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
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by urska@lemmy.ca
Relevent XKCD : https://xkcd.com/743/
I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.
However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.
Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.
The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.
And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.
That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.
I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.
Workflow is big, but it isn’t the biggest issue with Gimp for serious work, the destructive editing is. Workflow you can get used to, destructive editing means you’re fucked if you need to edit something you’ve previously edited - something most if not all professionals do all the time.
This.
It is planned feature for Gimp 3 I believe, hopefully it will be implemented well.
But for now, people that aren’t professional graphic designers should really stop recommending Gimp as a viable replacement. It is a very capable piece of software, but too many professional-grade features are missing.
And it’s never only about Photoshop either. It is the integration that the suite has. Illustrator to Photoshop to Indesign is (mostly) seemless.
I’m currently trying to switch to foss alternatives, but it’s rough.
Totally agree. Gimp is really advanced and badass in many ways, but it’s like a nuclear reactor control panel’s worth of MS Paint. Hopefully the non destructive editing will change that. But yes like you said, Photoshop has the whole Adobe ecosystem, too. Hopefully things will change for the better with FOSS though, and I think it will. There should be a consortium formed of FOSS media software that aims to collectively work together to beat Adobe’s ass.
Not to mention that even if you personally managed to switch to something else, if you’re not doing some completely solo work, you will still receive files from others (or may be expected to send files to others) in Adobe format. So even if you wouldn’t be using it, you’d still have to pay for it to stay competitive. At which point you may as well use it because of what you said, that most of the alternatives are missing those expert features. So in professional setting, there’s unfortunately no escaping Adobe. Someone would have to come up with an alternative feature full package of apps covering all bases (because Adobe isn’t just Photoshop and not just graphic design but an entire interwoven ecosystem used in various related fields) and then work really, really hard to push the industry toward it. And it would still probably take a decade or two. So realistically, it would have to be or become some big corporation that would likely turn evil too as the time goes. Or some open source miracle like Blender that would have to attract enough big sponsors.
Not defending Adobe, just saying how it is. I have enough grievances about their software (how they managed to fuck up something as simple as Acrobat is beyond me) but you just have to deal with it or look for a job in another field. (I’m lucky enough that Adobe is only secondary software for me but even then I still can’t escape it.)
Not open source, but pro grade, often nicer to work with than adobe stuff. The Affinity suite. Pay once per major revision. Decent upgrade plans. No subscription. Designer, photo and publisher.
The business model could change very quickly and promises by companies aren’t worth the paper they are written on. The CEO might tomorrow decide to sell the company to a large tech company which more often than not leads to the destruction of the software the company developed. Only open source or, even better, free software can guarantee that your software wont be enshittified.
They’ve actually been acquired a few months ago, they promised no changes to their business model but I’m not hopeful
They will boil that frog slowly. Soon there will be an alternative subscription with a discount for previous license holders. Then they hide the option to buy a perpetual license so only people who spent time to search for it can find it; and finally they will remove the option completely and claim that they did that because “Nobody was buying it”.
Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.
If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.
Until it gets bought by some big corp and suddenly has spyware integrated and goes into subscription anyway Happened to a lot of good proprietary software, and this is a reason why open source is superior.
FOSS is always a better option, as of today I don’t think anything compares. And since they aren’t a big company doing shady things, the licensed version is permanent, no big company buyout is going to impact anything other than upgrades.
Reaper is great, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to get my VSTs properly working on linux, especially ones with a full GUI like a lot of drum vsts do. It’s literally the only reason I still dual-boot windows on that machine.
I get that, there is a list of Linux friendly vsts out there that work well. I think they have a link to the list, but I don’t really use drums in my workflow so couldn’t give you any examples unfortunately. I did have to go into windows for some work stuff where I needed a specific vst though, definitely understand the issue.
WinRAR style
So we basically never have to pay?
No, just a nag. If you’re recording/editing a few times a year, it won’t be a bother. If you’re in there often, it’s worth the few bucks.
No, as with Microsoft, Users will just suck it up.
Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.
Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.
Man thanks for not suggesting GIMP I hate that thing so unintuitive, like bro you’re no blender, you’re not allowed to be unintuitive
^me as I’m in the middle of editing and just about to add Gimp to the post when I see your comment😅
Anti-libre software, Adobe anything, bans us from removing malicous source code and service as a software substitute is even worse, so else did we expect?
Shotcut for video editing
thanks for the comment I’ll add it to the post!
Also lmms https://lmms.io/ for music, you’re doing some great post, word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
added this as well!
you’re doing some great post
no worries🤗
word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
hell yea!✊
🤗 You’re doing great
We need an open source renaissance within those big tech industries. It can’t be that everyone is completely dependent on Adobe, Microsoft, Google and other bad actors that force this shit onto everyone.
