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.
Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know about that.
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.
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 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.
Minecraft, but only because of the bigger playerbase and a better train mod (the train mod, however, is FOSS)
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!
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
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Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried
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.
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.
Honestly anything I can’t do easily in Google docs probably means I should just do it in Python anyway.
Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.
Did you check logseq? It’s on flathub
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?
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
I know a lot of effort has been put into usability for blender, but it’s still just so weird compared to any other desktop app.
Lightroom. There are lots of alternatives for editing some even FOSS but I haven’t found any usable alternative to the library of Lightroom…
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.
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!
Spotify. I’ve wanted to use Funkwhale since it’s self-hosted and federated but I couldn’t give up all that Spotify offers.
Took me a while but I’m happy with navidrome/symfonium/slskd/tailscale in place of spotify.
Could you expand a bit on how your setup works? I think I get the big picture, but not sure how tailscale fits into it.
Tailscale just so everything works out and about with minimal effort.
I have Navidrome on my pi4 streaming/transcoding to my Android with Symfonium.
Slskd runs on my pi and can be access via my phone browser.
Makes it simple to acress slsk anywhere, download flac and stream it right back as mp3.
Thanks!
