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!
Krita is excellent for painting, not very good for image editing though.
Photopea is good for most tasks
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.
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They aim to introduce that in version 3.0, which they say will be a complete overhaul of the app.
Non-destructive editing through live adjustment layers is definitely the single most useful feature any editing software can have.
That alone makes life so much easier.
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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.
How does Rawtherapee compare to that? Many people seem to prefer it over Darktable
I tried it once a very long time ago. It was super slow and buggy. It’s easier to get used to Darktable quirks.
I wouldn’t say Photoshop is easy but Gimp is horrendous.
Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
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.
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.
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’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 hate Office365 with passion. It’s extremely unproductive and alternatives like Quip are much better.
I’m surprised to see quip here, honestly it’s never been for me (even with it’s salesforce integration). What do you like about it compared to gdocs / word?
Quip is very lightweight. It’s not clogged with 200 features I’m never going to use.
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
Eh, beamer is more than enough for most presentations. If your slideshow needs to be that flashy, you probably need more substance.
git puts track changes to shame.
You’re absolutely right about compatibility though.
If you’re using git to track document changes then you’re almost certainly in the tech industry and are quite familiar with the inner workings of your computer.
For 90% of people using computers right now, asking them to use git to do version management on their day to day work flow would be like asking me to fly a rocket ship to work.
I agree with the OP here, for what it does office is leaps and bounds ahead of any of the other software I’ve used to try to replace it and I always end up landing back on it.
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
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!
Why do you find jetbrains better than VS Code?
Not OP, but everything? It’s a far more complete solution with far more capabilities. It can be compared to full VS, not Code, IMO.
are there any good open source alternatives for VSCode for people that don’t want to learn emacs/vim? I’ve been looking for a good code editor to replace it but I haven’t been impressed elsewhere
VSCode is open (MIT) but it is packaged by MS to include some tracking/telemetry and they are distributed under a non-free license.
You can use VSCodium for a telemetry free and MIT licensed binary or you are free to build the source where the default config is no telemetry and MIT license.
I think VSCode(ium) is the OSS alternative? If you want OSS, it’s the way to go.
There is always Eclipse IDE. It’s not as polished as Jetbrain’s apps for sure but it’s still very capable. It’s published under the Eclipse Public License. I think the language server code that’s used in VSCode is from Eclipse, it can be used for developing many languages and there are lots of plugins and other add-ons to enhance the experience.
But to be fair, the plugin capabilities for VS code are incredible. Of course its a lot more work but you can pretty much replicate the VS experience
Refactoring and code cleanup utilities in Rider are exceptional right now. And that’s not small. It’s massive in value.
Don’t get me wrong, I want codium to have this, but the extensions that compare, especially for .net, are not in the same league.
Sounds like I should give rider another try. Doing a lot of refactoring right now
If you don’t need cross platform support, there’s also full vs with R#, but I prefer rider for the performance.
VS Code is not an IDE. There’s no comparison.
That’s a bit of a silly statement. Once you’ve installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it’s modular and not “batteries included” doesn’t make it incomparable.
Have you ever used JetBrains products for any serious development?
It’s fucking open source??? Does that me we can build from source to have it for free?
I have the last version you can use free forever (and I’m the reason they fixed it, by the way)
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
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 use Navidrome over Jellyfin for music hosting. The open source music clients for the subsonic API are a little more varied.
If you’re happy using closed apps, Symfonium supports both Jellyfin and Subsonic.
I 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.
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’m glad I used Infinity for Reddit, which was always FOSS, and there is now a new fork Eternity for Lemmy.
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.
Half-and-half here (also Germany). Almost everyone I know uses Signal & WhatsApp both. But WA is for bad connectivity and group chats, plus a few (mostly foreigners) holdouts.
I have ONE contact who uses Signal. Yes, it’s a shame but at this point I think that I could convert more people to using Linux than to switching to Signal.
Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else’s but still.
Cool instance you are on.
Thanks. May I ask what is so cool about the instance that I am on? ;)
Did not know we have our own instance
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there’s a kerala lemmy? thats neat
telegram is used a lot in slav countries, i feel like 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.
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.
Don’t get fooled by what’s popular, open source it’s better by design and it’s there to stay. You can do color correction on Blender too
- Directory Opus: The best explorer replacement, never seen anything else come close.
- EmEditor, the fastest text editor, and the only text editor I’ve seen that can easily handle multi-GB (the limit is 250 GB or something) files.
- YNAB classic, because I prefer the interface over the few envelope budgeting OSS tools
- JetBrains IDE’s, though there’s really not much OSS competition in the full IDE space.
UltraEdit is probably the oldest editor which was designed specifically for editing super large files. It has no limits, but it is also proprietary.
Slower, last I checked. Though that was a long time ago, probably 10 years.
Re: JetBrains - isn’t VS Code oss?
Even with plugins, VSCode is more IDE-lite and iirc the C# plugin is not OSS anymore. Also “not much” competition allows for some ;)
He said full IDE. You ever used a full IDE?
Dude’s getting downvoted but there’s not much of an integrated development environment in a glorified text editor with plugins once you realize the competition really gives you all the tools you need to never ever really need to leave the environment.
It’s okay, most of these users are kids editing python scripts in vs code anyway.
iMessage unfortunately
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.
Yeah, it’s quite bad as well. I’m using Fusion360 now.
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
I got a maker sub to solidworks. I couldn’t keep up with 360’s oddities and feature changes.
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 agree, love the intervonnectivity with iOS, especially AirDrop.
To me, that sort of “feature” is nothing more than a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
Maybe I just think that because of past trauma from Microsoft products and IoT devices being blatantly insecure, but…
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.
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
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
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You cannot setup servers on 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
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Server sounds better. Guilds sound dumb.
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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.
Zbrush is better for sculpting than Blender. (Although Blender is not sculpting specific, so it’s really good as a general 3d suite tool, capable of things ZBrush can’t do).
If you know of a FOSS 3d sculpting tool that is as good as Zbrush, let me know.
I must admit that I cannot get used to blender.
Might be that I’m an old fart who started on 3ds max back in the 00s, but I cannot get used to how different blender is from the normal modeling software paradigm.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely applaud and appreciate all that the Blender Foundation has done for 3d modelling and all the industries it touches, but it’s just not for me.
I’m lucky enough to be in a position where the cost of my software of choice (Modo) isn’t a problem, but I get kind of anxious as the idea of being forced to really use blender to do actual work.
I have a Maya background only, so I can’t compare to Modo or 3dsMax. But I found bridging over to blender not as bad as I thought it would be. It just takes time to get accustomed to the interface and some of its quirks. UV tools seem weak and the outliner hierarchies still leave me stumped, along with their pivot points system, but I’m hopeful I’ll get around those eventually.
If you haven’t tried Blender 3.5+ I’d recommend you give it a go, perhaps it is not as bad as you may remember. Or not, maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze in your case, I don’t know.
I’m the same vain, Houdini is better than blender for simulations.
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. 🥲
