Shoutouts

Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!

  • bruhduh
  • Toes

Free Open Source Alternatives

[Visual/Graphical]

For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to


[Audio]

For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to


[PDF]

Acrobat Reader to


[Video]

Premiere to


There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]

  • @[email protected]
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    37 months ago

    I fail to understand why people hate gimp so much.

    Because they’ve spent years learning Photoshop’s unintuitive interface rather than GIMP’s unintuitive interface. I learned them both more or less in parallel and found them both equally awful. (So who does have an intuitive interface? Paint Shop Pro, back in the days that JASC owned it, came the closest of any piece of raster image editing software I’ve ever used.)

    In all fairness, there are a few features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn’t, but the ones I’m aware of are professional level stuff (spot colour support and some complex editing constructs), and there’s usually a way to do without them or compensate with some other program.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 months ago

      I’m feeling this so much right now. Trying to learn FreeCAD. The interface is so unintuitive. I’m no stranger to CAD.

      The program is so irregular, inconsistent… Things that should work give unintelligible errors.

      Sure, it’s pre-release 0.22, but so frustrating. Their support forums are unhelpful/unfriendly at StckOverflow levels, just without the nice interface.

      Save me the “but it’s free, you should contribute to it if you don’t like it. I know it’s free. I’ve donated. I’m looking for an Open solution, not another hobby.