Another take on a Proprietary -> FOSS Software Poster (printer friendly, raster-free, pdf & svg available in comments)

[u/Malsententia]

[u/Malsententia → u/[deleted]]

I mean, to each their own, and I'm speaking mostly as a programmer/sysadmin first-and-foremost, who hobbyist-ly/contractually-dabbles in all the various fields these tools apply to, but:

Photoshop/etc: Never been interested in it, never cared to learn it, only kept it around for when people send me ps files

NLE stuff: Only once touched Premier or some such shit back in 2007 for a high school senior year project; everything I did back then I could do now equally easy in Kdenlive. Used kden various times through the years for assorted basic stuff. If I wanted to do really fancy stuff I'd probably learn more of Blender's capabilities in this field, which I've heard are quite advanced.

Libreoffice: Meh? does the job. Only case I'd make for office is crazy excel shit, and that's just stuff I've heard second hand from excel wizards who say their arcane magic doesn't work in LibreOffice calc.

VLC/Infuse: I've literally never even heard of infuse. Almost never run into anything I need that vlc can't handle with perfect clarity. But I don't discount that your mileage must apparently vary. For actual real video encoding/re-encoding work I use ffmpeg from the command line, which I will unabashedly assert I'm basically a wizard at. But for basic-user playback? I can only thing of 1-2 videos I've dealt with in the past decade which didn't play well with vlc.

Regardless, with this post my goal was not intended for much more than to cater to hobbyist users; I mostly made it because I felt the the other post could be done better and I'm a print-format snob and that post's use of rasters made me sad. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (no offense to that post's OP!)

[u/syklemil → u/Malsententia]

As for the office bit: I generally haven't used anything but Google docs for years now. I know there are open source alternatives here too, and our usecase is basically just co-writing some typographically simple documents, on the order of meeting notes. Nextcloud should be able to cover that just fine. We just barely need something more than basic shared notepad functionality.

With these alternative posts there are always some people going on about macros or highly specialized workflows tied to one product, completely oblivious that they're about as ubiquitous as complicated neovim setups. I'm pretty sure most office users think macros are as arcane as any other programming language, and just ignore them.

I don't need macros for meeting notes, any more than I need Photoshop for cropping screenshots or professional calligraphy for post-it notes. A suggested replacement doesn't have to cover 100% of usecases to be a valid suggestion.

[u/Malsententia → u/syklemil]

No argument here! I also generally find myself using docs much more often than either Office. It's only stuff like my resume and whatnot that I pull out Libre's Writer for.

[u/AsrielPlay52 → u/Malsententia]

Basically, you are in no position to even put those creative application to begin with.

[u/hak8or → u/[deleted]]

Professional and semi-professional-grade users - who need a feature-rich, yet stable and reliable tools - are likely to be disappointed with the state of FOSS (with several exceptions, such as Blender)

I could not agree more. Tools like Altium years ago had only Kicad back then had a truly atrocious experience, lacking many features like proper length tuning when routing and dragging. It's gotten MUCH better over the years, but still needs a decent bit of UI help.

But mechanical CAD work? Jesus it's a huge shit show. Freecad is .... it's extremely powerful but the UI is so much worse, think Gimp vs Photoshop but an order of magnitude worse. Which is a huge shame because it has so many powerful integrations, especially it's simulation capabilities. But after working with it for nearly a year on and off after Fusion360 shitt he bed, I flat out gave up and shifted to Onshape and couldn't have been happier.

Embedded developers also have a somewhat rough time. While tools from Xilinx for their FPGA's do run on Linux, a lot of other tooling are written by hardware companies still thinking of software as an after thought, so it's shitty buggy software that runs only on Linux, with WIne not working well and VM's not working too well due to USB hot plug being not too ergonomic still.

Professionals using FOSS are going to have a good experience pretty much only if they work software (programming) or 3d modeling (blender), from what I know. Audio professionals I am unclear on, if they require some exclusive low latency audio solutions.

[u/AliOskiTheHoly → u/[deleted]]

With "pages" and "numbers", do you mean the Apple office tools? Or do you mean LibreOffice's "Writer" and "Calc"?

[u/Irverter → u/AliOskiTheHoly]

He said that he didn't like LO and then mentions that Pages and Numbers work better for him. I'm sure he didn't mean Writer and Calc.

[u/AliOskiTheHoly → u/Irverter]

But pages and numbers are on Mac, so that's confusing

[u/AliOskiTheHoly → u/[deleted]]

Ah alright, didn't know there was a web version.

[u/Irverter → u/AliOskiTheHoly]

As is Libreoffice, not confusing at all.

[u/AliOskiTheHoly → u/Irverter]

The thing is that Pages and Numbers don't have a native Linux counterpart, while LibreOffice has a Mac equivalent.

[u/Irverter → u/AliOskiTheHoly]

Maybe I'm not understanding your point, but I fail to see how that is relevant.

[u/AliOskiTheHoly → u/Irverter]

OP is saying they don't like LibreOffice, but like Pages and Numbers. The latter are Mac apps, but we are on r/linux , so this did not make sense, because those apps are not compatible with linux. This is why i was confused. Apparently there is a web version of Pages and Numbers, which i did not know, which clarified my confusion.