A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
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 Microsoftβs best efforts.
OpenOffice is dead.
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.
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.
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.
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
Photoshop is easier to use than gimp. I donβt 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.
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!
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I canβt work without and continue to pay for. Iβd love to find a pure OSS alternative, but thereβs nothing else like it.
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.
MacOS instead of some Linux distro. Mostly because of the hardware that comes with it, making a neat integrated product.
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...
Affinity is the best non Adobe image editing suite. The Foss stuff just doesn't compare, imo. Even if feature parity, the UI of Foss image editing softwares is hotshit.
FL studio is beating out LMMS. However, I pirate FL, so it's still free to me.
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.
Visual studio code. There's nothing else that's anywhere near as good that doesn't cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don't do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can't remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.
Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.
TIL Obsidian isn't FOSS!
Photoshop, Fences, Plex, Steam, Unraid. I just highly prefer them to any alternatives I have tried. And believe me, I have tried every alternative to Photoshop and Fences that I could find. They just don't do it. And because of those two in particular, I have to add Windows to the list.
Oh, and I guess Sync for Lemmy. The only reason I even know what Lemmy is, is the fact that the Sync for Reddit app stopped working and basically said, "Yeah, move to Lemmy, idiot."
This will get me loads of downvotes, but Windows 10 Mail and Calendar (not Outlook) is simple yet works flawlessly and is miles ahead of Thunderbird by usability, stability and user-friendliness. On the other hand though, Ubuntu Evolution is even better and is open-source.
Lightroom. There are lots of alternatives for editing some even FOSS but I haven't found any usable alternative to the library of Lightroom...
DaVinci Resolve.
There is simply nothing that even come close.
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.
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.
Tbh just normal YouTube + Premium is great and feels reasonable value to me.
TickTick is a better reminders app than anything FOSS ive tried
I really care about my privacy. But I just can't break from SwiftKey keyboard. It's just so good. It's really unfortunate that it's owned by Microsoft.
Nearly all video games, and by extension where i get them - Steam. Open source gaming is simply not an option. One can - and i do - stay away from the big annoying AAA companies most of which of just subsidiaries of yet bigger annoyinger tech companies, and Valve is actually pretty decent about open source, but one cannot simply game without proprietary software.
Discord and WhatsApp. Literally everyone i know uses one of them.
For me at least i have no problems with the UI, functionality, etc, of these apps' foss equivalents but the main problem is the userbase. You cannot have a messaging app with no people to talk with and you cannot and a game store with no games to play. You can have the best design and software ever but that won't do shit without the established legacy and publicity of a big company.
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.
OSM over HERE/Apple/Google maps. It has much much better mapping of footpaths, which makes it much more useful for planning runs/walks/hikes.
Join our community: !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml
Also, you answered the question backwards, but I don't mind XD
For me personally there is no open source calculator on android that even comes close to Hiper Calc Pro. Having actual expressions and physical constants makes things so much easier and makes the app better than most physical scientific calculators.
Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.
My operating system.
It's not that I prefer it per se, rather I have better things to do then e.g. spend 2 hours messing with my font rendering to end up with a result half as good as Windows is out of the box.
Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it's modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn't like it either (but then, I also didn't really like Illustrator all that much, it's really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don't have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode ("persona") that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn't want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it's truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.
Microsoft Excel - I tried a lot of the FOSS office suites but I always come back mainly due to familiarity but also compatibility (which I know is not much of an issue lately).
Google Photos - I have Immich setup and use it but my wife and people around me use Photos and so I have to conform.
"Pixel OS" - I can't move to Graphene or similar due to banking apps.
Skype - Like Photos, due to relatives
FL Studio. I've been using it since the late 90s. I know it like the back of my hand.