually customizable as Sync.
It's missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn't big though, and most of them aren't a big deal.
I'm not sure why you think Thunder is ugly though. The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
I was unable to get the font sizes right, to change only the base font to affect all proportions, and to colorize the indented comments the way I like them. Maybe I just wasn't able to find the settings, though.
Fair enough.
What features am I missing out on with Sync? I came from Sync for Reddit and love the app. There are several settings I immediately changed upon downloading sync for Lemmy though, including colorful comments, one tap comment collapse including the parent comment, and the swipe actions.
As far as features, you're not missing much.
It's missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn't big though, and most of them aren't a big deal.
The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
Overall, there's not a huge difference, except the fact that Thunder doesn't have ads and I don't have windows getting stuck sometimes.
That’s funny because I switched off of plex to Jellyfin because of how bad the experience on plex was.
Same here. And especially for watch parties Jellyfin has been great.
Such a cool feature to self host
Yep! Just need faster internet so I can share with more friends 😭
I use Navidrome over Jellyfin for music hosting. The open source music clients for the subsonic API are a little more varied.
If you're happy using closed apps, Symfonium supports both Jellyfin and Subsonic.
I'm glad I used Infinity for Reddit, which was always FOSS, and there is now a new fork Eternity for Lemmy.
So i bought plex pass a while ago and i keep hearing about plexamp, I dont really understand why is it considered so good, could you elaborate on why you like it? Does it do more than play music from my home server?
I just switched from Plex to Jellyfin. Aside from a few minor features like intro skipping, I don't miss it.
I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I've still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I've found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
The Jetbrains suite of IDE's. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform ~~they are all ~~ many of them are built on is open source though, and you can get free licenses for all of their products if you are using them to develop open source software!
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
It's fucking open source?????? Does that me we can build from source to have it for free?
I have the last version you can use free forever (and I'm the reason they fixed it, by the way)
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
Why do you find jetbrains better than VS Code?
But to be fair, the plugin capabilities for VS code are incredible. Of course its a lot more work but you can pretty much replicate the VS experience
Sounds like I should give rider another try. Doing a lot of refactoring right now
VS Code is not an IDE. There's no comparison.
That's a bit of a silly statement. Once you've installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it's modular and not "batteries included" doesn't make it incomparable.
Have you ever used JetBrains products for any serious development?
Yes, I've made heavy use of PyCharm, IntelliJ and Datagrip and I'm a huge fan of them all.
Microsoft straight up says it’s not an IDE.
Sure. But I didn't say it was either. I only pointed out that it's silly to say "there's no comparison", when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it's not even difficult.
Edit: In fairness, I did say "it's effectively an IDE", but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I'm doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.
Edit 2: I feel I've gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they're not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they're totally comparable.
I guess it depends on your goals. I install Intellij, or WebStorm, or PyCharm, or RubyMine, and I get a working environment right out of the box. I don't have to figure out what functionality is missing, then go search for the most maintained and up to date plugin, hoping that it has all the features I need. It just works. I use VS Code a lot, every day, but it's sorely lacking, even with all of the plugins it has, in basic stuff like refactoring an entire codebase, or just regular old code cleanup. I'll give a few examples, they might have equivalents in the vs code ecosystem, but I have not been able to find them.
In JB products I can choose Code > Inspect Code, from the menu bar, and have it show everything wrong with the project, including code that is never hit, code that is duplicated, Control Flow issues, Data Flow issues, typos, probable bugs, Security issues (including in your dependencies), migration aids, the list goes on and on and on. And it doesn't just do it for one language in your repo, it does it for every file type. So you don't have to install a plugin that finds security issues in your poms, and then one that finds them in package.json, and then another for your gemfile, etc.
This one is quite hard to describe, so I'll let the intellij docs explain it for me. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/structural-search-and-replace.html
There are a ton of things that I can't find equivalents for in VS Code, but these are two major ones.
It's that's fine that you've got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn't.
But I'm not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I'm arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.
I agree that JB's search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.
But you can get a lot of JB's functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).
Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).
I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).
There are no good open source CAD systems at all.
For electrical engineering there is KiCad, which is pretty good overall. Only reason I'm still using proprietary software is because I'd have to recreate my libraries and it will be a huge pita.
For mechanical design there is FreeCad, which is usable for simple geometries, but if you come from a proprietary CAD software you may find it lacking.
I got into the 3D printing hobby a few months ago and FreeCAD is pretty much useless. I can be more productive by writing JavaScript code with Three.js library, lol.
For 3D printing, did you try OpenSCAD? If you're already a programmer it's much easier to get into than it is to get into any classic CAD software.
OpenSCAD has its uses, but would hardly classify it as full CAD software. Prusa, I believe, used OpenSCAD for a while but they even moved to Fusion360. FreeCAD would be great if the devs would stop trying to reinvent the wheel in their UI. There is a ton of potential, but it simply isn't where it needs to be yet.
Fusion360 or SolidWorks are very well established in that space and their shitty license models reflect that.
Still, as a free alternative, FreeCAD is where it's at. You just really need to understand if it will suit all of your needs and for me, it doesn't.
Yeah, it's quite bad as well. I'm using Fusion360 now.
I've made some great and somewhat complex designs using freecad, it's certainly capable.
I eventually switched to fusion 360 because of the UI and it's more easy to find help. And less need to find help
Yep, that's my experience as well. It works, but man... You're just wasting time fighting the app instead of designing your models.
For that you can also use Blender
Not really. Blender is NOT a CAD. It doesn't ensure that your bodies are solid, it doesn't provide any analysis tools, it doesn't support working with blueprints/sketches, it's not parametric, etc. Basically, it doesn't do anything CAD at all.
Yeah, it's a great tool for the job. Not as good as Zbrush, but I used it for print prep several times and it just has all the tools you might need.
I wonder, what makes a good CAD system?
I had this idea for a while to build a Frankenstein monster of a 3D software that uses real time graphics and has a multi step build process covering CAD, wireframe manipulation and voxel workflows. If I ever actually make it, your concerns will be heard despite being probably not the best softwsre to do your work in :)
CAD system must be reliable. It is simply unacceptable to have math issues which cause unpredictable geometries.
CAD system should have a good UI. This is a big issue for open source software in general as UI and UX is usually an afterthought.
CAD system should be fast and use hardware acceleration. Running single threaded python scripts on CPU to do complex computations kills the productivity. Designing real life objects is already a mentally taxing task, the whole purpose of CAD is to remove the computational bottleneck of a human.
CAD should be object aware. If I draw two gears and put them next to each other, I should be able to rotate one and see the other moving accordingly.
This is a bare minimum, I'm not even talking about computational modelling, stress testing, etc.
Proper math and an intuitive interface, the opensource alternatives really struggle with some basic functions
Modern day, proper parametric modeling with robust and intuitive constraints.
That is a question too hard to answer in a comment and one that depends on the use case of the software. Few users need the power and features of CATIA or NX, but those who need it can't accept anything lesser. SolidWorks is a good spot in terms of flexibility and features if it could be easier for the average person to use. You need proper accurate parametric modeling (e.g. a NURBS kernel) for solid models and surfacing. Hearing things like wireframe and voxel indicates it isn't suitable to me.
I got a maker sub to solidworks. I couldn't keep up with 360's oddities and feature changes.
Maybe some day.
Once you get the basics down it's pretty much all transferable. There are some minor workflow changes, but the functionality isn't all too different.
Blender ;)
Whatsapp. Everyone in India uses it. Its like the imessage situation in the US. So widespread.
Schools, college, friend groups, family groups all are on whatsapp.
Can second this for Germany, too.
I tried to degoogle and to only use FOSS apps and services, but ditching WhatsApp would throw me in a black hole.
I have ONE contact who uses Signal. Yes, it's a shame but at this point I think that I could convert more people to using Linux than to switching to Signal.
Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else's but still.
Matrix bridge?
You don't have to give contact permission to the app.
Cool instance you are on.
Thanks. May I ask what is so cool about the instance that I am on? ;)
Same in the Czech Republic. My whole family communicates only through whatsapp.
Same in France. Even (this is insane) for work coordination...
So you prefer it because everyone use it? This doesn't sound smart
How am I supposed to message people when the only messaging app they use is whatsapp and facebook messenger (which I don't use)?
I guess the only easy alternative is to use SMS and email since everyone use it. But it is not safe.
I am always open to alternatives like Signal, Element,etc. But no one use them. I am not going to force people to use a messaging app.
As a workaround, you can bridge most services to Matrix. I currently bridge Telegram, Signal and SMS to my Matrix server and only need Element on my phone and desktop.
Unfortunately Element is fairly focused on business users, would be cool if they could host bridges for individuals to make the barrier of entry easier.
DaVinci Resolve is much better than any open source NLE. Generally, most closed source media production software is better than their open source counterparts except Blender. Blender is incredible and it gives me hope that other open source software can be just as successful in the media industry.
DaVinci is better, but it also provides licence for life. So it's proprietary but have a good relationship with the customers.
'Generally' is a really wide word. Better for what? For who? When? That's the all question...
Huh. DaVinci is OSS isn't it?
No. It's free to use for the standard version with most features available for free. There's a paid "studio" license which unlocks all the features. Neither have their source code available for the public.
Lol you will find out its not when trying to install it on Linux. They only support CentOS, which actually doesnt exist anymore, and there is nearly no info about needed things. A Flatpak? No way. Appimage? Dream on.
I mean opening the install guide PDF file you got when you downloaded the installer from their website isn't that hard.
In most cases, you only need to left-click the installer anyways so you will probably not need it. I just installed Resolve 18.5 on my Kubuntu laptop which worked very well except that Resolve apparently needs a dedicated GPU to work (at least on Linux, dunno about Windows).
A Flatpak would be welcome of course, but it's not needed.
Btw they support Rocky Linux, Centos 8 and RHEL 8 but the installation works well on presumably every distro. For Rocky Linux, they even got an ISO for quick deployment and standardisation of the OS and Resolve in a company.
Don't get fooled by what's popular, open source it's better by design and it's there to stay. You can do color correction on Blender too
Dude, you’re completely ignoring the entire point of the post.
Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform
Inkscape works good on Windows too, but its UI... It's like it was made by monkeys for dinosaurs. I'm not sure that Inkscape devs ever tried to use it themselves.
The UI isn't the best, but is it really that bad? I've used some adobe software as well, and I don't really find Inkscape's UI that hard to use in comparison. Whether it's pretty is another question.
Pretty bad in my opinion. Especially when you're working on more than one document at a time.
I agree that it's bad for editing anything more than a page, didn't think of that as I only really use it to make figures, which I think it's pretty great for.
Idk about you but I thought this was the case as well, since the last time I used Inkscape was probably like 6 years ago, and at the time, the UI was super dated looking (don't get me wrong, it was still functional).
The different is night and day now, I honestly couldn't tell that it was the same software. UI looks super clean and modern.
I used fresh Inkscape installation to fix some SVG files last month. Its UI is still cancer from 1990-s.
Version 1.3 has introduced a shape builder tool, always nice to have that. Overall, it seems that is has improved quite a bit in the last few years, so that's good to see
They revamped the entire interface, it's based on GTK3 and feels honestly very modern. I don't use it every day so take my feedback with a grain of salt
What issues have you run into on macOS? I use inkscape on my quite new mac very often, and don't have any issues. The command line tools for inkscape are also pretty good I think, and work without any issues (I get some
critical warning's every now and then though, but nothing has affected output yet).Inkscape is my go-to for creating decals for 3D assets.
Yeah they are full GTK now, on Windows it looked weird too
Photoshop, Fences, Plex, Steam, Unraid. I just highly prefer them to any alternatives I have tried. And believe me, I have tried every alternative to Photoshop and Fences that I could find. They just don't do it. And because of those two in particular, I have to add Windows to the list.
Oh, and I guess Sync for Lemmy. The only reason I even know what Lemmy is, is the fact that the Sync for Reddit app stopped working and basically said, "Yeah, move to Lemmy, idiot."
Jetbrains suite
MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
I agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop. And it’s still more comfortable to use than Windows IMO (no forced updates that slow down the shutting down process!).
Apple hardware is fantastic but I much prefer windows to macOS.
Affinity is the best non Adobe image editing suite. The Foss stuff just doesn't compare, imo. Even if feature parity, the UI of Foss image editing softwares is hotshit.
FL studio is beating out LMMS. However, I pirate FL, so it's still free to me.
![email protected]
It's just plain better than any other alternative. Better UI, better UX, better features, better customization, support for Monet... I could go on all day.
Discord over Matrix. The range of features plus the style of the client. I like soundboard and emotes. its easy to setup a server and invite people.
At the start of the pandemic Discord had the killer feature unmatched: active voice room discovery. You could see where people where, and how many were talking at a glance before you joined a room.
That's the single most useful feature of discord, but recently element integrated jitsi rooms and showed active participants. I think matrix is now good enough "enough" to replace discord.
I find a lot of admins forget or neglect bridges which can be frustrating
Yeah I feel the same way. I just can't get any matrix client to give me the same experience I get with discord. I know they're two different programs, and that if I started with matrix, discord would be weird, but still. It's annoying
You cannot setup servers on Discord.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord
Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.
Youtube, newpipe doesnt feels good to me No playlist No comment replies
So no🙁
I use klogg for browsing massive text files, it works pretty good for me
Re: JetBrains - isn’t VS Code oss?
I see. Did not realise there is such a defined line.
I do find PyCharm easier than VSCode but never could put a finger on it.
Dude's getting downvoted but there's not much of an integrated development environment in a glorified text editor with plugins once you realize the competition really gives you all the tools you need to never ever really need to leave the environment.
Most of the competition is modular with plugins as well.
VS code isn’t an IDE.
I tried installing this new "Files Community", kinda shady software even though opensource, and it didnt even install due to some libraries missing I guess...
UltraEdit is probably the oldest editor which was designed specifically for editing super large files. It has no limits, but it is also proprietary.
Do you mind expanding a little on Directory Opus ? I always have four or five explorer windows open and I am constantly annoyed with the clunkiness of Windows explorer. I know there are a few alternatives but not sure how they compare.
Thanks a lot for elaborating. I installed Free Commander in the meantime, see if it's enough for my use.
Yeah, I dont think there's a dual tree in Free Commander... It's just the one tree for both panes. But there's a favourite list and that should cover most of my needs. Let's see. Cheers !
Excel. There's just basic stuff with LibreOffice and OnlyOffice that work like crap. Like why in LibreOffice when I type =sum then hit tab does it think I'm done with the formula instead of adding the ( and letting me put in the first input. It's awful.
Visual studio code. There's nothing else that's anywhere near as good that doesn't cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don't do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can't remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.
Spotify. I've wanted to use Funkwhale since it's self-hosted and federated but I couldn't give up all that Spotify offers.
Spotify for music. I like the UI and the fact I can use it on all my devices.
Steam for games. I like that I can have progress synced across my Steam Deck, laptop and desktop.
Waze for maps and navigation. I like being able to report things on the road and update fuel prices etc
Steam and Discord, but mainly Steam.
If you told me I had to go 100% FOSS tomorrow, I could do it pretty easily, except for those two apps.
95% of my games are through Steam, and 95% of all my friends, family, and online community are in Discord. I could probably even dump Discord and convince some of my closest friends and FAM to switch to a Matrix client or something. But giving up Steam would mean I would basically be giving up nearly all gaming in my life.
And contrary to many other FOSS enthusiasts, I actually think Steam and Discord are great apps. I've rarely had issues with them, especially Steam. The UI is decent, the features are great, (Steam game join, Workshop mods, etc.) And Discord works really well on Linux for me, and GrapheneOS on my phone.
Of those two, I'd rather dump Discord. Valve is generally a very FOSS friendly company and pretty consumer friendly compared to most multi-billion dollar corpos. And what they've done recently for Linux gaming over the last few years with Proton, the Steam Deck, etc has has made gaming on Linux a wonderful experience for me.
Recently I have been trying to get into more FOSS games and GoG DRM-free games as an insurance policy for what I know is coming down the line one day. Gabe will either retire, pass away, or be bought out by a corpo/capital investment firm and Valve will become victim to the enshitification effect like all other proprietary software.
There is a small hope I have, idk if this is even possible, but what if Gabe chooses to open source some or all of the Steam code instead of letting it get bought out or taken over by somebody else? That would allow for the FOSS community to fork it and build a FOSS Steam.
Like I said though, a pipe dream for now. Long live FOSS!
Lightroom. There are lots of alternatives for editing some even FOSS but I haven't found any usable alternative to the library of Lightroom...
This will get me loads of downvotes, but Windows 10 Mail and Calendar (not Outlook) is simple yet works flawlessly and is miles ahead of Thunderbird by usability, stability and user-friendliness. On the other hand though, Ubuntu Evolution is even better and is open-source.
iMessage unfortunately
What do you like better about it over Signal or Whatsapp?
Apple would get so much more money out of me charging $20 a month to use imessage on windows/android vs waiting for me to replace my iphone. I get I am the rare user but by golly I wish they would go multi platform.
Im running a mac os virtual machine with the app/server called airmessage. I get iMessage for my family group chats now though it's tied to my email.
I’ve heard of it but didn’t want to buy a Mac or trust a third party with my messages.
I don't trust it either but I'll pick my insecure conversations over my family/friends complaining about contacting me (and contacting me less).
Didn't pay a thing for the VM
Google Maps, there is not even 1 good alternative for maps osm is there but it will take a lot more users and volunteers to perform as well as google maps and i dont think thats gonna happen Google maps don't have any foss frontend too and i dont know if its possible to make one
Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried
Ouff, a fair few of the big players:
I really care about my privacy. But I just can't break from SwiftKey keyboard. It's just so good. It's really unfortunate that it's owned by Microsoft.
Fusion 360. I'm sorry, but FreeCAD just can't compare.
DaVinci Resolve.
There is simply nothing that even come close.
Adobe Acrobat. I have tried at least 5 other PDF readers and editors for windows, and none of them are remotely close. Either they don't have any document editing at all and are just PDF readers, or their editing capabilities are VERY clunky, not feature rich, or just don't work.
I haven't ever found another program that let's me directly edit text in a PDF that already exists.
I don't need to edit PDFs much but when I do it's usually quite important, and Adobe is by far the easiest and quickest to do it in.
I hate that that's the case, because I really don't like Adobe as a company and would rather not have to use their software, but there it is.
I highly recommend pdf-exchange editor. It's not FOSS either, BUT it does offer a perpetual offline license, has a portable version and works even better. They do have a free reader version, so you can try out if you like their UI before you buy the full version.
Bluebeam is the holy grail of PDF editors, I highly suggest "acquiring" it.
I second bluebeam. Used it for work a lot. Especially doing redlines.
Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it's modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn't like it either (but then, I also didn't really like Illustrator all that much, it's really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don't have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode ("persona") that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn't want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it's truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.
My really obvious one, and a huge source of problems for me, is Discord. But the biggest one was a wild one:
Irfanview
It is a super-fast image viewer and simple image editor. Supports every format I've ever thrown at it. Bulk conversion and resize works like a charm. Hell, it's half the reason I haven't moved to Linux for my daily use.
I prefer paint.net for asbuilts in underground construction. I use GIMP when I'm on Linux / MacOS but paint.net is a nice simple in between from basic paint-> photoshop.
GIMP is a lot closer to photoshop. Don't get me wrong - it's a great software but paint.net fills that role a little better for what I need to do.
I paid for and use parallels on my apple silicon laptop just for oaint.net
Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.
Sync for Lemmy, JetBrains IDEs, and Sublime Text to name a few.
Shazam, because there are no open source alternatives
Games.
Other than basic things like Tetris (Quadrapassel) and minesweeper, I've not yet found an open source game I've enjoyed nearly as much as the countless proprietary games I own and play.
As much as I dislike Adobe, Photoshop is something I can't get away from.
OSM over HERE/Apple/Google maps. It has much much better mapping of footpaths, which makes it much more useful for planning runs/walks/hikes.
1Password - password manager with cross platform sync.
I've used Bitwarden but it's very barbones. In the past I always used 1Passsword because it's full featured but I was on Mac at the time and 1Password was Mac only.
I then moved to Linux and used Enpass, then Bitwarden. At last 1Password realised they needed to go cross platform and they have a native Linux client. So I moved back to them
Easily the best and most secure and full featured password manager that's ever existed. I highly, highly recommend it if you haven't tried it.
https://1password.com/
Steam and Spotify
For me personally there is no open source calculator on android that even comes close to Hiper Calc Pro. Having actual expressions and physical constants makes things so much easier and makes the app better than most physical scientific calculators.
Windows over Linux based OSes. The support (albeit via mass adoption) is much better. I can run almost any old software, including games. Plug in anything that's plug and play and not worry about driver compatibility. Things tend to just work and I'm not one accidental sudo away from wrecking the whole OS.
I just disable ads, put a custom start menu in place, and I'm golden.
I'm not saying Windows doesn't have issues, but for me personally it's likely far less than a Linux OS.
Zbrush is better for sculpting than Blender. (Although Blender is not sculpting specific, so it's really good as a general 3d suite tool, capable of things ZBrush can't do).
If you know of a FOSS 3d sculpting tool that is as good as Zbrush, let me know.
I must admit that I cannot get used to blender.
Might be that I'm an old fart who started on 3ds max back in the 00s, but I cannot get used to how different blender is from the normal modeling software paradigm.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely applaud and appreciate all that the Blender Foundation has done for 3d modelling and all the industries it touches, but it's just not for me.
I'm lucky enough to be in a position where the cost of my software of choice (Modo) isn't a problem, but I get kind of anxious as the idea of being forced to really use blender to do actual work.
I have a Maya background only, so I can't compare to Modo or 3dsMax. But I found bridging over to blender not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes time to get accustomed to the interface and some of its quirks. UV tools seem weak and the outliner hierarchies still leave me stumped, along with their pivot points system, but I'm hopeful I'll get around those eventually.
If you haven't tried Blender 3.5+ I'd recommend you give it a go, perhaps it is not as bad as you may remember. Or not, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze in your case, I don't know.
I'm the same vain, Houdini is better than blender for simulations.
Ah, Houdini! I've heard lots of great things about it, I need to get into it sometime.
I recently tried coming back to sculpting and damn, zbrush honestly feels horrible, the thing doesnt even have proper HiDPI scaling so its all blurry on my screen (paid product BTW), not to mention the awful UX. Tried using blender for sculpting and honestly, I got suprised on how good it is. Some defaults are messy and it lacks layers but other than that its pretty decent.
Probably DaVinci Resolve. Back when I was on Windows I used HitFilm, but since I moved to Linux I moved to DaVinci Resolve
For now, REAPER for Linux over Ardour. REAPER is cheap, and while it is absolutely not free software, it is about as close as you can get while still being proprietary. You can use the trial for as long as you want without paying, and other than a nag screen, it is fully functional. You can rewrite some of the built-in effects, and there are several options for writing your own audio plugins and extensions.
Frankly...I vibe with REAPER, and I don't vibe (yet) with Ardour. I'm still reading the manual, and I'm still going to try keep trying it out, but there are a couple choices REAPER made that I prefer. For example, REAPER doesn't distinguish between MIDI and Audio tracks. This is really useful to write lines in MIDI before I know how to play them on a real instrument, then seamlessly use the original signal chain after the MIDI instrument. According to what I've read and worked with so far, Ardour has a few different track types.
I've been using REAPER for several years. It's been rock solid, it has all the options I ever needed, and Cockos has stayed out of my way as I transferred my license to almost a dozen computers. I wish they would open-source the software, but it's one of the few software purchases I don't regret.
What I need to clarify is that it is good in spite of its proprietary-ness, not because of it!
Same for all daws for me. I tried to get along with foss ones but they pale in comparison. Ardour crashed a lot for me, especially when the project got large with many plugins so I moved to reaper and had no such issues. On bitwig now and I can't really think of anything even comparable that's foss, let alone easier/better.
Reaper is great. Fantastic dev team and great forums for support. And, most importantly, the license is affordable for bedroom shredders like me.
My operating system.
It's not that I prefer it per se, rather I have better things to do then e.g. spend 2 hours messing with my font rendering to end up with a result half as good as Windows is out of the box.
Word and Excel, tried LibreOffice it lags and has some weird graphical glitches and OnlyOffice has bad Arabic support
Adobe Suite. As much as I loathe Adobe, as a graphic designer there is no way to bypass them.
Affinity is making some headway on individual apps and there are a few others, but as a whole suite it just can’t be beat.
Steam and Spotify, I just can't get rid of them. I tried to download some music from YouTube, but the way to discover new songs is just way easier on Spotify than doing it yourself. Steam seems obvious, to play games, you should buy it, to thank the dev's.
DAWs - LMMS is cool and was my gateway to music production but it lacks so much compared to Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton, etc.
Active directory
I do my absolute best to avoid proprietary software. I can only think of three I use consistently. Those are Obsidian, Steam, and the Nvidia drivers.
Obsidian is a weird one; there are loads of note taking/pim/personal wiki options out there. And don't get me wrong, stuff like Standard Notes, Joplin, and Trillium are great. But for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, Obsidian is the only one that clicks for me.
Steam isn't so much an "I prefer," it's more of a "I have a huge game library I'm not willing to abandon." Without Steam, I can't play Terraria, Hades, Core Keeper, and more than 200 others. It might be a sunk cost fallacy thing, but I'm not giving up my Fallout New Vegas.
The Nvidia thing is an extension of the Steam thing. My next computer will have an AMD card, though, so that's kind of a "for now."
Jetbrains IntelliJ is a big contender, but I get along just fine in other, FOSS IDEs. I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, actually, but that may just be a case where I learned photo manipulation on GIMP and didn't touch Photoshop until far later.
My final answer has to be in image processing/photo editing software. CaptureOne Pro is leagues ahead of anything FOSS I've ever tried. DarkTable, RawTherapee, ART, none of it can come close to comparing right now. No matter how much time I give it, I just... Can never make the transition. Which sucks, because CaptureOne is not available on Linux and it's pretty well impossible to get it running. 🥲
Petal Maps/Google Maps And Waze navigation.
Petal is my favourite, it has some features that google and Waze don't have, like free drive mode. The open-source map alternatives unfortunately dosn't even come close. And being able to have the navigation app on half the screen and Spotify/Jellyfin on the bottom half is just golden.
I know that the CCP owns Petal, and I'm not proud of using it, but the experience is great. Google is also ass when it comes to privacy, but being able to quickly check the reviews of nearby restaurants/parks is amazing.
Waze isn't great either, but checking if there are any traffic jams before jumping in the car is also cool. (I know that both Google and Petal have this feature but Waze is just superior).
Additionally, I haven't found a Bluetooth tracking alternative to Tile.
WinSCP, for the transfer-then-delete function. It's the only thing I run under WINE.also open sourceCalibre, for doing everything I need with ebooksedit: Calibre still does everything I need but is open sourceEdit: thank you to everyone who pointed out my incorrect info
Plex’s Plexamp over any of the Jellyfin FOSS music apps. Bought Plex pass just for the amp.
Adobe Illustrator over Inkscape. I thought I'd save some money and learn Inkscape but it's just too weird an un-intuitive, sometimes buggy too. Key combinations couldn't be mapped to work like Illustrator which I was used to, so it's frustrating to work with because you know what it should be able to do, but now to have to figure out what Inkscape calls the feature and what menu that might be in.
Same for Photoshop over Paint.NET or anything else. Photoshop is still the master at layered image manipulation for all sorts of things. I use it for Web/UI mockup designs, and for photo editing in some cases. Nothing else can do this as well, and again it's because I'm so familiar with it and it's key combinations and features. Plus, now the new AI features are doing way more than I ever thought possible, it's pretty impressive stuff really!
Ynab it works on every platform I care about and easily pulls info from all my accounts
Google Messages over QKSMS, but only because Google is gatekeeping RCS
Maya. I just cannot get used to the Blender UI
Every open source office suite.
But then again, I also hate Microsoft office.
Google's suite is the most easiest I ever used. Followed by pure vanilla markdown.
What does not work for you in onlyoffice? I only use MS365 for realtime collab at university
FL Studio. I've been using it since the late 90s. I know it like the back of my hand.
Duolingo, I guess? There's not many libre language learning aids, except LibreLingo which only has Spanish.
If I still did book design, it'd be InDesign unfortunately; Adobe is the devil, but I haven't seen a text layout program that compares.
Not FOSS, but in terms of alternatives for Adobe, I have been liking Affinity so far. Haven't used Publisher much though.
I will do anything to get away from these fucks, even it means staying with proprietary software
And Scribus would be so much nicer if master pages worked the same as they did in InDesign.
What's Calibri? I'm not finding anything (besides the typeface) when I search.
Their website and a Wikipedia article about them are below.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)
You can use calibre for desktop publishing?
FL Studio, Ableton, and many VST. Yes, a know about Ardour, many LV2 plugins, and I tried it, and in somewhere moment, me liked it more, then proprietary analog. Some plugins is awesome, DrumGizmo is very well, Vitalium and helm too have good sound, and many another software is good, but for easy, fast, and really quality sound it easier make in proprietary analogs. It ones cause, why I have windows in dualboot (and yes, in Wine I haved large latency and another problems).
P.S But sometimes I still working on my music projects in GNU/Linux.
Minecraft, but only because of the bigger playerbase and a better train mod (the train mod, however, is FOSS)
Substance Painter has no equal and neither does SpeedTree. And maybe JIRA if you have to pay for it as a business
MX Player for Android (Older version preferably, before sellout, if you can find). So much better than VLC.
Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.
Games, Steam, firmware, fopnu, darkmx, "Skype" (relatives), WhatsApp (relatives), Telegram (relatives and work, I don't care if the client is open), Opera Presto (sometimes for nostalgy).
As much as I love to hate ESRI, Arcpy just works and has solid documentation. Sure I could use a strictly geopandas solution but when the customer wants to have the product in a file geodatabase, noting beats the built in export method.
I guess I am stuck in error 999999 land for life.
Finale vs Lilypond. I'm convinced only the Borg actually uses Lilypond. It's obscure, terrifying and difficult to use. Maybe it's because I've been using finale for over 14 years but it's hard for me to even conceptualize how to make music in Lilypond, whereas Finale just does whatever I ask of it.
Musescore is also a good FOSS alternative but I still stick by finale.
Adobe lightroom vs darktable. Don't get me wrong, I still use darktable instead of lightroon,, but my god, it is incredibly unstable and everything is just harder to do.
Studio 3T over MongoDB Compass. Despite the comparatively dated UI, S3T is way more capable
I'm still a widow of robo3t. I still use it over any alternative but every time I need to setup a new machine I find it harder to download than before. It's also throwing a lot of errors with newer mongo versions.
Both studio 3t and compass have an interface that just doesn't feel right to me.
For CAD and 3d design in general, I oreger Rhino. The grasshopper addition is phenominal,.and I've been using Rhino for almost.. 20 years now. I really enjoy the look and feel if it, I know basically every relevant command line input and input option etc. I use Revit and AutoCAD at work, but convinced them to get my Rhino for developing 3d models and converting them to 2D.
The only truly free program that competes with Rhino is Blender, which is an amazing program in a whole bunch of regards, but I've never liked the GUI at all.
Speaking of things Blender can also do, I prefer Photoshop to popular free alternatives such as GIMP or Blender. I'm very familiar with the tools and how they work, and the Beta improvements are mind boggling. I do however prefer Inkscape for vector work.
Speaking more about things Blender can also do, I prefer DaVinci Resolve as a free movie editor. However, I did purchase the basic license becuase I thought the program was that good. I'm blown away that they make it free with so many things enabled still.
Speaking ...Blender.. you get the idea.. digital sculpting is much nicer in Zbrush, to me. Took me forever to not hate the GUI (cough -- ok I still Hate it), but I really love some of the tools and plug-ins. It's also phenominal at mesh repair in general. Which is a subtasks I prefer Netfabb Basic for, which I think is also paid for now, but I think suspect it's included in my Autodesk license package..
The moral of the story is if you like to do any of these things go check out blender before you get used to a paid program, and save yourself decades of costs lol.
StylusLabs Write. I've tried all the FOSS hand-written note taking apps and none of them is practical to use.
Write just works. Produces SVGs that you can view in any browser and efficiently sync via git. Amazing.
It looks like an android app from 2012 and could really use some updates in other areas too.
I also don't get why it's closed source. It's free (as in beer) and there isn't even a way to donate.
Termius saves me so much time as an engineer connecting to the dozens of servers in our infrastructure
macOS because it's just so damned comfy.
Apples Notes because nothing else has the perfect amount of formatting, alongside exceptional sync.
Also Apple Mail for the same simplicity reason - Geary on Gnome is close-ish, but goes too far down the simple route. How does it not have a refresh button??
Also Logic Pro, mainly because there aren't any fully FOSS alternatives that even attempt a full-featured DAW, let alone with Drummer etc.
I also 'prefer' Apple's productivity suite over everything else, because it has by far the best UX, but I'm totally fine with LibreOffice too.
I wish there is
everythingfor Linux.fsearch has the looks but last time I tried I needs to wait for it to scan, no background indexing.
Yea, the workflow is a bit different. Not having a concept of fill opacity as separate from layer opacity forced me to change the way I do certain things, and having certain retouching tools grouped with the brushes was confusing at first.
For years, I didn't use anything besides Adobe CC, because it's "industry standard," so I've never given anything like Affinity a go in earnest.
With all FLOSS design tools, I had to have a bit of a reckoning with myself; like most people, at first I thought they were unintuitive, until I was able to have a bit of objectivity and found that most of the issues I had with them didn't arise because they were unintuitive; it was just because they didn't work like Adobe tools, which are themselves complex tools that you really can't just pick up on your own without some degree of instruction.
Serato DJ pro. No other software comes close. Mixxx is nice but I lose lots of features if I switch to it.
P4merge for code diffs and merge. Their 3way merge tool is the best.
There's a few open source front ends for Twitch that I've tried but I've had the occasional issue with video playback either stopping and being unable to reload or if I'm watching a VOD it won't consistently remember my position so I'd say I prefer the official app.
Normally I use open source ones when possible such as NewPipe or Invidious for YouTube for example.
On my phone I an using Xtra which works pretty well.
I know a lot of effort has been put into usability for blender, but it's still just so weird compared to any other desktop app.
Quicken,
I really wish there was a FOSS alternative that supported the autodownload of transactions across my plethora of banks/accounts (some I even chose specifically for better integration) but its sooo incestuous that theres really not much and what alternatives are available are usually cloud based where you cant guarantee the security of all your financial data.
Altium. Reasons. (the octopart integration is really nice)
StremIO, it's simply a lot more usable and stable than Kodi but I still use both for my piracy needs!
Kdenlive is still not up to pro standards. I make do with it, but if/when i'm editing for someone else i'll have to switch to a proprietary solution.
And that's besides the fact that everyone else is using it, which is usually the reason to prefer proprietary over FOSS. It's the reason i still have Photoshop installed alongside Krita.
Much to my chagrin, SVP is still better than MPV+VapourSynth in the realm of frame rate upscaling. Worst part? SVP is, in fact, based on the same code that VapourSynth uses, just with their own proprietary additions that should honestly have gone back to the community.
I don't, because I'm not a Chad.
Lightroom > Dark table Edge > Firefox Windows > Linux
Discord - no alternatives
macOS over Ubuntu (don't get me started on Windows). I use macOS on my MacBook Air and it's just so well thought out. Ubuntu is decent but I wouldn't want to use it for my daily work.
I love Obsidian and use it to manage my Markdown files and I'm in awe. Checked out Logseq as well but it didn't work for me.
VS Code. As much as I hate Microsoft, this is great. I'll likely look for a community-supported version without the creepy telemetry shit though.
None, closed source is flawed by design
Adobe, office, any form is not Linux desktop, edge, GPU drivers, Intel drivers, probably forgetting a lot.