What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨VirusMaster3073@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

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

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Zonetrooper@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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”.

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- MrIamsosmrt@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I use solidworks for makers which is actually affordable for private use. I prefer paying $50 a year over having to deal with freecad and I dont even use CAD software that often.
  
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  - Zonetrooper@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’m in a similar boat right now - I use the Student Edition ($60-100 a year, depending on sales, locally installed vs. using the cloud-based 3Dexperience).
    
    It’s not a bad deal by any means, but I do wish I didn’t have to deal with annual reinstalls and perpetually worrying Dassault is going to decide to take it away.
    
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- TheFonz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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
  
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- Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - megrania@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Second this, I’ve tried TinkerCAD before and the whole Idea of CSG started to make sense, and then I found that OpenSCAD does something very similar, just with code … I find it very satisfying … I guess if you’re making highly asymmetrical, organic shapes, you might have some puzzles to solve … but I’m mostly making loudspeakers, so basically boxed with holes, and it’s not a huge problem.
    
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  - hagelslager@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Jocarnail@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  FreeCAD is getting better but it would really benefit for a big improvement in stability and UX
  
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clonedhuman@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- EnsignWashout@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  A manufacturer phone pre-installed with LineageOS would be awesome.
  
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  - ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Pixel + GrapheneOS is a dream.
    
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- megrania@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  My first ever smartphone (in 2015) was a BQ Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition that came with Ubuntu Phone pre-installed … a lightweight, 4.5" smartphone … there wasn’t much of an app ecosystem at the time but I didn’t miss it because up to that date I used a dumb phone, and the smartphone allowed me to do eMail and use a browser, which was enough for me.
  
  At some point I accidentially dropped it on a hard floor and it broke, and I was quite unhappy that the company didn’t continue that line :(
  
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- Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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jerkface@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The entire phone-based ecosystem.

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rodneylives@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

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vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Business Accounting software under FOSS is abysmal. Poor quality, poor documentation, poor functionality, limited locale support and limited local support.

CAM software under FOSS is limited to three axis at best, but most is two and a half axis.

Office functionality is covered with LibreOffice. Your assertion that it’s 20 years behind is in my experience not based in fact.

Source: I’ve been using FOSS for over a quarter of a century.

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- jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’ve been using Plain Text Accounting for the past two years and have mostly enjoyed my experience. I’ve found hledger both well documented and well supported. I don’t know the space very well, so which applications and/or packages have you tried?
  
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  - vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.
    
    All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business.
    
    Even if I did that, I’d have no way to validate the processes, short of becoming an accountant.
    
    GNUcash, held up as an example by anyone you ask has no documentation for importing data, has no sample company datasets, has no Business Activity Statement, continues to prefer using an XML file as a database and is unreadable on a 4k monitor.
    
    Kmymoney is fine for home users, but specifically not for business.
    
    Odoo, Adiempere, ERPnext and the six or so other ERP tools have poor or non existent documentation, same issues as GNUcash in relation to data and import, and have a poor track record in solving basic issues that are completely unacceptable in a business setting. For example ERPnext didn’t do currency fractions properly (ERPnext uses Centavo instead of Cent for the USD fraction: github.com/frappe/frappe/issues/13445, took 13 months to fix).
    
    Last week I evaluated Apache OFbiz. It looks like a product from 1995, and trying to find anything is impossible. For shits and giggles, try setting the global date format to yyyy-mm-dd. There are three different repositories and the Docker installation instructions don’t even bother to include which one to clone in which order. It starts at: “run the docker build command”. Not to mention that it uses a database called Derby. I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.
    
    I could go on, I’ve tested dozens. This is just from memory.
    
    Why did I test all these?
    
    Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.
    
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- tonyn@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Came here to say this. I hate paying for QuickBooks while giving them access to my business finances…
  
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Varyk@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
huh, i much prefer libreoffice to msoffice, i can’t even think of a reason why anyone could prefer msoffice.

Im a but gobsmacked at the notion.

what do you use the drawing for?

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- VirusMaster3073@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Stuff like this
  
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  - Varyk@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    memeoffice.
    
    didn’t think msoffice would be the easiest platform to build memes/diagrams on.
    
    I actually didn’t even know office could build something that complicated.
    
    thanks
    
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- DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The only thing I can think of that Word does better, is making equations. LibreOffice works ok, but it’s more clunky. I still use it over Word because it runs much faster on my PC
  
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InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Tax filing software

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- muldyret@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This seems like asking for faster horses. Your taxes should just be filed for you, then you can verify it, no?
  
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- r0ertel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  For excel stuff, 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.
  
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SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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cubeofcheese@mstdn.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
@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
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- RouxBru@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Reaper is awesome. It is dirt cheap. Also runs on linux. But then you have the VST issue
  
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  - cubeofcheese@mstdn.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    @RouxBru oh VSTs don't work on Linux?
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- y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Give reaper a shot. I honestly don’t know if it’s FOSS but it runs in donations and is pretty good imo
  
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- megrania@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hmm I think the issue is that Ardour is more focused on recording than electronic music production … There’s more intuitive DAWs out there but I suppose in terms of what it can do it doesn’t have to stand back … compared to ProTools I’d say it’s still quite intuitive (not a high bar for sure).
  
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- kionay@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Maven@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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- TheFonz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’m curious how DaVinci resolve’s fusion page compares?
  
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AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- Bacano@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This sounds dreamy
  
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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This will never happen. The problem with decentralized stuff is that anyone can put anything, so piracy will be omnipresent there, why would you pay for a game when the seller next store is giving it away for free (or much cheaper), and how would you distinguish between “EA” selling the Sims 1 there and “TheRealEA” selling the Sims 1 there for the same price. Also decentralized card information is a bad idea, so you would either need a centralized paying hub, setup your card with every seller, or only be able to use crypto to pay, all of those are bad in their own way. But it’s a nice dream
  
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  - AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    This will never happen.
    
    15 or so years ago people were saying the same thing about decentralized social media. Yet here we are.
    
    The problem with decentralized stuff is that anyone can put anything, so piracy will be omnipresent there
    
    This isn’t unique to decentralized platforms. Piracy is omnipresent. Yet people still buy stuff. But to address your question more concretely, imagine the store system is designed to be federated. Any instance owner can decide to what degree they would enforce anti-piracy measures. DMCA law requires a good faith effort on the part of a site owner to stop piracy, so any instance owner who wants to run a legitimate shop must properly vet game submissions to make sure they aren’t infringing copyright, and aren’t plagiarizing. They would also have to defederate from all pirate instances, but they would not be responsible for instances that have nothing to do with their own. People who choose to use the instances for piracy would be off on the margins of the internet, just like they are now.
    
    why would you pay for a game when the seller next store is giving it away for free (or much cheaper)
    
    Good question, since you already have that option for virtually all games, why do you pay for them? My reasons are because I generally do want to support the creators I like, as well as because a lot of pirated content is questionable in quality (ie., potential malware). Why do people pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when they can get the same OS for free, even legally? Continuing support in that case. Point is, people buy because they believe the value of buying is greater than what’s available for free, whatever reasons those might be.
    
    and how would you distinguish between “EA” selling the Sims 1 there and “TheRealEA” selling the Sims 1 there for the same price.
    
    I dunno dude, how do we do this now? A stupid checkmark? There’s gotta be better ways than a stupid checkmark. PGP signatures would probably be a good start. Maybe incorporate a web of trust implementation? How does Valve do it? I’m not an expert on the subject, here’s a Wikipedia page about the topic.
    
    Also decentralized card information is a bad idea, so you would either need a centralized paying hub, setup your card with every seller, or only be able to use crypto to pay, all of those are bad in their own way.
    
    Yeah, let that be a problem for the person who wants to decentralize payment systems. A more practical solution? Just include the popular payment methods that already exist. Except crypto currencies, that shit can fuck off.
    
    You gave all these explanations for why a decentralized game shop couldn’t work, but all of them are not only not especially hard to solve for such a platform, but are also just common challenges for all of the internet. It’s like the 90s all over again when people insisted that open-source software itself couldn’t work. Yet, again, here we are.
    
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scheep@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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)
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ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I heard www.onlyoffice.com is good, but have no personal experience.

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- Little8Lost@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I have tested power point & word of only office. Its nicer to use than what libre office offers, has more effects than word but the thing thats missing is moving objects around.
  
  I think its a solid replacement for word, not entirely feature complete but in exchange some nice features.
  
  It has pricing whick can be an instant no but i think the pricing is fair for what is offered (especcially when compared to word)
  
  but i think some program like calc/excel is missing so you have to get another program!
  but i think what other libre programs offer there is nice so no real problem
  
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- Agility0971@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Isnt it unmaintaned?
  
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  - Little8Lost@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    no
    At least not as far as i know
    onlyoffice.com/…/onlyoffice-docs-8-3-released
    But closed source i think
    
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zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
MS Onenote. Nothing comes close to it. With stylus support etc…

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- ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  obsidian.md github.com/FBarrca/obsidian-handwritten-notes
  
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  - zzffyfajzkzhnsweqm@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I will check it out
    
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wjrii@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD on Win.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)

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Glitterkoe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Hmm, LibreOffice may not be the prettiest, but it works. For my own documents and presentations I use Typst nowadays. That’s a blazing fast modern typesetting alternative to LaTeX. That being said, I can’t stand WYSIWIG stuff but that might not be everybody’s cup of tea.

I mostly run into stubborn manufacturers like Roland that only release their musical instrument companion apps for Mac/Win and leave Linux Digital Audio Workstations hanging.

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Hawke@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m with you on the “FOSS office alternatives are shit”, but unfortunately MS office is also shit. Google is the closest I have found to a good office suite but even that is becoming a bit chaotic and awkward. LyX is a promising word processor but also pretty awkward to use in its own way. I’ve got nothing, there.

As far as gaming, this sound less kind than intended but you deserve any shit you get for saying Linux gaming is bad these days. Apart from a few AAA games with anti-cheat where the devs just don’t want to, basically every game just works without any extra effort. Even obscure indie games. I can’t think of the last game I wanted to play that didn’t run on Linux, and often it is better under proton than Windows or native.

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- pfjarschel@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I made the jump recently, and although there are clear issues, I don’t see any reason to use windows as my primary gaming OS anymore. Some games still require some fiddling with proton versions, extra command line arguments, environment variables, etc. That is bad for the average user that just wants to click play and play. Also, I noticed that at least on my setup (alienware laptop with nvidia gpu), some games have clear performance issues compared to windows, mainly some UE games. But it’s not so bad to make me want to boot windows again.
  
  And just some extra two cents: I’m still keeping a windows partition for those games that simply cannot run on linux, and it’s possible to keep your main library on the linux partition (I’m using btreefs) and use that same library on windows. You just have to install a driver on windows, and it works beautifully. Haven’t had any issues so far.
  
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joshchandra@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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?!
    
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  - reptar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    ImageJ is great for stuff like that. Fiji is probably a better route for less fuss (Fiji Is Just ImageJ, plus some popular plugins)
    
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Nomad@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Project management. There is one very good but old solution, open project is barely bearable.

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JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The only one I really miss is an NFC payments app, but a local LLM for Android that’s FOSS would be cool too - PocketPal is free, but not open source or on F-Droid.

Also LibreOffice for desktop is great, but on mobile there aren’t any easy to use ones in the same way Google Docs is, I’ve tried LibreOffice for Android and Collabora

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- brokenlcd@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  For local llm i think maid should do the trick, never really tried it though, my phone is way too weak to hold that up
  
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- theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Pretty sure I’ve seen folk run a terminal emulator and ollama on android
  
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  - JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I meant a more graphical way, but yes, that would work
    
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Inucune@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Obd2 software so I can diagnose and repair my car. This is more than a dtc scanner, I need to be able to trend values and flash/program modules without a $15k tablet with $50k of yearly software.

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EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don’t come close

I really only use Word and Excel, and I find the FOSS alternatives just fine. I can understand if power-users might find the newer features worthwhile, but for basic word processing and spreadsheets the FOSS options are good enough.

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expr@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.
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Cheskaz@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.
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megrania@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as “an alternative”. I’m really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.

Luckily I’m not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.

There’s also many things that proprietary software just can’t do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) … MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me event though I used it daily for a long time …

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umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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Demonmariner@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Microsoft Access. I have one database that I need that’s written in Access, and although I suppose I could convert it to some other system it would be a chore and I’m not that driven to make the change.

I’ve moved almost everything else onto Linux.

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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Microsoft Exchange/outlook. It’s such a good email platform, not just because of legacy email/smtp, but all of the other collaborative features that show up in Outlook.

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