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.
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've found OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice) is very compatible with Microsoft's Office document format. I can open and edit docx files created by other people with no problem.
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.
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.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
Absolutely, making proton open source made me respect them more than any other major tech company
What are the open-source alternatives though? I don't think there are even proprietary alternatives, it's like Netflix before each publisher decided to make their own streaming platform.
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 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.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks features many of the other apps have.
Care to mention some? I've used Thunder but I find it unbearably ugly and not as visually customizable as Sync.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
I still donate to Inkscape each month (please do the same at https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/), but it became unusable for me on macOS, unfortunately. I now use Serif Affinity.
Inkscape is fantastic on Linux. I’d highly recommend it!
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.
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
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."
Same. I know sync isn't foss but the features and how it's presented got me into the lemmyverse. I use it more than jerboa or infinity. Both great but the sync guy has a good smooth app. I support that.
I used RIF for many years until the Spezzening. Jerboa is pretty good, but felt just a little shy of something. Sync felt great as soon as I tried it.
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
While that is true, that's also not what people mean when they say 'servers' in this context. No of course they're not actual servers, but that's what they're called and I don't think anyone is under the impression they're actually servers
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.
Absolutely, Affinity Photo is really good. Publisher is okay (buggy and slow, though, at least in 1.2 it was, haven't tried 2.0), but Designer is miles behind Inkscape in my experience. It has just so little functionality. I'm not exactly a heavy vector user so I could be wrong too.
I've been using https://photopea.com and it does 99% of everything I would've done in Photoshop, in your browser. The only thing I've found that's not up to par with Adobe is the content aware fill... it technically works, but it's just not very good at it. And it of course doesn't have any AI assisted features. It's also free and ad supported, or you can pay $5/month to remove ads.
I am using logseq at work, as I don't have a license there. I prefer Obsidian over all alternatives I've tried so far. Major points are:
Plugins, which obsidian offers a lot
File structure, obsidian stores all notes in a directory tree of markdown files. You can sync this with any service you like: GIT, Syncthing, manually, whatever you like.
I don't really get the journaling format of logseq, why does every note have to be a point in a hierarchy?
logseq definitely coming along. I tried their donation only sync and it seems to mostly work.
That said nothing has beaten Standardnotes for me. Standardnotes can be found on flathub, fdroid etc. The only drawback is to get the important features you need to either selfhost or buy the plan. The free service is very barebones
Bitwig is outstanding. I so wish there was an open source DAW that came close in stability and workflow. Zrythm crashes constantly, and the workflow in Ardour is obtuse. I can't quite figure out how to do anything in LMMS and the other options just look so dated I'm not even tempted to try them.
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.
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.
You could just use vs codium as a fully open source option.
VSCode is open source though? Although I guess maybe not the plugins?
It's similar to chrome. Chrome is not open source, its base project chromium is. The VSCode distributable has closed source stuff on top which is mostly telemetry. There's a purely open source build of VSCode called vscodium.
I use the proprietary version for the remote tools and settings sync.
I can work from home on my windows PC with no loss of productivity compared to my Linux workstation.
And the ability to open any GitHub repo in the browser based Code just by pressing . is a game changer.
VSCodium exists. Not sure whether it has intellisense by default but might be worth a try. It is open source and without all the Microsoft telemetry
What are you talking about? Neovim LSP autocompletion is way faster and smoother than VSCode's, and one of the reasons I personally have trouble working in the latter nowadays.
both GNU emacs and vim can have autocompletion powered by the same language servers that vscode uses. They support the same features (jump to definition, rename symbol under cursor etc etc) as well.
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.
Honestly anything I can't do easily in Google docs probably means I should just do it in Python anyway.
I need spreadsheets for work in commercial loan underwriting. We don't have a commercial underwriting system yet so all our templates are excel based. I waited to move to Linux solely because of Excel when working from home. During COVID though my work finally gave everyone laptops so I didn't need to do work on my personal rig anymore.
Libre office's filtering is far better though- being able to apply actual regex instead of Excel's weird proprietary pattern matching is just so much better that I opt for it most of the time.
I am a big fan of LibreOffice in general and there is not much I need that I cannot do. That said, I agree that Calc has lots of little usability paper cuts like the one you describe that make using Excel a lot more pleasant.
Spotify. I've wanted to use Funkwhale since it's self-hosted and federated but I couldn't give up all that Spotify offers.
I've never even looked for an alternative, what started as mild intrigue a decade ago turned into my only window into music, as much as the interface can sometimes drive me mad (and their sometimes cavalier attitude to changing it) I just can't deny that the recommendation engines have introduced me to whole new worlds of music which I love and wouldn't even know exists otherwise
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!
I could probably dump discord, but there's just no alternative to Steam. It succeeded, where literally every other publisher failed, to unify game distribution on the PC. Even if valve made steam itself FOSS and let anyone clone it, there's no chance in hell they'll get anyone but the most indi of studios to launch anything on it, let alone exclusively.
Of all the proprietary codebases and their companies, Steam and Valve are the only ones I respect.
Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried
Yt premium/music is a decent deal and no hassle. I feel like a leper saying that sometimes.
Luckily, I ended up signing up for Google Play Music the day it was released for $7.99/mo and that price has been grandfathered in to every change and price hike they've done. So now I get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium for the same price 12 years later. I don't think I'll ever switch music providers or stop watching YouTube if I get to keep the current price.
I don't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube.
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.
I feel like Win 10 default apps just waste so much screen real estate. I've been using Thunderbird for years and while 5 years ago I would agree the user interface is obtuse the refresh that happened a few years back really improved things. I've also never had stability problems and I have thunderbird tracking 7 email accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails total (I'm a data hoarder)
Evolution on the other hand, hoo boy, I have to use it at work and despise it lol. That program gives me stability problems and frequently fails to interact with Exchange. Gives me a great excuse for missing meetings haha
All said, Outlook desktop I think is superior to both Thunderbird and Evolution, I just don't wanna pay for it
Guys try out Thunderbird 115! You need to create all your stuff new I guess, because they changed so much a lot of things broke for me, but once set up, its pretty great
Except if you set the checkbox to remember logins an don't use Gnome. Needs workarounds, devs wontfix.
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.
MS Office breaks interoperability betweem different versions, so it can go off the cliff.
I don't use GMaps, but for driving Waze with traffic warnings just can't be beaten. Hiking with OSM is great.
I found paint.net a much better experience than GIMP. Now, I'm not that into photo editing, but it's a much easier user experience for me.
An example being that you don't need a 7 step solution just to deselect something. You can just click outside of the canvas.
Does it have all the bells and whistles of GIMP? Eh, not really, but there is a forum where people make individual packages for it, and there are a lot.
Imagine the day when using Ms Office is identified as the reason for breaking compatibility, instead of the inverse.
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.
Also, wolfram alpha
Fusion 360. I'm sorry, but FreeCAD just can't compare.
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.
Bluebeam is the holy grail of PDF editors, I highly suggest "acquiring" it.
Also, you answered the question backwards, but I don't mind XD
I think you misread OP's question
True. Soz. Read it while tired.
Photoshop over Gimp Krita, etc. Just too many features and years ahead nearest competitor
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.
Also, have you used sheets? Hot shit compared to the fucking powerhouse that excel is.
Yes and no. For stuff like citations: absolutely. For reviewing stuff, the mode to suggest edits in Office (or even Google Docs) is great and doesn't really have equivalent with a proper UI for LaTeX. Yes, you can use PDF comments, but then you need to change the LaTeX document manually.
But that's the whole point. I started exploring it and learning about it and realized that it will take more time than it's worth - by that time I completed it in Word and fixed it's own citation issues manually. I really, really want these to be better than MS Word...but they just aren't there yet.
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.
Sync for Lemmy, JetBrains IDEs, and Sublime Text to name a few.
Second Sync for Lemmy. I don't care if people hate on me for using it. It's (currently) far superior.
Some people hate Sync for two reasons, that is, pricing and tracking. What they need to know is that tracking is done by google ads, once one gets adfree version tracking won't happen.
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.
OpenTTD is the best in its genre if you like that sort of thing... Though it is a reimplementation of originally proprietary software.
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
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 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.
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.
Funny. That is why I do not use Windows. It takes so long to set up. First, so many of the drivers are not built in. Then, hardly any of the apps I need are built in. Then, none of the programs stay current without constant admin.
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.
As much as I dislike Adobe, Photoshop is something I can't get away from.
Steam and Spotify
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.
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.
Bitwarden is amazing. It may not have so many "categories" but that's a choice they made as most of them can be set as "Login" , not sure what you feel missing in BW
What is the difference with Bitwarden? I can't think of anything.
Far, far more categories in 1Password
Categories?? What's that? 😅
In addition to logins you can also store:
Passwords
Bank Cards
Bank Accounts
Secure Notes
Software Licences
Drivers Licence
ID
Membership Cards
Documents
API credentials
SSH credentials
Database
Crypto Wallet
Passport
Medical records
Email accounts
Reward program
Social security number
Server
Quite a lot more than just logins.
Bitwarden has an "identity category" where you can fit many of those things, and many of your examples are literally fancy user and/or password combinations, which can be stored in the "standard" category (SSH or API credentials, crypto wallets 😅), and the fancier things can be stored as secure notes, which obviously do exist in Bitwarden too.
Not a feature that would make me avoid an open source security solution.
Maybe you should revisit Bitwarden... it's really great.
Probably DaVinci Resolve. Back when I was on Windows I used HitFilm, but since I moved to Linux I moved to DaVinci Resolve
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.
The driver thing confuses me. What I love about Linux is I DON’T have to go on a wild search expedition for drivers or install random software to get my hardware working.
Wacom tablet just this week.. plug in and works perfect on Linux.
Wasted 30 minutes getting it to work on Windows and disabling the junky software it comes with on boot.
Yep. I've got a Logitech mouse that always bugged out on Windows. Tried downloading their app/drivers and the install indicator just kept going and going above 100%. Completely broken.
I like Linux but there are absolutely some driver problems with laptops.
Just go on the arch wiki and search for any recent laptop and it's quite likely that something will be slightly buggy or not working. Often there is an easy solution.
You specifically mention old software, but for older software Wine on Linux seemed very reliable to me, probably because older interfaces are better tested already. Some very old games (i.e. Win 95-XP era) worked better for me on Wine than on modern Windows out of the box.
I used to think all of these too bud, trust me, but it has gotten better over the last 5 years. I did have a couple of hiccups but for the most part Ubuntu was pretty smooth. Steam makes all of your old games real easy too.
I attempted a home Linux machine about 7 years ago and had to give way over family needs. I'm now running mint on the next iteration of the family computer.
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."
Maybe it's old enough that some people never had to deal with it, but before Steam, being able to play a game on a different version of Windows than what it came out for was a crapshoot. Playing on Linux was even MORE of a crapshoot. I remember when I got Team Fortress running on Linux for the first time (at like 10 FPS) and was ecstatic.
Linux gaming existed before steam, but Steam (and Valve) brought Linux gaming to the masses.
Premiere Pro. It's industry standard and DaVinci just isn't the same.
It's a shame adobe knows this and jacked up their prices to ridiculous levels ON TOP OF removing the one-time purchase to a SaaS model.
Interesting, I find Davinci to be much better and coherent than Premiere, though it also isn't foss.
Kdenlive is a great foss alternative though. I use Kde Connect and Krita daily.
Haven't tried myself, but did you try Kdenlive ? apparently it's very good. I use Blender for my editing needs because I'm so used to it, it isn't bad but a little quirky. (always with Blender)
I used a bit kdenlive (and no experience with professional grade productsm, IMO it's a sufficient alternative for a home project, where the most advanced effect you'll need would be a green screen.
But feel like these professional grade programs are "blacked magic" compared to kdenlive. The few video tutorial I've seen show they have crazy effects. Not a big deal because I have no idea on how to use them, but definitely an issue for a pro.
For an amateur but proprietary the gopro app is crazy, you give it a few rushes, choose a music, a target social media, a style and on 3 click you have a video ready to be published
As an editing program, it's not really supposed to have much in terms of effects... usually for anything beyond editing and color grading you'd go for a compositing program such as Natron, Nuke, Blender, etc.
You're saying it does color keying though ?
Premiere is a crashy mess compared to Final Cut. Davinci isn't open source, it's just free unless you need to do 4k and some advanced colour stuff. Davinci is high end Hollywood magic.
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!
I like the Affinity suite of products.
Very good and much cheaper than Adobe.
Honestly? Visual Studio. Like I am an Emacs user through and through. When properly setup with LSP, ccls, etc. it offers a better editing experience, and when it works its similar to, if not better than VS--even on huge codebases. But I would rather go live in a dumpster than have to use GDB over the VS debugger again. Its so slow, its a nightmare to use with multithreaded code, it just isnt capable of handling a large, GUI driven application.
Maybe there is some GDB config guidebook that I'm missing, but it better be something more than 'lmao just write a python script to pretty-print std::vector'.
DAWs - LMMS is cool and was my gateway to music production but it lacks so much compared to Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton, etc.
There's Ardour and Jack
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.
Microsoft Excel - I tried a lot of the FOSS office suites but I always come back mainly due to familiarity but also compatibility (which I know is not much of an issue lately).
Google Photos - I have Immich setup and use it but my wife and people around me use Photos and so I have to conform.
"Pixel OS" - I can't move to Graphene or similar due to banking apps.
X-Plane comes close to FlightGear. It has far-superior visuals. fully functional glass cockpits like the Garmin G1000, and simulated ATC, but the vast array of community-made planes available in FlightGear still kinda seals it for me, despite the jank.
FreeCAD has its pain points. Software like Creo Parametric is much more robust in a lot of ways, but I literally cannot run it on Linux (no mouse-wheel zoom in WINE, slide show in QEMU). Fundamentally, they are similar enough, and my work primarily takes place on a component level so I can live without the streamlined assembly workflow. Also, FreeCAD doesn't cost >$2000, and can still do FEM analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Maybe I could find a crack for SolidWorks and try that out, but it takes a long ass time to learn a CAD system proficiently.
Everyone who learned on Photoshop says the GIMP interface is weird, but I learned on GIMP and can say the same for Photoshop.
Games are the only exception, but games aren't fungible. Minecraft is not a substitute for Dwarf Fortress. CS:GO is not a substitute for Unreal Tournament.
by now i'm almost fully switched off of directly using google products other than an android phone (pinephone was unfortunately not usable when I tried it) and google maps (when i'm delivery driving i just need it to work smoothly, don't have time to troubleshoot like i would with other software)
it's been a few years since i did a foss deep dive so i imagine pinephone and/or osm have made progress.
edit: also invidious instances kept breaking so i finally just went back to regular youtube in browser. newpipe on mobile
osmand is pretty good
Check out Organic Maps, it's a frontend for OpenStreetMap with a gorgeous UI/UX.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Duolingo, I guess? There's not many libre language learning aids, except LibreLingo which only has Spanish.
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.
Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.
Substance Painter has no equal and neither does SpeedTree. And maybe JIRA if you have to pay for it as a business
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've installed Darktable probably 10 times in the past 5 years, and uninstalled it immediately after. Basically collecting its .exe files at this point.
There's just something about the UI that makes it daunting and unappealing to use for me. I'm hoping more FOSS programs can get the Blender treatment with UI/UX improvements and a ton of fundind.
Pixelmator for macOS blows GIMP out of the water and is a one-time purchase of $50. I've used Photoshop a lot at school and Pixelmator does 99% the same.
Studio 3T over MongoDB Compass. Despite the comparatively dated UI, S3T is way more capable
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate Office365 with passion. It's extremely unproductive and alternatives like Quip are much better.
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've found OnlyOffice (not to be confused with OpenOffice) is very compatible with Microsoft's Office document format. I can open and edit docx files created by other people with no problem.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
Absolutely, making proton open source made me respect them more than any other major tech company
What are the open-source alternatives though? I don't think there are even proprietary alternatives, it's like Netflix before each publisher decided to make their own streaming platform.
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 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.
That’s funny because I switched off of plex to Jellyfin because of how bad the experience on plex was.
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.
Cool instance you are on.
Thanks. May I ask what is so cool about the instance that I am on? ;)
there's a kerala lemmy? thats neat
telegram is used a lot in slav countries, i feel like its pretty decent
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.
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
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.
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.
Youtube, it just has way more content than any libre platform
There why we use ReVanced YouTube and YouTube ad block extensions.
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!).
I still donate to Inkscape each month (please do the same at https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/), but it became unusable for me on macOS, unfortunately. I now use Serif Affinity.
Inkscape is fantastic on Linux. I’d highly recommend it!
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.
gf
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
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."
Same. I know sync isn't foss but the features and how it's presented got me into the lemmyverse. I use it more than jerboa or infinity. Both great but the sync guy has a good smooth app. I support that.
I used RIF for many years until the Spezzening. Jerboa is pretty good, but felt just a little shy of something. Sync felt great as soon as I tried it.
Jetbrains suite
Though IntelliJ and Pycharm are both open source. But if you use the rest of the suite then yeah
Those are the two inside the most anyway. My work pays for the advanced license for all of them, but I don't even think I have any other installed.
Can't imagine working without PyCharm Pro. Some may say I'm a shitty dev, but it just makes thing so much easier for a lone developer.
What’s bad about using the tool that is the most productive for you?
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
While that is true, that's also not what people mean when they say 'servers' in this context. No of course they're not actual servers, but that's what they're called and I don't think anyone is under the impression they're actually servers
Sync for Lemmy. 🤷
Or connect for lemmy
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.
Absolutely, Affinity Photo is really good. Publisher is okay (buggy and slow, though, at least in 1.2 it was, haven't tried 2.0), but Designer is miles behind Inkscape in my experience. It has just so little functionality. I'm not exactly a heavy vector user so I could be wrong too.
I've been using https://photopea.com and it does 99% of everything I would've done in Photoshop, in your browser. The only thing I've found that's not up to par with Adobe is the content aware fill... it technically works, but it's just not very good at it. And it of course doesn't have any AI assisted features. It's also free and ad supported, or you can pay $5/month to remove ads.
FL sucks on Linux. I'd recommend Bigwig studio.
The only real problem with affinity is lack of Linux support. Otherwise I love it.
Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.
TIL Obsidian isn't FOSS!
Obsidian is amazing. It also feels open-source lol; I thought it was at first.
Maybe because the plugins are, and the notes you make with it are plain markdown files.
Absolutely love Obsidian.
Did you check logseq? It's on flathub
I am using logseq at work, as I don't have a license there. I prefer Obsidian over all alternatives I've tried so far. Major points are:
logseq definitely coming along. I tried their donation only sync and it seems to mostly work.
That said nothing has beaten Standardnotes for me. Standardnotes can be found on flathub, fdroid etc. The only drawback is to get the important features you need to either selfhost or buy the plan. The free service is very barebones
isn’t obsidian open source?
Nope it's not. It's free, but you can only look at part of the source code and can't look at the proprietary parts. Logseq is completely FOSS though
I love Bitwig. Linux support too!
!bitwig@lemmy.studio is dead but I'm hoping to change that soon!
Bitwig is outstanding. I so wish there was an open source DAW that came close in stability and workflow. Zrythm crashes constantly, and the workflow in Ardour is obtuse. I can't quite figure out how to do anything in LMMS and the other options just look so dated I'm not even tempted to try them.
!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
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.
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.
You could just use vs codium as a fully open source option.
VSCode is open source though? Although I guess maybe not the plugins?
It's similar to chrome. Chrome is not open source, its base project chromium is. The VSCode distributable has closed source stuff on top which is mostly telemetry. There's a purely open source build of VSCode called vscodium.
I use the proprietary version for the remote tools and settings sync.
I can work from home on my windows PC with no loss of productivity compared to my Linux workstation.
And the ability to open any GitHub repo in the browser based Code just by pressing . is a game changer.
VSCodium exists. Not sure whether it has intellisense by default but might be worth a try. It is open source and without all the Microsoft telemetry
What are you talking about? Neovim LSP autocompletion is way faster and smoother than VSCode's, and one of the reasons I personally have trouble working in the latter nowadays.
both GNU emacs and vim can have autocompletion powered by the same language servers that vscode uses. They support the same features (jump to definition, rename symbol under cursor etc etc) as well.
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.
Honestly anything I can't do easily in Google docs probably means I should just do it in Python anyway.
I need spreadsheets for work in commercial loan underwriting. We don't have a commercial underwriting system yet so all our templates are excel based. I waited to move to Linux solely because of Excel when working from home. During COVID though my work finally gave everyone laptops so I didn't need to do work on my personal rig anymore.
Libre office's filtering is far better though- being able to apply actual regex instead of Excel's weird proprietary pattern matching is just so much better that I opt for it most of the time.
I am a big fan of LibreOffice in general and there is not much I need that I cannot do. That said, I agree that Calc has lots of little usability paper cuts like the one you describe that make using Excel a lot more pleasant.
Spotify. I've wanted to use Funkwhale since it's self-hosted and federated but I couldn't give up all that Spotify offers.
I've never even looked for an alternative, what started as mild intrigue a decade ago turned into my only window into music, as much as the interface can sometimes drive me mad (and their sometimes cavalier attitude to changing it) I just can't deny that the recommendation engines have introduced me to whole new worlds of music which I love and wouldn't even know exists otherwise
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!
I could probably dump discord, but there's just no alternative to Steam. It succeeded, where literally every other publisher failed, to unify game distribution on the PC. Even if valve made steam itself FOSS and let anyone clone it, there's no chance in hell they'll get anyone but the most indi of studios to launch anything on it, let alone exclusively.
Of all the proprietary codebases and their companies, Steam and Valve are the only ones I respect.
(Also Slack, but I'm forced to use that for work)
Lightroom. There are lots of alternatives for editing some even FOSS but I haven't found any usable alternative to the library of Lightroom...
That’s the one. Every alternative wants to compete with the Develop module, but the Library is really what makes Lightroom so useful and hard to quit.
DaVinci Resolve.
There is simply nothing that even come close.
Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried
Yt premium/music is a decent deal and no hassle. I feel like a leper saying that sometimes.
Luckily, I ended up signing up for Google Play Music the day it was released for $7.99/mo and that price has been grandfathered in to every change and price hike they've done. So now I get YouTube Music and YouTube Premium for the same price 12 years later. I don't think I'll ever switch music providers or stop watching YouTube if I get to keep the current price.
I don't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube.
Depends on the region, which they are cracking down on, but at Turkish pricing for a family plan at just over $2pm it's extremely worth it.
Wow yea that's crazy
I'm in Canada and buy the family plan. Not super cheat but, I get the value out of it
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.
I feel like Win 10 default apps just waste so much screen real estate. I've been using Thunderbird for years and while 5 years ago I would agree the user interface is obtuse the refresh that happened a few years back really improved things. I've also never had stability problems and I have thunderbird tracking 7 email accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails total (I'm a data hoarder)
Evolution on the other hand, hoo boy, I have to use it at work and despise it lol. That program gives me stability problems and frequently fails to interact with Exchange. Gives me a great excuse for missing meetings haha
All said, Outlook desktop I think is superior to both Thunderbird and Evolution, I just don't wanna pay for it
Guys try out Thunderbird 115! You need to create all your stuff new I guess, because they changed so much a lot of things broke for me, but once set up, its pretty great
Except if you set the checkbox to remember logins an don't use Gnome. Needs workarounds, devs wontfix.
Discord (proprietary) vs. Matrix (open-source)
Steam (proprietary) vs. GameVault (open-source)
Spotify (proprietary) vs. Funkwhale (open-source)
Strong or Hevy (proprietary) vs. ? (open-source)
Moon+ Reader Pro (proprietary) vs. FBReader (open-source)
Sleep as Android (proprietary) vs. ? (open-source)
Google Maps (proprietary) vs. OpenStreetMap (open-source)
Ouff, a fair few of the big players:
MS Office breaks interoperability betweem different versions, so it can go off the cliff.
I don't use GMaps, but for driving Waze with traffic warnings just can't be beaten. Hiking with OSM is great.
I found paint.net a much better experience than GIMP. Now, I'm not that into photo editing, but it's a much easier user experience for me.
An example being that you don't need a 7 step solution just to deselect something. You can just click outside of the canvas.
Does it have all the bells and whistles of GIMP? Eh, not really, but there is a forum where people make individual packages for it, and there are a lot.
Imagine the day when using Ms Office is identified as the reason for breaking compatibility, instead of the inverse.
iMessage unfortunately
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.
Also, wolfram alpha
Fusion 360. I'm sorry, but FreeCAD just can't compare.
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.
If you are interested, there is this: https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
Not prefect but about as good as gboard imo
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.
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.
Join our community: !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
Also, you answered the question backwards, but I don't mind XD
I think you misread OP's question
True. Soz. Read it while tired.
Photoshop over Gimp Krita, etc. Just too many features and years ahead nearest competitor
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.
Also, have you used sheets? Hot shit compared to the fucking powerhouse that excel is.
Learn to use latex
Yes and no. For stuff like citations: absolutely. For reviewing stuff, the mode to suggest edits in Office (or even Google Docs) is great and doesn't really have equivalent with a proper UI for LaTeX. Yes, you can use PDF comments, but then you need to change the LaTeX document manually.
But that's the whole point. I started exploring it and learning about it and realized that it will take more time than it's worth - by that time I completed it in Word and fixed it's own citation issues manually. I really, really want these to be better than MS Word...but they just aren't there yet.
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.
Sync for Lemmy, JetBrains IDEs, and Sublime Text to name a few.
Second Sync for Lemmy. I don't care if people hate on me for using it. It's (currently) far superior.
Some people hate Sync for two reasons, that is, pricing and tracking. What they need to know is that tracking is done by google ads, once one gets adfree version tracking won't happen.
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.
OpenTTD is the best in its genre if you like that sort of thing... Though it is a reimplementation of originally proprietary software.
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
https://www.pinta-project.com/
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 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.
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.
Funny. That is why I do not use Windows. It takes so long to set up. First, so many of the drivers are not built in. Then, hardly any of the apps I need are built in. Then, none of the programs stay current without constant admin.
Who has that kind of time?
Shazam, because there are no open source alternatives
There's Mousai, which is a GNOME app on GNU/Linux which uses the AudD API.
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.
As much as I dislike Adobe, Photoshop is something I can't get away from.
Steam and Spotify
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.
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/
Bitwarden is amazing. It may not have so many "categories" but that's a choice they made as most of them can be set as "Login" , not sure what you feel missing in BW
What is the difference with Bitwarden? I can't think of anything.
Far, far more categories in 1Password
Categories?? What's that? 😅
In addition to logins you can also store: Passwords Bank Cards Bank Accounts Secure Notes Software Licences Drivers Licence ID Membership Cards Documents API credentials SSH credentials Database Crypto Wallet Passport Medical records Email accounts Reward program Social security number Server
Quite a lot more than just logins.
Bitwarden has an "identity category" where you can fit many of those things, and many of your examples are literally fancy user and/or password combinations, which can be stored in the "standard" category (SSH or API credentials, crypto wallets 😅), and the fancier things can be stored as secure notes, which obviously do exist in Bitwarden too.
Not a feature that would make me avoid an open source security solution.
Maybe you should revisit Bitwarden... it's really great.
Probably DaVinci Resolve. Back when I was on Windows I used HitFilm, but since I moved to Linux I moved to DaVinci Resolve
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.
The driver thing confuses me. What I love about Linux is I DON’T have to go on a wild search expedition for drivers or install random software to get my hardware working.
Wacom tablet just this week.. plug in and works perfect on Linux.
Wasted 30 minutes getting it to work on Windows and disabling the junky software it comes with on boot.
Yep. I've got a Logitech mouse that always bugged out on Windows. Tried downloading their app/drivers and the install indicator just kept going and going above 100%. Completely broken.
Same mouse on Ubuntu works perfectly.
I like Linux but there are absolutely some driver problems with laptops. Just go on the arch wiki and search for any recent laptop and it's quite likely that something will be slightly buggy or not working. Often there is an easy solution.
You specifically mention old software, but for older software Wine on Linux seemed very reliable to me, probably because older interfaces are better tested already. Some very old games (i.e. Win 95-XP era) worked better for me on Wine than on modern Windows out of the box.
I used to think all of these too bud, trust me, but it has gotten better over the last 5 years. I did have a couple of hiccups but for the most part Ubuntu was pretty smooth. Steam makes all of your old games real easy too.
I attempted a home Linux machine about 7 years ago and had to give way over family needs. I'm now running mint on the next iteration of the family computer.
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.
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."
Maybe it's old enough that some people never had to deal with it, but before Steam, being able to play a game on a different version of Windows than what it came out for was a crapshoot. Playing on Linux was even MORE of a crapshoot. I remember when I got Team Fortress running on Linux for the first time (at like 10 FPS) and was ecstatic.
Linux gaming existed before steam, but Steam (and Valve) brought Linux gaming to the masses.
Active directory
Premiere Pro. It's industry standard and DaVinci just isn't the same.
It's a shame adobe knows this and jacked up their prices to ridiculous levels ON TOP OF removing the one-time purchase to a SaaS model.
Interesting, I find Davinci to be much better and coherent than Premiere, though it also isn't foss.
Kdenlive is a great foss alternative though. I use Kde Connect and Krita daily.
Haven't tried myself, but did you try Kdenlive ? apparently it's very good. I use Blender for my editing needs because I'm so used to it, it isn't bad but a little quirky. (always with Blender)
I used a bit kdenlive (and no experience with professional grade productsm, IMO it's a sufficient alternative for a home project, where the most advanced effect you'll need would be a green screen.
But feel like these professional grade programs are "blacked magic" compared to kdenlive. The few video tutorial I've seen show they have crazy effects. Not a big deal because I have no idea on how to use them, but definitely an issue for a pro.
For an amateur but proprietary the gopro app is crazy, you give it a few rushes, choose a music, a target social media, a style and on 3 click you have a video ready to be published
As an editing program, it's not really supposed to have much in terms of effects... usually for anything beyond editing and color grading you'd go for a compositing program such as Natron, Nuke, Blender, etc. You're saying it does color keying though ?
Premiere is a crashy mess compared to Final Cut. Davinci isn't open source, it's just free unless you need to do 4k and some advanced colour stuff. Davinci is high end Hollywood magic.
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!
I like the Affinity suite of products. Very good and much cheaper than Adobe.
Honestly? Visual Studio. Like I am an Emacs user through and through. When properly setup with LSP, ccls, etc. it offers a better editing experience, and when it works its similar to, if not better than VS--even on huge codebases. But I would rather go live in a dumpster than have to use GDB over the VS debugger again. Its so slow, its a nightmare to use with multithreaded code, it just isnt capable of handling a large, GUI driven application.
Maybe there is some GDB config guidebook that I'm missing, but it better be something more than 'lmao just write a python script to pretty-print std::vector'.
FL Studio. I've been using it since the late 90s. I know it like the back of my hand.
DAWs - LMMS is cool and was my gateway to music production but it lacks so much compared to Studio One, FL Studio, Ableton, etc.
There's Ardour and Jack
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.
Microsoft Excel - I tried a lot of the FOSS office suites but I always come back mainly due to familiarity but also compatibility (which I know is not much of an issue lately).
Google Photos - I have Immich setup and use it but my wife and people around me use Photos and so I have to conform.
"Pixel OS" - I can't move to Graphene or similar due to banking apps.
Skype - Like Photos, due to relatives
None.
X-Plane comes close to FlightGear. It has far-superior visuals. fully functional glass cockpits like the Garmin G1000, and simulated ATC, but the vast array of community-made planes available in FlightGear still kinda seals it for me, despite the jank.
FreeCAD has its pain points. Software like Creo Parametric is much more robust in a lot of ways, but I literally cannot run it on Linux (no mouse-wheel zoom in WINE, slide show in QEMU). Fundamentally, they are similar enough, and my work primarily takes place on a component level so I can live without the streamlined assembly workflow. Also, FreeCAD doesn't cost >$2000, and can still do FEM analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Maybe I could find a crack for SolidWorks and try that out, but it takes a long ass time to learn a CAD system proficiently.
Everyone who learned on Photoshop says the GIMP interface is weird, but I learned on GIMP and can say the same for Photoshop.
Games are the only exception, but games aren't fungible. Minecraft is not a substitute for Dwarf Fortress. CS:GO is not a substitute for Unreal Tournament.
by now i'm almost fully switched off of directly using google products other than an android phone (pinephone was unfortunately not usable when I tried it) and google maps (when i'm delivery driving i just need it to work smoothly, don't have time to troubleshoot like i would with other software)
it's been a few years since i did a foss deep dive so i imagine pinephone and/or osm have made progress.
edit: also invidious instances kept breaking so i finally just went back to regular youtube in browser. newpipe on mobile
osmand is pretty good
Check out Organic Maps, it's a frontend for OpenStreetMap with a gorgeous UI/UX.
Try piped.video, it is the web frontend to NewPipe's backend. Like a better Invidious.
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
Calibre is free software
But WinSCP is opensource too: https://github.com/winscp/winscp
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.
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.
Ynab it works on every platform I care about and easily pulls info from all my accounts
Plex’s Plexamp over any of the Jellyfin FOSS music apps. Bought Plex pass just for the amp.
I just use navidrome for music, jellyfin is just for video imo
Google Messages over QKSMS, but only because Google is gatekeeping RCS
Maya. I just cannot get used to the Blender UI
You can customize Blender to look like Maya, all the way up to the keybindings.
Nvidia GPU drivers, Noveau is generally fine but for some reason it bricks Deep Rock Galactic which is enough to make me switch.
Rock and stone brother.
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).
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.
Duolingo, I guess? There's not many libre language learning aids, except LibreLingo which only has Spanish.
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.
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.
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.
Substance Painter has no equal and neither does SpeedTree. And maybe JIRA if you have to pay for it as a business
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've installed Darktable probably 10 times in the past 5 years, and uninstalled it immediately after. Basically collecting its .exe files at this point.
There's just something about the UI that makes it daunting and unappealing to use for me. I'm hoping more FOSS programs can get the Blender treatment with UI/UX improvements and a ton of fundind.
Pixelmator for macOS blows GIMP out of the water and is a one-time purchase of $50. I've used Photoshop a lot at school and Pixelmator does 99% the same.
Studio 3T over MongoDB Compass. Despite the comparatively dated UI, S3T is way more capable
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.
Have you tried saber?
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.
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.
MacOSf or the trackpad gesture support.
The touchpad gestures in Gnome are by now the same as on MacOS. Gnome is the default desktop on many popular Linux distros.