Hemingways_Shotgun

GIMP for example is nowhere near feature parity with Photoshop

Yeah. That’s exactly my point…maybe I wasn’t clear.

The problem is that no one specific FOSS tool has feature parity. To get the same abilities as Photoshop, you have to use a workflow that is a combination of GIMP, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus instead of having it in the one package, which is why Adobe is the industry standard.

Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn’t even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!

That’s sort of where I see the issue as well. What proprietary software does is takes the features of a bunch of different pieces of kit and puts them together into one package.

There isn’t one particular thing that Propietary software does the FOSS software can’t. The problem is that you need multiple different software solutions to do it.

So while Illustrator offers Paragraph Spacing (for example) Inkscape doesn’t, you get that in Scribus. But Scribus lacks the more advanced pathing vector tools, which Inkscape offers. Meanwhile neither of them have strong photo editing abilities, which GIMP brings to the table, but GIMP can’t really do painting well, which KRITA brings to the table…and so on and so on.

Every open source alternative does something as good as their proprietary alternaties. But not everything. You have to use a combination in order to match the capability of one adobe product, and that’s just not feasible in a professional environment.

If you wan’t to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn’t worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.

Then, I would argue, the alternative isn’t to sign petitions to make the corporate guys make their proprietary stuff available on FOSS operating systems. The alternative is to contribute to the FOSS alternatives in order to make them as good as the proprietary.

I’m not saying that you in particular haven’t contributed (either financially or developmentally). I don’t know you, so this isn’t particularly directed at you.

But in general, the “FOSS isn’t as good as proprietary stuff” crowd has overwhelmingly never actually tried to fund or contribute to the development of the software itself and their complaints amount to “Why isn’t my free thing as good as the thing they make me pay for?”

In which case the answer is “of course it isn’t…you’re telling me the software developed on the evenings and weekends by enthusiasts doing it in the spare time for NO money isn’t as polished as a fully funded business software!? NO WAY!!! I’M SHOOKETH!!!”

The alternative to the (perceived) quality disparity between FOSS and Proprietary isn’t to go begging at the Corporations doorstep; it’s to make the FOSS alternatives good enough to take the throne of “industry standard” away from the corporations.

It’s not impossible…hell, Blender is the poster child for pretty much doing exactly that. It’s not the “industry standard”, but it’s accepted in the industry in ways that GIMP and Inkscape still aren’t. And the reason is because it’s good enough to be there.

Depends on what you’re using it for.

Writer, Presentation, etc… yeah. works great. No problems at all.

Calc/Excel…sure…will work for pretty basic stuff. But as soon as you get a relatively complex spreadsheet, interoperability goes out the window.

For example, I have a few spreadsheets that I work on at home (where I use Linux) and at work (where I use windows). I can’t work on it in one without screwing up the formatting, forumlae, and advanced filtering in the other, and vice versa. I’m forced to use OnlyOffice in order to be able to do so.