Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
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Kinda hilarious that anyone uses Premiere Pro when Resolve is better, and free (with very optional features locked behind 1-time paywall). David Manning had a revelation and made a video about this recently. As did PewDiePie.
This graphic is missing Bitwig in the AU section. Definitely worth mentioning since it runs on Linux/OS X/Win.
I don’t know what those two letters mean. I wish they had written out the name. I’ve avoided buying Adobe stuff because it’s stupidly expensive, but I’m still aware that in some industries, some of these have been industry standards at one point or another. Being able to tell wtf their names are, or even what they do would be helpful.
Some are easy, I’ll share the ones I know
Ps = Photoshop
Id = InDesign
Pr = Premiere
Ae = After Effects
Dw = DreamweaverI don’t know what Xd stands for, because everyone just calls is Xd but it is UI/UX design like figma and sketch. Ai is confusing but they use it for (Adobe) Illustrator, possible they thought
Ilwould be more confusing
Ive been using Sumatra for pdfs. It’s open source too.
Countering Animator with Blender, that’s brutal. For at least some stuff Blender is also the better Illustrator.
Does anybody have a similar list of alternatives but for the Autodesk Suite/Ecosystem? Some open source CAD and BIM programs, some FOSS modeling and rendering programs?
If you are looking for FOSS CAD, then FreeCAD 1.0 is about the only game in town. SolveSpace is fine for fairly simple uses but lacks all the advanced toys one might like. Nor has it been updated in 3 years now. Siemans SolidEdge has a free community edition, but it’s Widows only. OnShape is is a popular alternative to Fusion, and is fully cloud based, but it is restricted like Fusion.
As an acolyte that wears the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD, there is a growing community of tutorials, (I highly recommend MangoJelly on youtube) for beginners to learn with. But the learning curve can be steep as you get past the basics. There is a FreeCAD community here, but it’s small and not very active. Sadly the best place for answers remains on reddit.
I’ve spent the better half of six months trying to answer this question. (not continuously, just passively)
For some background, I used fusion 360 for a number of years, so I witnessed it turn to absolute shit, but that means parametric CADs are my cup of tea.
Here’s my thoughts.
FreeCAD: I tried this, but I’ll admit I gave up quickly.
It doesn’t feel like a complete solution. It feels like more and more tools have been tacked on without the realisation that people who haven’t been using it for years are going to have even less of an idea of where to start.
I do want to come back and give it another shot, as it hit 1.0 recently.Plasticity:
I was originally interested in it because if how easy it could be to model something. After having used it for a number of days, I agree that it’s relatively intuitive to get something going, but it lacks the precise feeling of a parametric CAD. Don’t get me wrong, you can be precise with it, but it feels something akin to a 3D paint and less like a CAD program.
I can imagine if you just want to do something small, it would be sufficient.OpenSCAD: I’ve been a programmer for 15+ years, and I expected to like this.
Sadly, if you lack a strong maths background, you’ll find this difficult to master.
I’ll be the first to admit my maths isn’t as great as it used to be.
The beauty of a parametric CAD is that I don’t need to know how to position everything exactly, I can just give it the constraints and it manages it for me.
With this, it felt like I kept on testing a value, measuring the resulting dimension that I was trying to go for, tweaking it again, rise and repeat.
Didn’t feel like I was programming, it felt like I was writing the 3D model itself with a DSL.
The lack of fillets and chamfers was also frustrating.And this brings me to my current recommendation:
SolveSpace:
I’ve been using it for about a month now, and I’ve been happy with it.
It didn’t take much to understand what it’s trying to do.
It’s completely parametric and I felt at home pretty quickly.
You can do fillets and chamfers easily, it just requires a bit of creative work.Let me know if you have any other questions.
I’d be happy to answer them.Try blender. I use it for CAD.
Penpot?
Without the title of this post, it’s probably easy for any non tech person to misunderstand this image as being a list of Adobe programs that spy on you, at least on first glance.
Maybe it’s to only spy on Sony. They love pirating Adobe products; and hate when others pirate their stuff.
See, my problem with these types of resources is if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement.
That’s not a hard rule, I do think some of these are a better first choice, or a better-for-some applications first choice. I’m just often frustrated by the way these things are communicated.
if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement
And it would be even less if there had to be only one thing per thing.
One of the strengths of the FOSS metacommunity is the variety in designs and results. Big Corpo abuses economies of scale and locks you in with a “one shoe fits all solution” because they under the table also chisel and file your feet; FOSS has (largely) no such restrictions so they can afford to try things and see what results and, more importantly, what evolves. Not everything has to be a copy of corporate, and we shouldn’t act as if it had to be.
Woof, I don’t know if I can pick up what you’re putting down.
Particularly for professional use nobody is trying to have fun and exciting new solutions for UI or functionality every week. Industry standards get to be industry standards for a reason. It’s useful to be able to just go hire someone that knows how to work on the software platform you’re working and your clients are working and your providers are working.
For casual home use, go nuts, I don’t mind. And there is certainly room for multiple things to remain relevant at once, especially if the concepts are close enough that crossing over is trivial or easy.
But I don’t need to edit video in seven different pieces of software, I need to get the video edited. And if I need three people editing video I need them all to be editing video in the same thing, or at least in things that are perfectly interoperable. Standards aren’t a corporate imposition, even if corporations benefit greatly from lobbying themselves into becoming the standard.
Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.
A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.
The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.
I mean… cool, but by that logic you want to design all your graphic designers from painters and artists to do posters with brushes again.
That’s just not practical, and “it’s not efficient, but” is a massive dealbreaker for a whole lot of applications. Artisanal product has a premium and is very cool and if you can get away with making a living out of it I find that amazing.
But sometimes somebody just needs a poster made or a shop logo or a trash bag removed from their wedding picture background. Industrial work at pace is important and the baseline for a work area.
I’m also not sure what time was before the standardization and consolidation of software. Word replaced Wordperfect. Photoshop replaced the Corel Suite. Premiere replaced (or at least displaced) Avid. It’s not like there weren’t industry standards before.
Some companies still use proprietary stuff and train people on their in-house software, it’s doable. It’s just easier for most of the pack working with multiple clients and vendors to be using the most popular thing at any given time.
File format standards certainly, and OSS generally embraces those (at least if they’re non-proprietary), but UI doesn’t have to be standardized. On the other hand though not everything needs to be a unique snowflake. UIs should take the things that work well and experiment with what doesn’t.
Lets also not pretend that proprietary apps don’t screw around with UI design just as much. I can’t count how many times now Microsoft has redesigned the UI of something that was perfectly fine and didn’t need redesigning only to end up making it worse.
Sure, I can agree with that.
The problem with OSS tends to be that engineers are more willing to work on it than UX designers and it’s quite rare for them to have the lead on that area. Forget convention, just on quality. There are exceptions (hey Blender!), but not many.
More often than not what you get is some other paid upstart hit some big innovation and then that propagates and sometimes it gets to open source alternatives before it does to fossilized, standardized professional software.
I do think there’s some value in having UX that makes it easier to jump back and forth, though. Especially if your positioning is “I’m like this paid thing, but free”. The easier you make it for the pros to pick up and play the easier you can carve some of the market and the more opportunities you give to newcomers learning on the free tool to migrate to the paid tool if the market demands it.
I think part of the problem is that “good” UX isn’t a single thing but a continuum. It’s very dependent on the skill level of the user. Often what makes a good UX for a newbie is a bad UX for a power user and vice versa. OSS tends to attract power users and particularly the ones working on some software in a particular area tend to be domain experts. That in turn can lead to designs optimized for very advanced use cases that end up being frustratingly opaque to an “average” user or even worse a newbie.
Blender is an excellent example of this. It’s regarded as one of the best 3D programs out there but it’s far from a simple piece of software to pick up. What saves it is that all the commercial alternatives are just as obtuse as it is and so the ground level expectation is that it’s going to be complicated.
Likewise many OSS and Linux tools expect or even require CLI usage which while great for power users putting together scripts and pipelines are often opaque and unintuitive to someone who is still learning the domain.
This focus on power users leads to turning newbies away and funneling them towards the commercial offerings where they then get used to their quirks and limitations of those apps so that when they do eventually become power users the quirks and limitations of the OSS alternatives feel strange and off-putting to them.
Yeah I just want a tool to get my shit done and get paid
Well, on the other hand, it’s by far not always the case that the program one person is currently using is already the best choice for their use case. For example, in the process of degoogling, I’ve begun using a lot of programs that are actually better for me than the ones I previously used (e.g. Notesnook > Google notes). Of course there’s friction/effort involved in finding the best replacement, but there’s just no way around that if the goal is to get away from the defacto standards.
Sure. And I love finding better solutions, particularly when they’re for a thing I do for my own sake.
But if you’re a newspaper that is ingesting hundreds or thousands of pictures a day from dozens of photographers and having half a dozen people editing all that input into a database that a dozen composers and web editors are using at the same time sometimes janky but universally familiar is a lot more valuable than “better at this thing on interesting ways”.
It doesn’t mean you can’t displace a clunky, comfortable king of the hill. Adobe itself used to be pretty good at doing just that. Premiere used to be the shitty alternative kids used because it was easy to pirate before it became THE editing software for online video. The new batch of kids are probably defaulting to Resolve these days, so that one feels wobbly. Other times you just create a new function that didn’t exist and grow into space previously occupied by adjacent software, Canva-style.
But if you see a piece of industry-standard software with a list of twenty alternatives broken down by application, skill level or subsets of downsides the industry standard is probably not about to lose their spot in favor of any of those anytime soon.
Just a small thing, but as of the latest release Inkscape has a functioning live-trace tool
It was one of the biggest things keeping me using illustrator but I used inkscape’s trace yesterday and it worked great
How much time have you put into Inkscape now? I’m hankering for some reviews from people who are also refugees from the Adobe ecosystem.
I don’t use it regularly enough to weigh in comprehensibly - I use it mostly for processing svg drawings created in other programs for cnc plotting, or for compiling svg drawings onto standardized layouts for sending to a printer
My only complaint with inkscape is that it’s a bit slow with rendering complex shapes/canvases with many points, but otherwise it does everything I need from a vector program.
The CNC plug in is so useful! I also made my wedding save the dates in it and some figures for a scientific manuscript: worked great.
I’ve never used vector programs. What is a “live tracer”?
It’s a tool that helps ‘trace’ a raster image into vector shapes and paths
it’s useful for creating vector artwork from raster images - sometimes a logo or icon is only available in a poor resolution raster image, and so having an easy way to convert it into vector saves a ton of time.
I used it yesterday to create an SVG file for CNC plotting of a company logo. It would have taken me a few hours to hand-trace it myself
I sometimes get commissioned to make a logo here and there. This would come in very handy.
Draw from LO is pretty meh for a lot of things, but I use it a lot to edit pdfs, and it is very consistent
Just started using reaper, coming over from audition and it’s so similar I didn’t have to re-learn anything.
REAPER rules. I started on ProTools in 2010. Ditched it for Reaper in 2012 and never looked back. Best $60 I ever spent. I’ve gladly bought multiple licenses for my devices over the years.
REAPER is absolutely one of the best pieces of software out there. I’ve been using it too since maybe 2009, though not so much in the last few years (not moved to an alternative, I’m just not doing so much audio these days).
I love the business model, the development cycle, etc. and even though it’s not open source it kinda has a similar community feeling. Every bit as feature-filled and capable as any of the industry standards.
Another great alternative to Acrobat (Reader) is Okular; it’s free, open source and runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.
It’s been my go-to PDF reader since switching to Linux since it already came pre-installed with Manjaro KDE.
i mean eveb masterpdf editor paid would help to not support adobe. this list should not be an image but a wiki. bitwig i also expected to see.
Or if you have to use Adobe products, at least have the decency not to pay for them.
