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198 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Thank you very much for this, I already use four programs out of those, time look into more 😉

  • I've never used Photoshop but I have used Photopea and people tell me it's exactly the same: https://www.photopea.com/

    • I like it too, but it's like comparing a convenience store around the corner with the big box supermarket across town. Many similarities but it's much more limited. Do think it deserves more attention though, it works really well if you ask me.

  • So happy to see my beloved Paint Tool Sai on here! 😃 Really good list. Didn't know there were so many alternatives

  • text. no seriously, pdfs are easy to create. reading vendor locked files aren't useful. reply with a shrug 🤷 i create most of mine with firefox print. used to generate them on the fly with php, for users to download.

  • Why isn't Okular on the list? Way better PDF reader than Acrobat.

    • Acrobat is Adobe's pdf editor and the listed alternatives are pdf editor, which isn't the same as a pdf reader.

198 comments