I remember people saying “3.0 is right around the corner” several years ago.
I categorize GIMP 3.0 the same as ASOIAF, Star Citizen, and the Google Drive client for Linux. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I see it, but I ain’t holding my breath.
Again, just my opinion, but I prefer Krita to any FLOSS alternative. I’ve been designing professionally for over a decade, using Adobe for most of it; Krita is my preferred FLOSS tool for photo editing, and I’ve tried them all.
I’m surprised, I never managed to use it efficiently for that purpose. Perhaps AffinityPhoto spoiled me a bit. I love Krita for illustration work though, nothing compares… As far as commercial alternatives go, I haven’t tried Clip Paint although everybody praises it- but I don’t really feel the need to. Apparently it’s excellent?
Yea, the workflow is a bit different. Not having a concept of fill opacity as separate from layer opacity forced me to change the way I do certain things, and having certain retouching tools grouped with the brushes was confusing at first.
For years, I didn’t use anything besides Adobe CC, because it’s “industry standard,” so I’ve never given anything like Affinity a go in earnest.
With all FLOSS design tools, I had to have a bit of a reckoning with myself; like most people, at first I thought they were unintuitive, until I was able to have a bit of objectivity and found that most of the issues I had with them didn’t arise because they were unintuitive; it was just because they didn’t work like Adobe tools, which are themselves complex tools that you really can’t just pick up on your own without some degree of instruction.
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.
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.
I’ve had a pretty good experience using photopea as a photoshop replacement. Definitely not quite as powerful, but it has more than enough features for your average user
My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It’s unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.
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
Apple would get so much more money out of me charging $20 a month to use imessage on windows/android vs waiting for me to replace my iphone. I get I am the rare user but by golly I wish they would go multi platform.
I’m still a widow of robo3t. I still use it over any alternative but every time I need to setup a new machine I find it harder to download than before. It’s also throwing a lot of errors with newer mongo versions.
Both studio 3t and compass have an interface that just doesn’t feel right to me.
The Jetbrains suite of IDE’s. Particularly Jetbrains Rider. The platform they are all 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!
That’s a bit of a silly statement. Once you’ve installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it’s modular and not “batteries included” doesn’t make it incomparable.
Sure. But I didn’t say it was either. I only pointed out that it’s silly to say “there’s no comparison”, when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it’s not even difficult.
Edit: In fairness, I did say “it’s effectively an IDE”, but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I’m doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.
Edit 2: I feel I’ve gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they’re not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they’re totally comparable.
I guess it depends on your goals. I install Intellij, or WebStorm, or PyCharm, or RubyMine, and I get a working environment right out of the box. I don’t have to figure out what functionality is missing, then go search for the most maintained and up to date plugin, hoping that it has all the features I need. It just works. I use VS Code a lot, every day, but it’s sorely lacking, even with all of the plugins it has, in basic stuff like refactoring an entire codebase, or just regular old code cleanup. I’ll give a few examples, they might have equivalents in the vs code ecosystem, but I have not been able to find them.
Inspect Code
In JB products I can choose Code > Inspect Code, from the menu bar, and have it show everything wrong with the project, including code that is never hit, code that is duplicated, Control Flow issues, Data Flow issues, typos, probable bugs, Security issues (including in your dependencies), migration aids, the list goes on and on and on. And it doesn’t just do it for one language in your repo, it does it for every file type. So you don’t have to install a plugin that finds security issues in your poms, and then one that finds them in package.json, and then another for your gemfile, etc.
A conventional search process does not take into account the syntax and semantics of the source code. Even if you use regular expressions, IntelliJ IDEA still treats your code as a regular text. The structural search and replace (SSR) actions let you search for a particular code pattern or grammatical construct in your code considering your code structure.
IntelliJ IDEA finds and replaces fragments of source code, based on the search templates that you create and conditions you apply.
It’s that’s fine that you’ve got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn’t.
But I’m not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I’m arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.
I agree that JB’s search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.
But you can get a lot of JB’s functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).
Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).
I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
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 github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
I agree about Plex. But I don’t get the love for Sync.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks features many of the other apps have. Personally, I’m liking Thunder right now, but I’m excited for Boost to come out.
Sync has ads unless you pay, it’s not open source, and I haven’t actually found anything superior about it.
It’s missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn’t big though, and most of them aren’t a big deal.
I’m not sure why you think Thunder is ugly though. The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
I was unable to get the font sizes right, to change only the base font to affect all proportions, and to colorize the indented comments the way I like them. Maybe I just wasn’t able to find the settings, though.
So i bought plex pass a while ago and i keep hearing about plexamp, I dont really understand why is it considered so good, could you elaborate on why you like it? Does it do more than play music from my home server?
I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I’ve still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I’ve found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
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. 🥲
Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else’s but still.
As a workaround, you can bridge most services to Matrix. I currently bridge Telegram, Signal and SMS to my Matrix server and only need Element on my phone and desktop.
Unfortunately Element is fairly focused on business users, would be cool if they could host bridges for individuals to make the barrier of entry easier.
Zbrush is better for sculpting than Blender. (Although Blender is not sculpting specific, so it’s really good as a general 3d suite tool, capable of things ZBrush can’t do).
If you know of a FOSS 3d sculpting tool that is as good as Zbrush, let me know.
Might be that I’m an old fart who started on 3ds max back in the 00s, but I cannot get used to how different blender is from the normal modeling software paradigm.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely applaud and appreciate all that the Blender Foundation has done for 3d modelling and all the industries it touches, but it’s just not for me.
I’m lucky enough to be in a position where the cost of my software of choice (Modo) isn’t a problem, but I get kind of anxious as the idea of being forced to really use blender to do actual work.
I have a Maya background only, so I can’t compare to Modo or 3dsMax. But I found bridging over to blender not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes time to get accustomed to the interface and some of its quirks. UV tools seem weak and the outliner hierarchies still leave me stumped, along with their pivot points system, but I’m hopeful I’ll get around those eventually.
If you haven’t tried Blender 3.5+ I’d recommend you give it a go, perhaps it is not as bad as you may remember. Or not, maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze in your case, I don’t know.
I recently tried coming back to sculpting and damn, zbrush honestly feels horrible, the thing doesnt even have proper HiDPI scaling so its all blurry on my screen (paid product BTW), not to mention the awful UX. Tried using blender for sculpting and honestly, I got suprised on how good it is. Some defaults are messy and it lacks layers but other than that its pretty decent.
DaVinci Resolve is much better than any open source NLE. Generally, most closed source media production software is better than their open source counterparts except Blender. Blender is incredible and it gives me hope that other open source software can be just as successful in the media industry.
No. It’s free to use for the standard version with most features available for free. There’s a paid “studio” license which unlocks all the features. Neither have their source code available for the public.
Lol you will find out its not when trying to install it on Linux. They only support CentOS, which actually doesnt exist anymore, and there is nearly no info about needed things. A Flatpak? No way. Appimage? Dream on.
I mean opening the install guide PDF file you got when you downloaded the installer from their website isn’t that hard.
In most cases, you only need to left-click the installer anyways so you will probably not need it. I just installed Resolve 18.5 on my Kubuntu laptop which worked very well except that Resolve apparently needs a dedicated GPU to work (at least on Linux, dunno about Windows).
A Flatpak would be welcome of course, but it’s not needed.
Btw they support Rocky Linux, Centos 8 and RHEL 8 but the installation works well on presumably every distro. For Rocky Linux, they even got an ISO for quick deployment and standardisation of the OS and Resolve in a company.
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!).
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.
If you’re using git to track document changes then you’re almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I’ve used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Not only mathematics, pretty much everyone in the world of science/academia uses LaTeX. For git, I’ve seen some stuff, but most researchers that program a decent amount are reasonably familiar with git as well.
That’s still a far higher degree of technical competence than is possessed by the target audience for PowerPoint, Google Slides, or LibreOffice present. Also, claiming someone isn’t technical just because they’re not a computer programmer is a little odd. Most programmers I know don’t go anywhere near LaTeX because it’s so confusing and the spec is so complicated. They use powerpoint, Miro, or markdown slides when they want to present something.
This guys reply to me was literally “git isn’t too technical, mathematicians use this extremely complicated program for generating highly technical documents all the time so obviously grandma could too!”
I agree 100% with you, I tried to use LaTeX ONE time in college and nearly chucked my computer out the window, and I’m a software developer. I was using it for a math class and couldn’t get my head around any of it.
It certainly isn’t a good replacement for MSWord or PowerPoint for the VAST majority of people who don’t need to put mathematical notation into their presentations and just need words on a screen
Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it’ll actually show you what changed in the document view
Ah, I took it so that they mentioned beamer / LaTeX as a separate thing from change tracking, which is usually more of a document editor feature than a presentation editor feature.
But like, using LaTeX as a replacement for microsoft word is NOT really useful advice for the vast majority of people who use Word. I don’t need ANY of the special things LaTeX does, and I’ve been using Word all my life to do the basic stuff I need it for.
I get where people here are coming from, but the whole point of this thread is talking about proprietary software which is better for the average use case than open source stuff, and I think the point still stands that MSOffice products absolutely fit that bill. Yes, open source or free alternatives exist, but they aren’t nearly as good, feature-full, and easy to learn and use as the open source alternatives.
The fact that we’re here arguing whether LaTeX is a viable alternative to Word and Power Point kinda proves that MSOffice is the best for this IMO, because LaTeX isn’t exactly easy to pick up and use and is really intended for industries that need extremely complex formatting on their presentations and papers.
No one here is talking about using LaTeX instead of Word. They are talking about making presentations, not documents.
And yeah, I can see how making presentations in LaTeX is faster and easier (for some people) because PowerPoint is so incredibly annoying and slow to use. And the ability to use version tracking is very nice.
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
I’ve 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’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
If you have to interact with documents created by others it would be better to use open formats not proprietary shit designed to be not cross compatible
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.
Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
I’m not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.
I don’t need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I’m looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don’t know any good MS Access alternative.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous “collaboration” is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I’ll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
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.
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
Internally they are called guilds, but “publicly” they’re called servers. When you interact with the API you use guilds, but the Discord client itself doesn’t use that term - it only uses “Server” as far as I can see.
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
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