A big one for me is Microsoft office (desktop), Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don’t come close, and feature wise are 20 years behind. Especially since I basically mastered MS office 2007+'s drawing features, which the FOSS alternatives don’t replicate very well.
And of course Microsoft loves to push Office 365. I don’t pay for that and just use desktop office, but Microsoft prefers you don’t know that you can do this.
And I’m going to get shit on by Lemmy big time for this but while Linux is great and has made vast improvements in recent years, I still use Windows, not only because of MS office, but because a lot of games tend to only support Windows. I know that wine and proton exist but they’re not perfect and don’t feel quite the same as running native.
I wish an operating system existed with a hybridized Linux and clone NT kernel (using code from FOSS Wine and ReactOS of course) so that the numerous back catalog of NT software can run similar to as intended while also interacting with Linux programs better and using a shared environment. Since it would probably become vulnerable to viruses for windows as well, maybe? (my programming knowledge is extremely rusty) an antivirus similar to Windows defender is bundled with the operating system. Hopefully if someone makes such an operating system it can be a Windows killer and would switch immediately
https://www.visidata.org/ is way, way, way, way better than excel and it’s FOSS.
As for the rest:
- I don’t really miss Word because WYSIWYG editing is just kinda bad across the board. Much better to write with markup rather than fighting an auto-formatter all the time.
- I thankfully have not needed to make much of any PowerPoints, but I think I would probably feel similarly about them and want them in some kind of markup language as well.
- Teams just sucks ass compared to many other alternatives, though I’m admittedly not familiar with good FOSS ones
- Outlook is basically just a dinosaur and there’s a million ways to do email better. Frankly, FOSS has it beat by a huge margin
The rest of Office isn’t really even worth talking about tbh.
I’m not sure I follow. LibreOffice is at least as good (if not better) than Offics365 unless maybe if you’re doing advanced shit in Excel, or need specifically coded macros.
Considering Microsoft’s push to make everything into a webwrapped application, I think LibreOffice is only going to be a better and better alternative as time moves on.
For excel stuff, https://www.visidata.org/ is way, way better than excel assuming the data is tabular (which, frankly, it should be anyway). Like it’s not even close.
I mean LO is pretty good, but it is a bit rough to find what you want. At a min its more difficult to format your sheets in LO.
@VirusMaster3073 music DAWs. I think the only real option is Ardour, but I tried it and was struggling to just figure out how to create a couple instrument tracks. Could be skill issue, but honestly I’m pretty good at figuring out UIs so if I was struggling a lot with the basics, it’s probably not just me. So I’m still on garageband for now which doesn’t get in my way when I’m trying to make music
Give reaper a shot. I honestly don’t know if it’s FOSS but it runs in donations and is pretty good imo
Totally agree. The DAW space is depressingly neglected as FOSS and I can’t imagine why. 15 years ago I was certain there would one day be a FOSS DAW that had the same love put into it as Blender.
I’d like to see an open-source decentralized game store, like a competitor to Steam, GOG, etc. However, I think it should also target emulators. There’s still an unfounded stigma toward emulation even though emulators themselves are legal, and even though the big AAA game companies themselves are now using them as a lazy way to repackage and resell their old games on new platforms.
One of the biggest barriers to entry into emulation is the setup. Even with super user-friendly frontends like Emulation Station, people are still required to either go out of their way to either legally backup the games they already own, or told to “do some searches,” because of legal issues. Nevermind how this exposes new users to potential malware.
But people still make new games for these old systems. It’s entirely possible to make a store that can sell ROMs legally - one already exists, itch.io. But imagine a federated open-source game store, one where game makers can choose to legally sell their own games, and then create plugins for the emulation frontends to allow people to buy roms directly from those interfaces. It would turn emulation into a fully complete console-like experience, all while being available on more platforms than any console could ever hope to be (including those same consoles when they’re jailbroken!)
I also think it would be the final puzzle piece that legitimizes emulation.
This sounds dreamy
The entire phone-based ecosystem.
Adobe After Effects!! PLEASE DEAR GOD
This is the singular thing still keeping me using Adobe software. If this was replaced then I could be FREEE
I’m curious how DaVinci resolve’s fusion page compares?
I can’t answer that, but the reason I’m typing this from Windows is that getting DiVinci to reliably work in linux has been a pain in my ass.
MS Office isn’t better than LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, they all do the same task of making docs, spreadsheets, and presentations with very similar UI. It’s a no brainer to use the one that doesn’t bug you to use OneDrive.
Linux gaming has come a long way, especially with the introduction of things like Proton and popularisation of it by the Steam Deck. If you can play games on the Steam Deck, those games run on Linux :D
The main reasons (mind you, not only reasons) why people don’t just switch to Linux is:
- it’s different (humans naturally gravitate towards things they are familiar with)
- partly because Linux has a few things that are unintuitive to the average user (e.g. using terminal), but distros like Mint have mostly solved this issue
- Switching itself is really annoying (I would say I’m in this boat, but I’ve installed Linux on my old computers and will definitely do it again if I ever get a new computer)
Xodo pdf annotator
It seems all pdf annotators are allergic to letting me have
- The ability to change the text I’ve highlighted without deleting the entire highlight
- Several different highlighter colours and opacities
They seem like really silly requirements, but they make a huge difference to how long it takes me to get through my readings for class.
I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?
I have still quite literally found no other tool, even paid products, that can interior-crop the way IrfanView can (select row/column Y in XYZ if the entire image was XYZ, and crop out that inner part and auto-tuck X and Z directly against each other). And it’s had this feature for decades, I think.
Not exactly the same, but similar: when working with sprites for games, I often run into situations where I realize way too late that I need the size of each frame to be slightly larger than what I had been working with it. You’d think that having the ability to resize an image by adding extra padding to each individual frame would be a pretty common feature in image editing software these days, but nope. I ended up writing a small tool specifically for that just so I wouldn’t have to adjust frame by frame ever again.
The thing that used to always piss me off was when you tried to upscale stuff in Photoshop and it looked perfect. Then you bit enter and it anti-aliases the absolute fuck out of it. Like what?!
ImageJ is great for stuff like that. Fiji is probably a better route for less fuss (Fiji Is Just ImageJ, plus some popular plugins)
Tax filing software
It’s the only reason I keep a windows VM around. Windows is getting so naggy though. Every time I boot it up, it wants me to update it, install virus scanner and ser up my user on microsoft vs local.
One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it’s the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it’s kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn’t see constant refinement either. It doesn’t even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don’t want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It’s like a welding torch without any eye protection.
I’m using ACDSee on Windows, because it’s operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it’s faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn’t it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you’d think photographers would have pointed this out), but it’s just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.
Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.
I have to ask you about metadata nerd status…
I have a bunch of exported Google Photos and icloud Photos… photos… what’s the best way to fix the metadata as the “date taken” keeps using export date.
That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.
So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.
Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.
With all the political shit going on these days, it baffles me why companies continue to use anything that stores data in cloud servers owned by American companies. I don’t care where the data centres actually are, the parent company is foreign and aside from “trust me bro” I’m not sure what else is preventing them from snooping sensitive information.
3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.
Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.
You beat me to it. The moment someone makes a FOSS cad program where the ui doesn’t suck a donkeys ball they will be the goat
I grew up learning organic modeling in blender and ever since I got a 3D printer, it’s just been so easy to make things with it as opposed to learning CAD. I’m getting better thanks to OnShape and FreeCAD 1.0 but I keep finding myself going back to blender because “it just works” once you understand how to setup scaling and snapping for manipulating vertices. Basically just setup your world measurements to metric and scale it to 0.001 and then every unit will be 1mm (helps me work within the 250^3mm space of my print bed, mentally) and export as stl.
There’s even a 3D printer toolbox add on that lets you analyze and fix problems like manifold edges and additional mesh tools like manifold extrude that speed up the process for good quality parts. CAD’s biggest advantage is the non linear history editing which is super powerful but you can definitely do non-destructive editing in blender using modifiers that only get applied at export time so you even have a functional equivalent if you’re organized and plan ahead a little.
I guess what I’m saying is, blender is amazing software and absolutely capable as a workhorse for 3D printing. You’re right that the multi-digit costing proprietary software is leagues better for designing digital parts and assemblies but blender is extremely flexible and not just for the more artistic side of things, you can make extremely technical parts with blender.
I have been using OpenSCAD to make models for 3D-printing. I know this is a specific use case, and I have no experience with the “real” CAD software, but OpenSCAD makes sense to me as a programmer.
It’s really aimed at programmers, but for someone who is used to the better known proprietary versions (so with sketching and “shaping” with a mouse,), it’s barely useable.
I’d love to see a user-friendly, easily-implemented FOSS alternative to the entire Android system.
The options that exist now often can’t get past all the defenses that Android and phone manufacturers put into systems to secure their own data collection/revenue. I have an older Motorola phone that I literally can’t install another operating system on.
We desperately need a stable, user-friendly, and hardware-adaptive replacement for Android. I don’t want that shit on my phones any longer.
Its sort of a thing. Pine phones use open source linux. I think the main problem is development of apps to run on a linux phone isn’t popular so its pretty bare bones as a system. Havent used one myself though.
A manufacturer phone pre-installed with LineageOS would be awesome.
Pixel + GrapheneOS is a dream.
And they’re even working on releasing phones that come with GrapheneOS preinstalled
Ooh, neat.
Who is? Google? Do know if I’d be able to trust that
The GrapheneOS team is working on finding a suitable OEM that would be able to release flagship hardware with security comparable to a Pixel, and GrapheneOS preinstalled.
You might be interested in postmarketOS They try to mainline older Android devices. It works pretty well on the PinePhone, too.
As far as I understand, the hardware-adaptive part is difficult to implement because ARM systems do not have automatic hardware detection like x86/x64 PCs do, so the hardware list (tree) has to be known for each device, that hardware is mostly proprietary and requires proprietary drivers. All of which results in Android phones using different per-phone-model kernels.
