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?

  • Handles
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    547 months ago

    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.

    • poVoq
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      7 months ago

      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.

      • Handles
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        187 months ago

        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”…

      • Handles
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        57 months ago

        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.

    • KillingTimeItself
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      37 months ago

      this pretty much. Everytime i see people bitching about editors and editing, it’s almost always keybinds. Which is literally a skill issue. Or something will be organized slightly differently, also a skill issue. Or it’s feature set will be like, marginally different.

      It’s almost never something that’s going to stop you from doing what you wanted originally. Your visions change, your tools change, your ways adapt, it’s how the world works, it’s how we work. It’s how everything has always been.

    • MudMan
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      27 months ago

      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.

      • Handles
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        47 months ago

        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.