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.
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.
unfortunately “pretty good” is not “guaranteed”, which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.
I’ll still use the libreoffice options if i’m, say, already logged into my Linux install and don’t want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well… I just use it.
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.
Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.
I’m not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.
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?
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 don’t need office much but when I do, I hate that I can never find what I’m looking for in that stupid ribbon. I also don’t know any good MS Access alternative.
Disagree but collaboration is horrible. Online Office sucks too though, they dont even try. They want people to use Windows.
Oh yeah 365 online simultaneous “collaboration” is absolutely useless. If I really need multiple people inside the same document I’ll use Google docs and then export it to finish off the formatting.
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.
There are many non-technical people in the world of mathematics and they manage to use LaTeX just fine. Overleaf offers synchronization without needing to touch Git.
Git diff will look pretty terrible for docx or similar files. The thing with the builtin change tracking is that it’ll actually show you what changed in the document view
Imo using a text based tool for presentations is really counterproductive because presentations should use as little text as possible.
For me currently, libreoffice impress is actually the best option because it has all the necessary features (wysiwyg style editing, svg support, latex equations, some animations).
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.
Well yeah I was answering for me though, not the whole internet.
Gimp has a work flow that I can’t get into, photoshop clicks better. For you, it could be the opposite and that’s great.
I’m not selling photoshop, I don’t even use either anymore. It would be stupid not to try to make gimp work for you first.
Depends if you learn gimp or PS first.
Like if you start life with Linux, windows seems weird
They aim to introduce that in version 3.0, which they say will be a complete overhaul of the app.
Non-destructive editing through live adjustment layers is definitely the single most useful feature any editing software can have.
That alone makes life so much easier.
If you’re talking about general ergonomy (as opposed to functionality), you may find Affinity Photo to be a breath of fresh air. It’s close to Ps (on purpose) but it is so much better thought out, the way you interact with your documents. Really worth trying
Same with Inkscape vs Affinity Designer.
I really wanted Inkscape to work for me, though I was constantly fighting the UI and some weird artifacting Inkscape produced exporting SVG files.
Affinity Designer was, and still is, especially since their licenses are perpetual/non-subscription, well worth the price and is a dream to use.
Darktable is pretty much a Lightroom replica in terms of the workflow. Its main issue is that Darktable reacts to slider changes in an unpredictable way. Small value differences lead to overblown changes to the image. Fine tuning the result is near impossible.
Does it have a good panorama sticker or HDR merger? Those are the tools I absolutely need from Lightroom
How does Rawtherapee compare to that? Many people seem to prefer it over Darktable
Consider Photoshop Elements for a similar UI and one time payment to use forever.
Steam. The support they have for multiplatform almost feels open source and they have been invaluable for the adoption of desktop Linux
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!
It’s fucking open source??? Does that me we can build from source to have it for free?
I have the last version you can use free forever (and I’m the reason they fixed it, by the way)
The underlying intelliJ platform is, not the entire IDE. I did edit the post though, as I realized not all of them are built on that platform.
If you are working on open source, you can still grab free licenses. You just have to renew them each year (completely free, just requires proof of FOSS contribution)
are there any good open source alternatives for VSCode for people that don’t want to learn emacs/vim? I’ve been looking for a good code editor to replace it but I haven’t been impressed elsewhere
But to be fair, the plugin capabilities for VS code are incredible. Of course its a lot more work but you can pretty much replicate the VS experience
That’s a bit of a silly statement. Once you’ve installed a few extensions for your language (a language server and linting at minimum), it is effectively an IDE with a reasonably powerful debugger included. Just because it’s modular and not “batteries included” doesn’t make it incomparable.
The most recent one is, of course, Sync for Lemmy. It may just be muscle memory at this point, but I find the experience a step improvement in browsing.
On my home server front, I would mention Plex despite Jellyfin’s massive improvements over the past 2 years. Plexamp is just a magical piece of software.
For the most part, though, I think I’d reverse the question. Most of the time, I prefer OSS.
Try reiverr, its a jellyfin ui made by a lemmy user that integrates with the arr suite and tvmd so you can easily find new things to watch https://github.com/aleksilassila/reiverr
I agree about Plex. But I don’t get the love for Sync.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks some features many of the other apps have. Personally, I’m liking Thunder right now, but I’m excited for Boost to come out.
Sync has ads unless you pay, it’s not open source, and I haven’t actually found anything superior about it.
It feels kind of clunky and it lacks features many of the other apps have.
Care to mention some? I’ve used Thunder but I find it unbearably ugly and not as visually customizable as Sync.
It’s missing some of the gesture customization others have. I particularly like the left AND right swipe gestures in Thunder. Plus, there are more actions you can assign to them.
Thunder also has more visual adjustments. Things like edge to edge images and post action customizations.
Also, the reply window makes formatting and quoting easier.
The feature different isn’t big though, and most of them aren’t a big deal.
I’m not sure why you think Thunder is ugly though. The way I have them setup, they look almost exactly the same, except I have nested comments in factors more visible on Thunder, which makes it a bit easier to track the conversation.
That’s funny because I switched off of plex to Jellyfin because of how bad the experience on plex was.
I love Jellyfin and mainly use it and recommend it where possible these days, but man, the download situation sucks. Hate having to download files without compressing them, especially since I keep my media lossless. Its the main reason I’ve still kept Plex running on my server. Also sometimes the clients can be wonky, I’ve found Jellyfin works best for me with Kodi as the player for most things, which is interesting. But overall I do like Jellyfin and support it and its mission, hopefully gets better in these aspects in time.
