It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
My phone firmware
god i fucking hate android, i await the day linux on mobile actually functions with great anticipation.
I’ve been so excited anytime I see updates from gnome-mobile. It’s looks much cleaner than phosh
i’m just waiting until someone inevitably ports something like i3wm or sway over and it’s actually pretty usable. That’s all i need to be happy in life.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
Android may be ‘meh’ to you. I like it, but only because it’s good enough for what I need. Fair. But it’s got something the green Linux phone never had: massive presence.
Droid is a bad Linux with a huge ecosystem, and that’s why this may be the best we can hope for. We could have a perfect phone, but without that massive presence to get the apps and the dedicated devs, anything with less presence will suffer.
Think about it. It’s a sad fact, but you know it’s a fact.
That’s like how Xz didn’t get trojanned because it was a nothing project: it is a crucial part of everything. It lost its presence and when the sole Dev was deep in burnout he was hoodwinked. Ya need the eyeballs, and that’s a popularity game for foss.
My 2c.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
unsure what you’re trying to say, but they make linux phones now, people do buy them, not very many. But for me, a linux user, it’s exactly what i want.
IDK where you got me “thinking android was meh” It’s fucking awful. I said as much. I don’t understand why people keep bringing up market saturation like linux isn’t an enthusiast OS to begin with. It doesn’t need it, perhaps some day it’ll grow beyond that. But for the time being, there is no need for it to do so. It works perfectly fine as is. The only issue right now is app support, and UI compat.
Linux already has the apps you would need, all you need to do is port them, or make a fork. Most apps these days can be used on a web browser, which solves like 90% of everything significant. Literally just build it with arm compat and give it a mobile UI.
no idea what you’re trying to say about XZ, it got backdoored most likely as a result of state actors, and like you said, the dev being burnt out. That’s just part of the game when it comes to open source, unfortunately for that team that was working on it. That’s going to be a highly scrutinized path of action going forward, and much more difficult. Also it never lost it’s presence? That’s literally WHY it was backdoored. It was a prime target for being infiltrated due to basically every linux distro using XZ on a fundamental level, and basically every machine shipping it.
Discord. It’s extremely popular and has no direct alternatives (Matrix spaces thing isn’t ready at all yet)
EDIT: I didn’t know Revolt and Zulip existed. I’m doing a research on them now
I keep hearing people recommend signal messenger as an alternative to discord, and honestly that’s the most obvious sign you don’t actually use discord
Yeah signal is amazing for one to one or small groups, but not for what discord servers are used for.
But to be honest, many discord servers are used for things they really shouldn’t be used for… Like code documentation and bug tracking
Well some people use Discord as a messenger for some reason and for them Signal is probably the best but yea it’s not a Discord alternative at all
Matrix is also extremely complicated to sign up for. I tried getting some tech savvy friends to sign up for Matrix the other day. Even for someone tech-savvy it is waaaaaaaay too complicated. Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
Yeah…for many of these programs the onboarding is so daunting, even for those who are tech savvy. Laymen don’t stand a chance with something that is that complicated. It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
Oh 100%. The problem is that there’s a lack of UX designers and such in the Open Source community. There’s technical people building stuff but they often don’t know how to make a good user experience (or in some cases they don’t care to).
IDK why this always gets downvoted. UI/UX some of the biggest issues with FOSS software, and is a massive barrier to entry to someone who isn’t a massive computer nerd willing to put up with that shit.
I guess they take any criticism of open source as if you are against the whole movement. I don’t understand either.
personally when it comes to the onboarding im more on the side of “self host your own onboarding, for friends and family and shit, and then federate out from there if needed.”
Theoretically doing a clean onboarding shouldn’t be very difficult. More involved i suppose, but if you don’t have the time to figure out how a federated instance works, (or to properly document it) you shouldn’t be on the internet, you have more pressing matters to attend to.
@SorteKanin I’d like to see that. I have already onboarded about 35 students and my whole family to matrix, nobody had any problems with signup. Bigger problem is later if they get the infamous “Unable to decrypt message” error.
Yeah. I still don’t understand all the encryption stuff. I lost all my encrypted texts even after I used my recovery pass phrase on a new session.
There are instances that are not very hard to sign up for. The main issue with Matrix is instability and performance, especially when communicating with users/groups on different instances. It’s really not a great experience. And the inability to properly delete messages can be a big deal too
Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but think of it as an assurance that you’re not locked in with one app.
That said, I completely agree that Matrix and Element need to work on UX, particularly making it easy for new users to adopt it as well as verification/device switching.
Can’t relate. It’s not harder to get your hands on a matrix account in comparison to a mail account. And for those that want it even easier, just download Element and you are guided through the default registration at matrix.org
Honestly i never enjoyed discord It is messy and difficult to find information once its a few days old
Id much rather use a decent forum really
This is more of a hammer as a screwdriver problem, where everyone decided to use chat software as a forum.
almost every hobby has moved to facebook and it’s the same damn thing. utterly useless for the purpose people try to use it for.
i don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people, but this is definitely one of the pinnacles.
They want to use a single account for everything and have the most people possible.
That is it really. They don’t want to have to make 50 new accounts where every account has to deal with getting past the spam policies and filters only to find that their potential base is 1/10 of that on other platforms
That’s why reddit became the de-facto forum for many things also. 1 interface, 1 account, people can trace your account across different “forums” and it was searchable (on search engines, not shit reddit search).
There are currently a wave of people moving certain activities to Band of all fucking things (using it side by side with facebook due to facebook policies). It’s basically a shitty korean clone of facebook but slower and with less stability and even less features.
They could have picked ANY of the platforms actually designed for the intended purpose. But Band? It’s the OPPOSITE of useful.
People don’t make sense.
Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to Discord
The privacy policy of their app’s captcha solution is horrendous so no thank you
Doesn’t seem that bad, when you go to log in it checks your IP, length of time on the site and mouse movements.
hCaptcha
This section has been adapted from hCaptcha’s documentation.
We use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (hereinafter “hCaptcha”) on our website. This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation (“IMI”). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behavior of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled.
When using the Revolt App, hCaptcha will only begin analysis when you:
Submit a login request. Submit a registration request. Submit a password reset / email resend request.For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Data processing is based on Art. 6(1)(f) of the GDPR (DSGVO): the website or mobile app operator has a legitimate interest in protecting its site from abusive automated crawling and spam. IMI acts as a “data processor” acting on behalf of its customers as defined under the GDPR, and a “service provider” for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For more information about hCaptcha and IMI’s privacy policy and terms of use, please visit the following links: https://hcaptcha.com/privacy/ and https://hcaptcha.com/terms.
The Revolt’s policy is not that bad. Look at the hCaptcha’s one
That’s the part of hCaptchas policy that’s relevant to Revolt.
For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Did you miss these parts or are they inapplicable?
How We Use Information We use the information we collect for the following purposes: To administer Integrator and Customer accounts and provide the Service. We use Personal Information in order to associate specific accounts with Integrators and Customers and to provide them the Service, to respond to requests or inquiries, to provide support or technical assistance, and to facilitate payments. To improve to Site and the Service. We use Analytics Information to improve our existing and develop new services and offerings and to customize existing and future product offerings. To derive market insights. We use Analytics Information to analyze the market and conduct business analyses related to the Site and our Services, and for other research purposes. To provide a market for Labeled Data. Our Service enables high volume data labeling and human review for machine learning systems as a service to website owners and companies who need help getting their data labeled. To that end, we disclose Labeled Data to our Customers interested in acquiring Labeled Data. To secure our services and systems. We use Analytics Information to secure our systems by identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities, and to otherwise protect the information we collect. For any legitimate business purpose, provided that the information is de-identified or aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
How We Share Information We share or disclose personal information in the following cases: Upon direct request from an Integrator to identify the fraud risk of a specific CAPTCHA challenge request or IP address, or otherwise where specific consent was given. With vendors we engage to provide essential aspects of the Sites and the Service, such as data storage, hosting, and Analytics, and only for those purposes. As necessary to comply with applicable law, including governmental requests, law enforcement requests, and otherwise to public and private entities in order to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of you, us, or others. With others for any legitimate business purpose, provided the information is de-identifiedor aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
Disclosure Regarding “Sales” of Personal Information under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not “sold” any Personal Information (as defined by the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any “sale” of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age (so they do sell information of people over 16). Disclosure Regarding “Sharing” for “Cross-Context Behavioral Advertising” under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not “shared” any Personal Information for “cross-context behavioral advertising” (as such terms are defined in the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any “sharing” of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age for “cross-context behavioral advertising”.
I based my assumptions on the parts in Revolts privacy policy, since reading the privacy policy of hCatpcha it alludes that each ‘vendor’ can select how much data they’d like to collect I assumed that Revolt only allowed them to collect IP, length of time on site and mouse movements. While they do sell information, they claim it to be anonymised and I contacted support to see how they did that for IP addresses.
Which is why I don’t really mind. The information they have of me is at most how my cursor moved, how long I took to Submit a login request, Submit a registration request, Submit a password reset / email resend request and an obfuscated IP. Seems OK to me.
https://zulip.com/ is likely your best alternative. It’s more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there
I recently ran into that very issue, leading to me downloading (one foss) third party clients for discord which are privacy focused. As long as discord is still the place to be I have to be there too, but I can certainly limit the data they can gather about me. I found
- goofcord for desktop (supports plugins too)
- aliucord for android
Perhaps they are an option for you too
I couldn’t get goofcord to work on Wayland but webcord works great
Especially with the upcoming implementation of ads. Really sucks that many communities and software support (who should have just had forums) are deeply embedded into it and will have to start from scratch and lose any and all helpful content. Its hard to see big communities moving to anything else anytime soon, even of there was a great Foss alternative. It would indeed be amazing to have one in the first place
I think what’s even worse than ads is many channels now require verification through a phone number if you want to write something. Not sure when that became a thing but I just recently ran into this roadblock and noped tf out.
I thought the Discord ads drama was an April Fools joke?
You had me for a second, lol. Unfortunately it is not an April fools joke :/ luckily for us though, the worse the application gets, the higher a chance a Foss alternative will emerge from a madlad who was sick of discord’s shit
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ads-discord-blocking-adguard.html
Adoption is always the main issue, as we can see here on the Fediverse. It’s crazy how even technically-inclined people flock to discord. So many 3d printing communities are on there, people who install custom debian distros on raspberry pis, solder wires, crimp connectors and assemble open source machines, still fall into the trap.
If you’re talking about voice channels specifically, then there is Mumble.
If you’re talking about chat rooms, old school solution is IRC and we have XMPP that works fine for most people.
Mumble needs a server, iirc
Edit to be more precise, it needs you to host a server of your own
I let you in on a secret: Discord also needs a server 🙃
… Ok I’ll let you have that ‘technical correct’ smug satisfaction, you bastard.
But for real, if you can’t / don’t want to host your own server, just use any server from hundreds of available servers.
Oh I’s been a while. My clan hosted our own mumble server, back in the day. Didn’t know there was a lot of public ones nowadays…
There are even services that give you free temporary servers. I don’t know why anyone would use that instead of just finding any server and use a free room if you just want to talk with friends, but well, it exists.
You go to a service like that, press a button, it generates you some random port number and password, then you connect to that server with mumble and become an admin of it. The server is temporary and gets automatically destroyed after some fixed period (usually something like 24 hours).
Also what I tried to do with my friends is run Yggdrasil and connect directly via IPv6 (so I run Yggdrasil and launch a mumble server, and all my friends enter my IPv6 address) and that works too, so no need to have public IPs or domain names to use Mumble anymore.
Yggdrasil is such a cool thing, loving it.
No I meant an app that looks similar and contains most of the features (servers specifically) so it’s easier for not tech savvy users to get into. Someone suggested Revolt but its privacy (as in sending the data to not privacy respecting third parties) is questionable so idk if I can consider it a good enough alternative
There is a project, but it’s really early in it’s development. It’s called Cabal. Has a nice desktop client, looks kinda like Discord. It’s p2p, so no server required. BUT AGAIN, VERY EARLY IN DEVELOPMENT.
Not something you should use, but look out for how the development is going.
There seem to be quite a few projects. It’s slowing the development down. It would be better if everyone focused on one. But peer to peer is interesting. I’m wondering how much disk space it will use a day if I’m in a group with like 100k people though
Something like Revolt could maybe be a replacement for discord
Lol
FOSS CAD softwares. I know FreeCAD exists but it’s very unintuitive compared to the proprietary ones. I am thankful that it exists but it’s a long way apart to become a household name like Blender.
I wish I could start writing one but I don’t have a clear picture of requirements to plan and start writing one. If anyone is expert in this field please link some research papers and guidelines for someone to start fresh.
Check out Ondsel. They’re working on improving FreeCAD and making the workflow not suck.
Still definitely a work in progress, but the dimension/constraint tools and 3D feature naming are already lightyears better in their version.
Thank you. I’ll check it out.
I think FreeCAD is still the best bet, it does.seem to be making a few strides recently. Topo naming and sketcher workbench are both getting updates. For me personally it’s definitely usable for personal projects. I want better FreeCAD rather than an alternative new thing.
Yeah I should look up some tutorials for it. I jumped in thinking I could figure it out after working with Creo, Solidworks and AutoCAD but I should have RTFM.
Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.
I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).
Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.
100%
I put together a list of open source CAD software a couple of years ago, but none of the options are quite there yet.
Most definitely - Especially for woodworking FreeCAD is horrible and inefficient - even a friend who has been a contributor takes longer for some things than I do in Fusion360 as an occasional user. As a maker I love the idea of FreeCAD and the implications it has for third world countries, the amateur maker scene,etc. But I hate it for what it is. Which is so sad.
I use FreeCAD for woodworking, and…yeah. It works, it has its limitations, and I figured I know some Python, maybe I can code up some tools for woodworking specific tasks that would speed the process up.
Almost none of FreeCAD is documented and what documentation exists is wrong. You can’t learn how to contribute to FreeCAD, you have to be born knowing how. It makes no goddamn sense. “You know the chamfer and fillet tools in the Part Design workbench? I want one that makes Rabbets” is a bigger R&D problem than the Manhattan Project.
My understanding is that there are long-term developers who have left, and new blood is starting to appear, which is why the next version is going to have a lot of improvements to the sketcher among other things.
I would love a FOSS version of Rhino3D.
softwares
Software, like traffic and sheep and e-mail, don’t get an S when talking about a lot.
Blender is not CAD software though, it’s 3D modelling software. They’re not quite the same thing, and they’re intended for (and excel at) different things.
I know. I’m just comparing the reputation and how polished they are wrt to each other. Given they have similar scopes with modeling and graphics and everything.
But they don’t really have similar scopes… One is for technical models, based on extruded 2D drawings, the other is for abstract 3D modelling. Sure in both if them the end product is a 3D model, but they’re achieved in vastly different ways with completely different skillsets and different use cases.
I think you’re missing their point, they weren’t saying that Blender is cad, it’s just a good comparison, as a successful piece of software in the the same broad, general category (3D modeling)
We want what Blender is to mesh modeling, rendering, etc, but for parametric cad, manufacturing, etc. Basically Fusion 360 but open source, without any of Autodesk’s bs. Ideally it would even work together with Blender for rendering.
The comment I originally commented on compared them as if they were similar tool, (before it was edited), which I simply pointed out it is not. It’s like saying a plane and a helicopter are the same, sure they both are able to lift off the ground, but the similarities kind of stop there.
Because the purpose/function of the software isn’t exactly the point of this particular discussion.
A lot of FOSS applications have what I’d call GIMP syndrome. The software is functional and powerful, but it’s got the UX of a urinary tract infection, and the developers seem to have an outright religious need to KEEP the software in a perfectly capable but unusable state. GIMP is the example of this behavior, the developers have outright said terribleness is their vision and it shall not be altered. So GIMP is the technically correct yet permanently non-valid answer to “What’s a FOSS alternative to Adobe Photoshop?”
Blender is one of the rare examples of a FOSS application that overcame GIMP syndrome. Blender is not only powerful and capable, but though a UI overhaul became decent to use as well. As a result it is seeing genuine adoption because it actually is the best answer to the question “what software will do this task?”
That’s what this thread right now is talking about, wishing that FreeCAD would similarly reach that level of “not just surprisingly okay for free software, but actually objectively good” that Blender has.
You’re right, not sure why all the down votes. I think people don’t get how big a difference 3d modeling is from technical drawings.
Plain banking apps for smartphones. Having those developed in the open would hopefully make it possible to have forks that work on rooted devices without hiding magisk and whatnot.
That would be awesome. I wish banks would also have standardized (or at least open) APIs so I could use FOSS financial software to pull my live purchase history and then categorize that and etc. I think some banks do this, but not very common in the US from what I can tell.
Yeah, if banks had open and standardised APIs we could all use the same FLOSS banking app — or choose from any of a bazillion FLOSS apps. Instead they’re going the authoritarian route and locking customers in with bloated black box, proprietary apps…
In Europe we have PSD2 but I dunno if it’s enough to create a full app
i learned about GNU Taler the other day from one of the OS communities
Sure, I guess. Not what I was after but it has potential in its own right.
I had to leave VirginMoney because the lady on the phone told me I needed an iPhone to reset my password (seriously) even after trying with three separate Android devices.
There’s no desktop functionality (mobile is king with them) and it amazed me that day I had to use the Current Account Switcher to go to an equally meh banking service.
Sorry state of affairs across all mobile apps to be honest and as seen by the prevalence of MDM and accessing data Vs doing the very same, on a desktop “PC”. Why the data is more precious on a mobile device to them is telling…
Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.
A decent language learning type app, like dulingo
I wish there were more Open Source games.
Just wanted to shout out https://osgameclones.com/. It has a pretty decent list of them and source ports.
You may have heard of them, but I love Shattered Pixel Dungeon and unCiv
I wish we had an opensource game store to sell or donate to opensource games.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 ```bash' cat "$0" echo '``` :::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"Recently discovered Veloren, maybe you haven’t heard of it
Veloren is great, there is also Mindustry and Shattered Pixel Dungeon to name a couple of high quality ones.
And Beyond All Reason if you like RTS games.
Perhaps not Foss, but definitely free (beer) , endless sky, available on steam
Looks like Endless Sky is under GPL license, so definitely FOSS
Regardless, it is well worth your time. Find the wormhole, steal alien tech, build a fleet, become invincible.
Naev is another good one. I made a post a few weeks ago on one of the ask Lemmy communities asking about favourite open source games. Lots of good stuff came out of that post. Here’s a link to it for your instance https://lemmy.world/post/13444739
There: https://mander.xyz/post/11076441
There was a post recently about people’s favourite open source games and it’s been a nice repository of games for me :)
I really liked how Id used to release their old engines as open source, but of course once they got bought out all that stopped. The biggest problem for OSS games is with assets though. There are a few decent open source engines now for a lot of types of games, but it’s a lot harder to find decent looking assets to make games. I wonder if stuff like stable diffusion might help with that going forward.
Spotify.
An open source music streaming service where I can financially support artists but where I’m not forced to put up with annoying advertisements (even when paying membership fees!), and which allows me to use whatever app I want to play the music I listen to. It is annoying AF that I need to switch between apps to listen to music because Spotify’s shitty native app is inferior in every possible way with the single exception of offering more content.
There seems like a lot of potential for an app like this with the mixture of decentralization/encryption/verification/blockchain/etc. Easily verify artists, get the artists paid with a determined currency or by merch and donations, have it federated or decentralized so artists have more control and a company can’t take percentages… I don’t know. There has to be something there. It seems possible and almost a necessity in the future for artists to make money and corporations to not enshittify each app that is released. For example, spotify adding features to try to be like TikTok, or recently they were trying to add “educational courses” to the app
my personal favorite is the one where the band or artist hosts their own site, and then you can just buy shit from it.
Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?
For desktop there’s ncspot, which is a Spotify TUI client written in Rust. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it does work well
I use Ymusic it is android, but shouldn’t be hard to run on Linux
I use spicetify just to get an improved shuffle function.
How does that fix the shuffling? I thought it was just a UI tweak.
I hate Spotify’s shuffling so I’m all ears
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly. Or if you like me, don’t really care, just finding a way to throw money at them, in their general direction sometimes works. Spotify actually works so little, that the only party that makes money, is the music publishers that spotify allows on their platform, the artists and spotify generally don’t make much money, or make very little money. Gotta love capitalism.
If you’re a music artist, please allow people to just give you money directly, in some way. It’ll incentivize people who don’t pay for it to send you a few dollary doos.
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly.
Wow, mind blown! I had no idea money could be used to buy things directly! /s
Seriously though, buying music from artists you already know is easy for artists that actually provide this as an option, but it doesn’t help when trying to find new artists and songs to listen to. Spotify is brilliant for discovering new content and can’t be replaced by ‘buying shit directly’.
i suppose that’s fair, but it’s not like spotify is the only service that has music on it. Personally i’ve been enjoying nabbing music that other people use in media that i consume, or just bumping across something that seems interesting on the net somewhere.
I’ve gone from liking like two albums from a certain band, to liking their entire discography, just because i’ve downloaded it. You can absolutely still find music, it just requires some effort, and it’s well placed effort i think.
grindr
Exactly. Like when can I be a foss hoe
A defederated grindr
Do you like your men like you like your software?
Photoshop.
And yeah, no, please, don’t come over and mention Gimp and Kryta and all the others. I get it, they’re cool for the stuff they do. They just aren’t the all in one package that Photoshop is or have as powerful tools specifically for photo editing. Photoshop would require a Blender-style major effort to replicate and Gimp just isn’t up to it. I wish it were. Photoshop is at the perfect intersection of being uniquely capable and walled off behind the single crappiest ecosystem in software.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
Well, counterpoint: Photoshop tries to be an “everything for everybody” app, and GIMP/Krita don’t need to compare to that, as little as any user needs all the features of Photoshop.
Nobody can avoid Photoshop
Call me nobody, then. I worked with the Adobe suite professionally for 15+ years, haven’t touched it for the past six. You won’t find a single 1:1 replacement. It’s just a matter of quitting and accepting the individual limits of different alternatives.
It’s a groupthink issue anyways. 3DSmax/Maya was the same for a long time, and “everyone” was saying Blender is not an alternative. And then some big companies switched to Blender and suddenly people stopped complaining about it. And while Blender did improve during that time, it did not improve so substantially that it really made all the difference.
It’s absolutely that, like the office admin workers who swear by Microsoft Office over open alternatives no matter how insidious Windows becomes. “I know this one tool and you will have to wring it from my cold dead hands”…
“I find your conditions… acceptable”
I agree that it depends on your use case. If you’re an artist or illustrator you can make do with a number of alternatives and just go elsewhere for photo editing, and if you’re just doing basic adjustments to photos rather than detailed edits you can figure it out as well.
Photohop is harder to bypass if you’re a jack-of-all-trades user mostly doing image editing but also dabbling in the other options from time to time. That’s not to say you can’t do it if you try, but it’s going to be less convenient and add friction to your workflow.
Yeah, Jack-of-all-trades here as well. For sure it’s less convenient to have to switch programs for different purposes but there is also the added convenience of not having to find pirated and cracked Adobe warez.
Based. Just curious, what do you use for vector editing software? (For Illustrator-type work)
Not much, honestly. Fortunately I was never very reliant on vector graphics.
Inkscape IMO never really matured to a working solution, certainly not comparable to Illustrator, but I know others have better experiences.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. You are just too familiar with Photoshop, so using anything else is hard and less efficient.
In photography there is this mantra about “the most important part is right behind the camera”. A good photographer is not a good Nikon user, or good Canon user. A good photographer can deliver decent pictures with a potato camera if needed.
Sure, a potato camera is less efficient for any work that an actual good one. So it’s good to invest in a good brand. But the point is: if you are not capable to make average results with a potato software, the problem is not in the software.
You know why the person themselves is the important part of this equation?
Because they know what tools to use for which purpose.
For example, GIMP is only now getting non-destructive editing through adjustment layers, which is such an indispensable feature for important projectsFor example, GIMP is only now getting non-destructive editing through adjustment layers, which is such an indispensable feature for important projects
it’s not like you could ever just copy layers or something. That’s never been a feature in gimp, not once.
I understand your point, but to act like that is the sole thing stopping people from using, is kinda silly. (idk maybe i’m wrong and adjustment layers are this incredible feature, with never before discovered productivity benefits or something, i’m assuming not though)
They make things so much easier, having to make copies of every layer every time just to keep the original in case you need to re-do something half an hour later is super annoying.
Especially if you do multiple different things with a layer. Do you really have the patience to make backuo copies of a layer after every little edit you apply to it?
And then let’s say step 2 of 5 didn’t turn out like you want. Backup copies or not, you still have to re-do everything from 2 to 5 because of GIMPs destructive nature as of right now
oh so it’s basically like a COW fs but for graphics editing? That’s pretty slick. I’m sure you could implement something fairly similar to that natively, though it would be a decent bit of work.
It’s going to be part of the 3.0 release, after what feels like an eternity. The 2.99 dev release has it already, I might try that
Actually, I’d much prefer a FOSS alternative of Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop.
I’d be happy if the Affinity suite worked on Linux :(
yeah, I’d totally pay for it.
Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.
It does seem like a hopeless situation sometimes. I used to be a graphic designer and honestly it is very difficult to switch to any other program that is cohesive. Especially with the addition of AI features in Photoshop (keyword, I know, but generative fill can be extremely helpful in some cases). The Affinity suite is barely even able to keep up, and they have employees that are paid. Cross-compatibility and file type standards are a massive issue too, let alone the functionality itself
Just like MS Office.
Exactly… easily replaceable but you have an endless whining of users that imagine they might somehow in the future need this one feature that office has but alternatives don’t.
That’s an increasingly small number, if only because now Google is in that market, too.
However, there is a second reason you need Office, and that’s compatibility. I don’t use Office for work normally, but I still have an Office account (which, annoyingly, is how you pay for Office now), because I have clients who want to work on their formats and it doesn’t make sense for me to work around compatibility and have an argument about it instead of just paying for the damn thing and working with whatever software other people want to work.
But if I was by myself and didn’t need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
But if I was by myself and didn’t need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
That’s my position as well. But there are certain features that I do require for work and other integrations with other MS products that you can’t get elsewhere.
As you said if one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows/Office licenses are “cheap” and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but for most people they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive FOSS-only experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things and dealing with small compatibility issues that simply work out of the box under MS for a minimal fee. For most people paying for MS and doing their job right away delivers a better ROI than going FOSS and then doing their job while dealing with the small details.
I object to that “work out of the box” comment. I have lost more work hours to OneDrive being terrible than to any single other technical reason. Office has at least as many quirks and inefficiencies as any of its alternatives.
It’s a bit of a standard and it doesn’t… not… work? So yeah, it’s the go-to you have to have as a fallback for things to not get annoying when you work with multiple other people outside your same organization on something. Alternatives are as good or better, though, especially if you consider commercial ones as well as FOSS ones.
But yeah, it’s priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Windows is a different story. Quirky and annoying yes, but not more so than the alternatives and definitely the standard for big chunks of things in ways that it’s not trivial to replace.
Also would be nice to have open source ecosystem with blender ,then open source pro level video editing like da vinci and open source photoshop.
Full on Transit app that works well. Most that do are closed sourced and the ones that are open do not work well. A traffic app would be good but that would be very resource intensive. So not holding my breath.
Software for the production of music and audio, like Ardour but for more platforms which more typical people could use more easily, plus plug-ins for that ecosystem. It’s a major sticking point how corporate that field is for me.
At least Reaper has Linux ports, better than nothing.
Live production stuff as well.
So much of the available “industry standard” software is fully proprietary and Apple only.
SnagIt!
Flameshot is great, but it lacks too many features I’ve come to depend on from SnagIt! and I would absolutely pay for a Linux port even if it isn’t FOSS
How about ShareX? I’ve been using that as a SnagIt alternative for a few years, but I was never a heavy SnagIt user though.
I haven’t tried that one, I’ll give it a shot
Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.
If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.
Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.
Yeah, I’m currently using an old version (2018!) Of AutoDesk sketchbook, since it seems like every other option tries to force me into a subscription or cloud service. I just want to take notes!
Have you heard of Rnote? It is only available for linux, windows and mac tho
I tried Saber (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.adilhanney.saber/) for a while with my fat fingers and it worked good enough for my use case, idk if it fits your needs
Try this. Still under active development, but I like it so far.
Yes yes yes 🙏 I swear I go around at least once or twice a month looking for this. I’m not sure if it is a huge technical feat to approach this type of program or not, but like you said there are tons of options for typing but I haven’t found even one that solely focuses on handwriting.
This is a totally wild card guess, but I imagine obsidian probably has a community hand writing extension
it’s also closed source.
You know, I always forget that
I don’t see anyone talking about it here but I’d dream of an open source alternative to AndroidTV/Apple Tv. Firstly because ATV is ultra-dependent on Google, and secondly because the interface is unclear and not really pretty.
Today I’ve switched to Apple TV, which is much better in terms of UX, but the OS is too closed and sideloading isn’t possible…
So I hope to see some sort of CalyxOS / LineageOS for Tv arrive one day!
