Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
For sure. Good UX is not "simple" UX. Professional software doesn't need to be flashy and clean, but it does need to be efficient and usable.
Bad UX is bad UX, though.
I bring up Blender because Blender vs Gimp is my favorite example of how FOSS can find a very functional alternative AND compete with the paid side with no compromises... but also of why it often doesn't.
Blender is for power users, but it's well designed enough you can dabble with it or follow a tutorial and have fun doing it. Gimp will make you hate the very act of opening a file and trying to make the most basic crop on it even if you're a Photoshop master.
Yeah I just want a tool to get my shit done and get paid
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.
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.