For me, it’s CAD software. FreeCAD is trash (sorry, lovers). Fusion360 is honestly the best out there for free. The “almost there” app is Shapr3D, but fuck $40/m.
And yes I’ve tried all the others not listed here.
Another mobile OS. Something that isn’t built entirely to exploit me.
I hear you. With Android turning into a closed OS like iOS later this year things are not looking very bright for people like me that uses alternative stores a lot.
Tell me about it. Like Linux Phone hurry up!
I miss the FirefoxOS concept. Ahead of its time. Basically ran PWAs for everything.
Theres always e/os, iodeos, grapheneos and other forks
I reccomend donating to postmarketos then. They do awsome work reverse engeeniering phones. Oneplus 6 is usable with pmos. Of course it has multiple problems but its nice seeing people make so much things for on old phones.
There are of course graphenos, calyxos, e/os/ of course. Unfortunatly the issue with every alternative os is that you need specific model of phone to even open bootloader.
Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.
Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that’ll stick.
Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.
I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.
So much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.
=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can
pd.to_excel()to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.Also duckdb. Realizing I could do
SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx'was a wondrous occasion
Yeah, excel really is hard to beat. Good one.
Re: email. Have you tried Port87?
Never heard of it.
Give it a try. :)
Anything closed where the update is “throw it away, buy the new model”. Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.
Do you work on industrial electrical? Kinda curious about your comment there. The company I work for implements new systems, some of the biggest in the US, but we do plenty of maintenance, refurbishing, tuning, etc on some very very old systems. I’ve seen working equipment that is from the dawn of the 20th century, still going fine. Maybe we come in and install a new VFD on them, or recently we did a system running 2 setups of 8k amps @ 480V for motors that had gone through a whole entire fire that was so bad the roof collapsed.
Maybe it’s just the sector I’m in, which is steel and aluminum mills, but I’ve seen industrial be the one that does not want change because it comes with a high price tag. The sales guys need to convince these places that they can’t keep running everything on electrical equipment from the 70s to 90s
I don’t know why I said industrial. Just old nerdy junk, like a digital embroidery machine that needs xp to load designs. A media player locked in a similar situation. My car is 12 years old, gimme the source to the janky is on the head unit. Abandoned firmwares.
Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.
Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?
photoshop cs6 was indeed great, it does run fairly well on wine tho
I have an issue with it that really makes it unusable: every input renders one frame behind. I make a gesture, I see most of the stroke, but not the last bit until I click again. I select and cut something? Doesn’t disappear until I give one more input. I zoom to a certain level, then click and it zooms the last little bit. It’s bizarre and makes it surprisingly unusable.
i did have some glitches and switched away from it to gimp eventually but your issue kinda seems different from mine. are you on x11 or wayland? if x11 are you running a compositor like picom?
I haven’t been able to get it working with winetricks, bottles or lutris. Any tips?
i haven’t ran it for some time, there were minor issues (iirc window autoraising glitches?) with my window manager (fvwm) and i just switched to gimp full time because i don’t use any advanced features.
CS2 is completely free from adobe. It doesn’t understand scaling in windows, and won’t run on the next Mac OS release. But it’s serviceable.
PhotoPea works pretty well for me, though I am not using it for anything other than fun projects.
Literally anything that you have to pay monthly for. I do not care what it is.
I have an old version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that, legally, they still have to provide me a download for. But, holy absolute hell if they didn’t make it nearly impossible to just download the version I paid for. Of course, the new one is subscription only. Costs so much I’d have paid more in 3 months than the single one time payment I did for the old version a decade ago.
Operating systems.
Windows is a collection of legacy code with trash strewn over top, but it is ubiquitous.
Apple’s offerings are typically decent and reliable, but the executives spent a lot of time lately kissing the ring.
Linux is simply not something I’m interested in supporting for my family.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
Yeah that ring kissing rubs me.
You could always use HaikuOS (kidding) there’s ZERO evil behind that one!
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
Hey I don’t want to preach but if many people were able to learn how to use Chrome OS over the last decade they will be able to learn how to use the latest Ubuntu (or whatever flavor of Linux is now considered the most intuitive and fully featured for new users).
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
Yeah, Creative Suite era, before Creative Cloud. That for every Adobe product.
PDF or really just an alternative to Adobe that isn’t even PDF but a completely different format that is open source by default so that nobody really needs a specific app to make edits. Maybd that’s just ODT?
Also, maybe not an alt per say but just want games to work on Gnu/Linux. Like all the AAA titles should be able to run on, for example, Linux Mint natively without Wine. A pipe dream sadly since capitalism dictates what works where but I digress.
Going back to Adobe though, would love something other than Photoshop that isn’t GIMP. Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Glimpse which basically did what Linux Mint does for Gnome and gave GIMP a much better interface. Sadly, they shut down their project. Lame.
Closest paid version I can think of is Bluebeam Revu.
Revu blows acrobat put of the water … it is equivalently priced though so not much help for plebs …
Yeah Revu is great at work, not so friendly for home.
It’s not for Linux, but Affinity is pretty good for a photoshop/illustrator alternative
Also, if vector is your speed and you want something kinda like Adobe XD, Lunacy is free, cross platform and has a web version
affinity.studio
You can run Affinity in linux.
Not native, is what I mean.
Sure, and at some point they might want to curtail linux usage, but right now is an option, which Adobe is not, so it is worth having it in mind.
Affinity Studio has no Linux binary. You would need WINE, etc.
That’s what I’m saying. It’s Mac and Windows only right now.
Is it true that canva may be planning to port affinity to Linux in the future?
Unlikely.
Honestly, notes apps. All of the big tech options are fine, but they’re big tech, so fuck them. All of the open source options suck. The best I’ve found is just Nextcloud Notes, but it’s still shit. Basic Markdown syntax, no linking notes, adding attachments is… well idk, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
I’ve found Obsidian to work well for me. Its plugin ecosystem is pretty robust, so there’s a lot of room to bolt on features.
And if you really need an open source option with every possible tool and a full customization language… emacs
Yep. Obsidian plugins is like installing Skyrim then thinking, “I’ll just go get the essentials from Nexus Mods…”
Three hours later you have an absolute beast that also does note taking too.
I keep seeing people say this, but I’ve never seen a plug-in that seemed to do much of anything that the base engine wasn’t already.
Obsidian, Joplin or Logseq. Have you tried any of these?
I’ve tried Joplin and Logseq. They both are not good for me. Joplin’s mobile experience was terrible.
I switched from OneNote to obsidian when I de-windowsed and haven’t looked back
Give Obsidian a try. Its very mobile-friendly.
It’s proprietary!
I know, I know. The notes you create are still yours. They’re just Markdown files. And they have a huge ecosystem of community-developed extensions that aren’t proprietary. The company is almost as far as you can get from Big Tech. I pay the $5/month for their sync service just to support them, but since your notes are simple Markdown files, you can just as easily sync your notes any other way for free.
my response was mostly meant as a hint to other readers, but I’d also like to add that the canvases are not markdown, but a custom json schema basically. not necessarily an issue, but noteworthy due to portability issues with that specific feature.
I just want apple notes self hosted.
markor on android seems pretty good for me, have you tried it?
No, but I use iPhone. Ideally I’d want something self hosted that works on all platforms.
Disregard, my original comment since first using this program it looks like it’s been ensloppified, what a tragedy
~~I like Trillium https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium~~
Oh god, yeah. Their README starts with an AI slop ad. :(
I’ve stuck with notesnook for awhile, but i might switch it up after my premium subscription ends.
To flip the CAD thing on its head, if I want a Python API for AutoCAD, Creo, or SolidWorks, their response is “fuck you, use our GUI cuz that’s easier for us to implement license verification with. And oh yeah, it’s all Window only.” The only CAD software I find remotely useful is FreeCAD. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s the baseline that all other CAD softwares somehow fail to match.
Tried affinity.studio?
Microsoft Exchange.
How many grandkids do you have? ;) ;)
How many competitors does it have that can do email, contacts, calendar, shared versions of the above items, and hybrid connect to exchange online.
I can’t think of a single option besides groupwise which is dead.
This might be controversial, but I want yet another code editor.
Hear me out, I write very little code, but often in widely different programming languages. Most of the time I write LaTeX and/or Typst all day, so I need:
- an editor that sandbox really well, there is no way I am trusting all my coding environment with my entire user space.
- an editor that don’t require much tinkering: if it can get to 80% there, I am willing to learn the rest, but I don’t want an editor that get 20% there and force me to pull 80 different package just to do things.
- preview LaTeX and Typst within the sandbox, ideally just in editor, so I don’t need to configure synctex.
- not controlled by a big tech like Microsoft.
So far, I am only able to find vscodium in flatpak that is close to my desire, but it is still mostly controlled by Microsoft.
(ideally, self hosted) overleaf with texlive-full installed?
But I do need to write code from time to time :(
Resin printing slicing software.
There’s currently two main options, Lychee and ChituBox. I’ve only used Lychee (after giving up with Chitu) so I can only speak on that. Lychee has mostly everything I want in terms of features, but customization is very limited (ie keybinds, default behavior etc), and some aspects of the UI can be VERY clunky. And the best part: 90% of the features that you need to slice somewhat effectively are locked behind a paywall. They do offer a 30 day trial, so I have a backup file of all my settings, and every 30 days I make a new burner account.
It’s a nightmare compared to the plethora of slicing options available for filament printers.
Oh and it’s monthly too? That’s the worst. For CAD I only print something like once or twice per month. I cannot justify any cost monthly.
Have you tried any of the Elegoo.com products? I know nothing about resin printing, but they supposedly support it
My filament printer is actually from them. I have a love-hate relationship with that machine. It’s like, 20% stock at this point, and it isn’t the fastest or the cleanest printer out there, but it works well enough.
I’m not aware of a resin slicer made by them, but without doing the research, my guess would be that it’s relatively subpar. I haven’t been resin printing for terribly long, but once or twice a year I’ll go online to see if there is any discussion of better alternatives to Lychee or Chitu, and the conversation has always stayed the same. Everyone is in the same boat in that those two programs are the only really viable options, despite being… not great.
Can’t speak to Elegoo’s product line, but I have an Anycubic Photon Mono M5S and it’s been pretty reliable for the 3 or so years I’ve owned it. Anycubic also has a branded slicer that’s serviceable and free to use, I think it’s a fork from chitubox but not 100% sure.
Adobe suite Ms office
