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
@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
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.
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
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 things they are familiar with)
- 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)
The entire phone-based ecosystem.
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.
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.
I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?
Tax filing software
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.
I heard https://www.onlyoffice.com/ is good, but have no personal experience.
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 problemIsnt it unmaintaned?
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.
Microsoft actively trying to kill desktop outlook and replace it with a glorified web app with half the features at best.
It has nearly every feature, and will make it extremely portable, easy to code, and easy to update.
This will be a huge success for people that want to work on an OS besides windows but need the features of Exchange/outlook.
I’m sorry but I’m really tired of web apps disguised as native applications.
To your point though, I haven’t tried it again in several months, just ran into several issues and swapped back for as long as I can lol
MS Onenote. Nothing comes close to it. With stylus support etc…
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.
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.
A manufacturer phone pre-installed with LineageOS would be awesome.
Pixel + GrapheneOS is a dream.
And they’re even working on releasing phones that come with GrapheneOS preinstalled
Ooh, neat.
Who is? Google? Do know if I’d be able to trust that
The GrapheneOS team is working on finding a suitable OEM that would be able to release flagship hardware with security comparable to a Pixel, and GrapheneOS preinstalled.
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, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, 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 Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.
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. :-)
Writer in Libre Office is fine if you install the correct fonts on Linux. Calc needs some work people that know how to use power pivot in excel use it all the time. So not having that makes the switch hard.
