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Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
GIMP is unfortunately not a good competitor, the UX/UI is atrocious, and that's after spending 25 years using it now.. I switched to Krita for most things at this point. GIMP needs some sort of revamp.
Adobe... Fucks people hard.
Shout out to pdfgear.
Does almost all the pdf file manipulation anyone needs and it's free.
is the image not loading only for me?
It loads for me on voyager, but is unreadable.
Libre Office Draw is another Ai alternative
Ive been using Sumatra for pdfs. It’s open source too.
Wish there was a good FOSS Acrobat/Blue beam alternative.
I use those tools for the majority of my work as an engineer.
bluebeam is great
Countering Animator with Blender, that's brutal. For at least some stuff Blender is also the better Illustrator.
Affinity + BMD’s Davinci Resolve FTW. Best combo IMOO. I did the switch back in 2017 and never looked back. Worth the single low price and long term free upgrades. For acrobat replacement (basics only) Apple’s preview is flawless and Ubuntu 25.10 Pages looks promising. Looking for recommendations for Lightroom replacement. Apple’s pixelmator purchase looks promising but I don’t want subscription.
I hate that there is not a good alternative to InDesign that works on linux.
If only the Affinity suit were to work on linux, even just with wine, I would be alright with the fact that it still is proprietary software. It was somehow able to replace my whole Ph/Ai/Id workflow but it is till keeping me from trying to switch to the penguin.
Does anybody have a similar list of alternatives but for the Autodesk Suite/Ecosystem? Some open source CAD and BIM programs, some FOSS modeling and rendering programs?
I've spent the better half of six months trying to answer this question. (not continuously, just passively)
For some background, I used fusion 360 for a number of years, so I witnessed it turn to absolute shit, but that means parametric CADs are my cup of tea.
Here's my thoughts.
FreeCAD:
I tried this, but I'll admit I gave up quickly.
It doesn't feel like a complete solution. It feels like more and more tools have been tacked on without the realisation that people who haven't been using it for years are going to have even less of an idea of where to start.
I do want to come back and give it another shot, as it hit 1.0 recently.
Plasticity:
I was originally interested in it because if how easy it could be to model something. After having used it for a number of days, I agree that it's relatively intuitive to get something going, but it lacks the precise feeling of a parametric CAD. Don't get me wrong, you can be precise with it, but it feels something akin to a 3D paint and less like a CAD program.
I can imagine if you just want to do something small, it would be sufficient.
OpenSCAD:
I've been a programmer for 15+ years, and I expected to like this.
Sadly, if you lack a strong maths background, you'll find this difficult to master.
I'll be the first to admit my maths isn't as great as it used to be.
The beauty of a parametric CAD is that I don't need to know how to position everything exactly, I can just give it the constraints and it manages it for me.
With this, it felt like I kept on testing a value, measuring the resulting dimension that I was trying to go for, tweaking it again, rinse and repeat.
Didn't feel like I was programming, it felt like I was writing the 3D model itself with a DSL.
The lack of fillets and chamfers was also frustrating.
And this brings me to my current recommendation:
SolveSpace:
I've been using it for about a month now, and I've been happy with it.
It didn't take much to understand what it's trying to do.
It's completely parametric and I felt at home pretty quickly.
You can do fillets and chamfers easily, it just requires a bit of creative work.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
I'd be happy to answer them.
Try blender. I use it for CAD.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the 1.0 of freecad.
I don't use CAD professionally, and even my hobby usage is less than it was, and it was only a dozen or two small projects.
I had never used freecad, always fusion 360. I've been away for awhile, and also switched to Linux in the meantime. I needed to make a simple object, and tried freecad 1.0, and I literally could not intuit how to begin. Not a single shape, I was so lost, it was very frustrating.
I tried onshape and got a bit further, but still don't like the corporate nature of it.
I'm not trying to slam freecad, I really want it to work, and when I have more time to sit down and study it, I want to try again. But in the meantime I went back to fusion 360 in a VM, which was very sluggish, but at least I knew where everything was.
Another great alternative to Acrobat (Reader) is Okular; it's free, open source and runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.
It's been my go-to PDF reader since switching to Linux, since it already came pre-installed with Manjaro KDE.
i mean eveb masterpdf editor paid would help to not support adobe. this list should not be an image but a wiki. bitwig i also expected to see.
text. no seriously, pdfs are easy to create. reading vendor locked files aren't useful. reply with a shrug 🤷 i create most of mine with firefox print. used to generate them on the fly with php, for users to download.
Or if you have to use Adobe products, at least have the decency not to pay for them.
Honestly, GIMP is not a good alternative to Photoshop. I know, "it's free" is enough for many people, but it ... just isn't.
With GIMP 3.0 it's a bit better at least, they've finally added non-destructive editing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfaq-Cm1ZkA
Full changelog here:
https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html
I'd dare say that unless you've already learnt Photoshop (and have to unlearn it) then Darktable+GIMP works fine for home photo editing.
If you're used to Photoshop and your skills with it is what puts bread on the table... then I completely understand not switching tools.
Thank you very much for this, I already use four programs out of those, time look into more 😉
What the actual fuck is adobe acrobat? A pdf editor with subscription model payment? Firefox, the browser, can edit pdf files. It's 2025.
Firefox can do basic annotating, adding text and adding pictures but it can't make a new PDF from scratch.
You may be confusing Adobe Acrobat Reader with Adobe Acrobat? Full Acrobat is the proprietary tool to make a PDF file from scratch including some of the more complex functions.
PDF is an open standard and has been for a while, so there are now plenty of alternatives for most of the functions. LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape can do a lot of PDF creation functions but not all. There are also "print to PDF" options to create basic PDF documents too.
However some of the more niche functions are not widely supported or well supported; and there isn't really any opensource dedicated PDF maker that I'm aware of. Layout tools are abundant but I think it's things like building forms and document signing that is less easily replicated. There is Master PDF - a fully functional PDF maker which is proprietary and available for Linux; it $80 for a perpetual license. I'm not aware of any other alternatives myself.
For PDF "your browser" should be the default recommendation. Firefox allows to add text and images now. Gimp can also be used to edit PDF.
Dreamweaver is still used? I used it a bit back in the day when Macromedia was around and shortly after Adobe got a hold of it. How does it work with the modern web? Does it work well with modern programming languages or is it still just a WYSIWYG HTML editor?
I used it briefly in a class around 2015ish. It worked about as well as any Adobe software does, but honestly it was really difficult to use and quite frankly it probably would take just as long to learn the HTML and CSS skills necessary to make a decent website as it would to learn how to make one in Dreamweaver
I am surprised that its actually still a product they sell and seemingly update. Looking on their product page, wow it has git support - it can be yours for $22.99/month too!
(That will also require you to give your soul to them too, via a contract signed in blood)
Davinci Resolve has to be one of the most jam packed free software packages available… seriously, it absolutely trounces Premiere at evvvverything
the model of free for everything except if features you’d want for producing a professional movie, and financed by hardware sales - that you don’t need unless you’re a professional - is absolutely incredible for home users
It doesn't trounce PPro, they're about equal IME. I've used both and it's the price that makes it beat PPro. And you get the full version for free when you buy a Blackmagic camera.
personally, my reasoning for saying it trounces it is the integration of all the tools: no switching to after effects etc
but beyond that, ppro colour correction is just soooooo far behind
granted i haven’t really used it much, so i might not have “got” its workflow - it took a while for resolves to click - but it just seems so disjointed and clunky to do anything beyond cutting together a basic video
Neat list, but imo photoshop is closer to being called a photomanipulation/image editor than photography. lightroom is the more dedicated photography software.
Also I wouldn't call paint.net an alternative to photoshop. I love paint.net but its a relatively simple image editor and its functionally limited even with plugins.
