For me, it’s CAD software. FreeCAD is trash (sorry, lovers). Fusion360 is honestly the best out there for free. The “almost there” app is Shapr3D, but fuck $40/m.
And yes I’ve tried all the others not listed here.
[…] FreeCAD is trash […]
What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?
I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.
A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.
This is probably slightly off topic from the intent of this post but I wish any device that produced sound, like your coffee maker pinging when your coffee is ready or your washer/dryer audibly notifying you when a cycle is complete, had at least a small ability to modify or change that sound. Even just a small way to change the frequency or pitch of the sound would help. Today manufacturers take the approach of ‘it’s important that someone knows when their spin cycle is complete!’, rather than ‘let’s let the consumer have some control over their audio environment’.
I suggest:
Household Acoustic Notification Standard (HANS)
Where it’s a standard protocol or noise making system you can configure with some kind of device. Perhaps it also outlines LORA notifications as well.
I didn’t know about this. Thank you!
When’s the last time you tried FreeCAD? I also used to think it’s trash, but version 1.0 really changed that and now 1.1 is freaking amazing.
Like last week. It’s cad software from 20 years ago that’s trying to be everything and not really mastering anything.
I want an open source option that focuses on UI/UX and not… well, whatever freeCAD is doing.
I have the same UI issues with GIMP and Inkscape. When programmers try to make human interface. (No offense to programmers)
I’ve been using GIMP long enough that I’ve learned where things are. It’s not intuitive, but I can usually accomplish what I set out to do without swapping to another program.
Inkscape feels like a foreign language that I don’t speak.
I started using it after 1.0, still haven’t gotten anywhere with it because it’s just not intuitive and I’m constantly running into problems where I have to go into the documentation. If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues. I found a YouTube series that someone recommended that looks pretty good though so I’m going to lock in and go through that and try again because I really don’t have any other choice. At least it doesn’t crash every time you fuck up constraints anymore.
If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues.
I don’t think this is true. Professional software is usually very hard to switch between. Be it CAD, video editing, 3D modeling, animation, programming, painting, freaking file sharing, or pretty much any other field of endeavor. Each program/tool/suite prescribes a certain workflow, and it almost never matches the workflow of another tool designed for the exact same purpose.
For exactly the same reason, it’s hard to switch between operating systems, especially if you’re a power user who knows a lot about how things work in the OS you’re used to. It’s not a sign that either OS is better than the other, it’s just how used the user is to a certain way of doing things.
I think this is also why Adobe and Autodesk are still doing alright. A large part of their customer base are just people who would have too much friction switching to a different, better (imo) suite of tools, so staying with the tool they know is worth the cost.
I don’t know your situation, but from your comment I think I can recommend pushing through the re-learning period with FreeCAD. It’s good.
I understand things not being the same. I’ve switched between software and OS’s before and dealt with these kinds of issues. I worked in IT support for years and have had to learn about how all sorts of software works on the fly. I’ve switched between several CAD programs I used successfully before landing on Fusion360. FreeCAD is a whole other level compared to pretty much anything else I’ve dealt with. Blender is the only other app I can think of that I’ve had so much trouble with.
Forgot to say: 1.1 has quite a lot of QoL improvements, so make sure you learn from a source made for 1.1 and not 1.0 or earlier.
Another mobile OS. Something that isn’t built entirely to exploit me.
Honestly, I would really fuck with a comprehensive Linux mobile experience. I know some things exist, but they aren’t yet fully rounded off. I say this now, but know damn well I’d tinker with something I shouldn’t and wind up needing to reinstall the OS like five times.
I really liked my Jolla phone back in the days. I hope they make a good comeback.
Theres always e/os, iodeos, grapheneos and other forks
that is still android though
I reccomend donating to postmarketos then. They do awsome work reverse engeeniering phones. Oneplus 6 is usable with pmos. Of course it has multiple problems but its nice seeing people make so much things for on old phones.
There are of course graphenos, calyxos, e/os/ of course. Unfortunatly the issue with every alternative os is that you need specific model of phone to even open bootloader.
I hear you. With Android turning into a closed OS like iOS later this year things are not looking very bright for people like me that uses alternative stores a lot.
Tell me about it. Like Linux Phone hurry up!
I miss the FirefoxOS concept. Ahead of its time. Basically ran PWAs for everything.
I really like photopea.
Tried affinity.studio?
Ping plotter
To flip the CAD thing on its head, if I want a Python API for AutoCAD, Creo, or SolidWorks, their response is “fuck you, use our GUI cuz that’s easier for us to implement license verification with. And oh yeah, it’s all Window only.” The only CAD software I find remotely useful is FreeCAD. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s the baseline that all other CAD softwares somehow fail to match.
Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.
Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that’ll stick.
Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.
I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.
Also duckdb. Realizing I could do
SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx'was a wondrous occasionSo much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.
=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can
pd.to_excel()to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.
Yeah, excel really is hard to beat. Good one.
Re: email. Have you tried Port87?
Never heard of it.
Give it a try. :)
Literally anything that you have to pay monthly for. I do not care what it is.
I have an old version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that, legally, they still have to provide me a download for. But, holy absolute hell if they didn’t make it nearly impossible to just download the version I paid for. Of course, the new one is subscription only. Costs so much I’d have paid more in 3 months than the single one time payment I did for the old version a decade ago.
Operating systems.
Windows is a collection of legacy code with trash strewn over top, but it is ubiquitous.
Apple’s offerings are typically decent and reliable, but the executives spent a lot of time lately kissing the ring.
Linux is simply not something I’m interested in supporting for my family.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
Hey I don’t want to preach but if many people were able to learn how to use Chrome OS over the last decade they will be able to learn how to use the latest Ubuntu (or whatever flavor of Linux is now considered the most intuitive and fully featured for new users).
I believe Mint is the current “beginner edition” of Linux. Ubuntu has been getting a lot of hate lately from what I’ve seen.
My latest build is running Bazzite on an HTPC, but it’s still a project and not fully up and running quite yet.
Yeah no, one toe past extremely basic and you might end up in a quagmire of shit and googling usually makes things worse with misinformation.
Yeah that ring kissing rubs me.
You could always use HaikuOS (kidding) there’s ZERO evil behind that one!
Anything closed where the update is “throw it away, buy the new model”. Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.
Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.
Yeah I have several old tablets that would be perfectly serviceable if I could get to the app store. But because they’re on such an old version of Android it won’t let me download apps.
Do you work on industrial electrical? Kinda curious about your comment there. The company I work for implements new systems, some of the biggest in the US, but we do plenty of maintenance, refurbishing, tuning, etc on some very very old systems. I’ve seen working equipment that is from the dawn of the 20th century, still going fine. Maybe we come in and install a new VFD on them, or recently we did a system running 2 setups of 8k amps @ 480V for motors that had gone through a whole entire fire that was so bad the roof collapsed.
Maybe it’s just the sector I’m in, which is steel and aluminum mills, but I’ve seen industrial be the one that does not want change because it comes with a high price tag. The sales guys need to convince these places that they can’t keep running everything on electrical equipment from the 70s to 90s
I don’t know why I said industrial. Just old nerdy junk, like a digital embroidery machine that needs xp to load designs. A media player locked in a similar situation. My car is 12 years old, gimme the source to the janky is on the head unit. Abandoned firmwares.
Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?
photoshop cs6 was indeed great, it does run fairly well on wine tho
I have an issue with it that really makes it unusable: every input renders one frame behind. I make a gesture, I see most of the stroke, but not the last bit until I click again. I select and cut something? Doesn’t disappear until I give one more input. I zoom to a certain level, then click and it zooms the last little bit. It’s bizarre and makes it surprisingly unusable.
i did have some glitches and switched away from it to gimp eventually but your issue kinda seems different from mine. are you on x11 or wayland? if x11 are you running a compositor like picom?
Still on X11, sadly. Budgie. Ubuntu 24.04. I find that Wine almost makes more of a difference. I’m pretty sure it’s how they’re handling inputs in the main thread at Adobe HQ.
I haven’t been able to get it working with winetricks, bottles or lutris. Any tips?
i haven’t ran it for some time, there were minor issues (iirc window autoraising glitches?) with my window manager (fvwm) and i just switched to gimp full time because i don’t use any advanced features.
PhotoPea works pretty well for me, though I am not using it for anything other than fun projects.
I have used photopea before and it works shockingly well, but I don’t like having to rely on a web-service.
CS2 is completely free from adobe. It doesn’t understand scaling in windows, and won’t run on the next Mac OS release. But it’s serviceable.
If I can make it run on Linux that may do.
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
Yeah, Creative Suite era, before Creative Cloud. That for every Adobe product.
PDF or really just an alternative to Adobe that isn’t even PDF but a completely different format that is open source by default so that nobody really needs a specific app to make edits. Maybd that’s just ODT?
Also, maybe not an alt per say but just want games to work on Gnu/Linux. Like all the AAA titles should be able to run on, for example, Linux Mint natively without Wine. A pipe dream sadly since capitalism dictates what works where but I digress.
Going back to Adobe though, would love something other than Photoshop that isn’t GIMP. Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Glimpse which basically did what Linux Mint does for Gnome and gave GIMP a much better interface. Sadly, they shut down their project. Lame.
Closest paid version I can think of is Bluebeam Revu.
Revu blows acrobat put of the water … it is equivalently priced though so not much help for plebs …
Yeah Revu is great at work, not so friendly for home.
It’s not for Linux, but Affinity is pretty good for a photoshop/illustrator alternative
Also, if vector is your speed and you want something kinda like Adobe XD, Lunacy is free, cross platform and has a web version
affinity.studio
You can run Affinity in linux.
Not native, is what I mean.
Sure, and at some point they might want to curtail linux usage, but right now is an option, which Adobe is not, so it is worth having it in mind.
Affinity Studio has no Linux binary. You would need WINE, etc.
That’s what I’m saying. It’s Mac and Windows only right now.
Is it true that canva may be planning to port affinity to Linux in the future?
Unlikely.
