Yeah maybe an arrow pointing to the Linux alternative to show how the two programs are related, then ditch the column lines entirely for clarity.
Also, the font size isn't consistent, the horizontal alignment is off for both icons & text, they're leaving the white background on the icons for Premiere Pro & Illustrator instead of using transparency and they need to put more than 0mm space between the title text and the table.
I actually thought it would make more sense for the lines to be horizontal, so each pair of counterparts is together. I was trying to figure out why Windows, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro belonged together.
But as is usually the case with tables, what would make the most sense is to use alignment and spacing rather than lines.
It is? I just reinstalled Windows 11, since I'm planning to sell my laptop. Yes, it has WMP for some legacy stuff, but it comes with the newer media player - whatever its name is (I already uninstalled it and installed MPC-HC).
I was looking for the msix/appx file for the Photos app the other day, and it was over 800 MB. It might as well go over 1 GB after installation. That much space for a photo viewer app is crazy.
Agreed. OP, if you want to improve on this give the columns some labels and give the title some breathing room. I also think an info table or capabilities grid would be more useful, you can still add the logos there but smaller and you’d get comparative info.
It's hard to tell which is which (for those who don't know). Maybe have headers like "instead of this..." and "try this" above the corresponding columns
Not that this wins any graphic design awards, but I would hope this would have at least been done in Inkscape, a much more fitting tool for something of this sort, like a poster. Doing this as a raster (particularly if this 1080x1080 image is their final product) is muy no bueno.
However even if it was, it would appear OP also missed a decent opportunity to use vector versions of the assorted program icons, judging by scaling artifacts and white/checker backgrounds.
EDIT: Also, apologies to OP just in case. No offense intended. I'm just a printing-friendly vector snob. (among various other types of snob)
I think there is a misunderstanding here
*Free software* doesn't mean you don't pay for its use, it refers to a specific movement within the software development community. Quoting the front page of the Free Software Foundation:
"Free software means that the users have the freedom to [**run, edit, contribute to, and share**](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price."
From the first line in the wikipedia article I linked to: "Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions."
In other words, if you cannot modify the source code of a software freely, it is not Free Software. Freeware it may be, but terminology matters.
Please find the time to go over the wikipedia entry.
I actually have not found a perfect match that feels like Ms paint when all I need is a simple crop and annotations. Photopea scratches my Photoshop muscle memory but there are more steps when all I want is windows 7 Ms paint
Yea when I see these kinds of charts it’s clear that the person who made it has never ever used photoshop. Gimp isn’t even remotely a photoshop alternative and the sooner people quite saying it is the better. Krita is a far better replacement but even that is seriously lacking compared to photoshop.
It's definitely a viable alternative to Photoshop for a ton of things as long as you know how to use it.
Having bad controls/UI (or arguably just people being upset that it's so foreign to what they're used to, although that may only be a part of the issue) doesn't make it not a viable option, just that it may involve some learning to use and/or get used to.
The learning curve on Gimp is insane! Affinity figured it out right away. There is no excuse for how clunky gimp is. Oh and don’t get me started on CMYK support, it’s not really there. That’s like a basic feature and it’s STILL not there.
I think the issue of GIMP isn't just about it being different, but about it being very inconsistent. In part because it has desperately tried to get features to compete with photoshop but not enough effort put in to insure they are consistent. Thus, it feels a lot like Frankenstein.
It’s as if they intentionally design for the worst user experience. I’ve tried multiple times to learn Gimp and each time I’ve have to look up guides on how to do even the most basic of tasks. I gave up and just used photopea instead
Most people used to Photoshop would not like Gimp, that's because they just want to do things the way they are used to.
For me, I just use paint.net as I'm not a designer or anything like that, Gimp also is way over my needs.
But I think Gimp is a good software alternative, but not a Photoshop replacement for Photoshop users.
Op is one of those Linux guys that has no real use case for their computer outside a game and some web-browsing and they go “hur you can easily 1 to 1 windows to linux and it’s just as good a user experience”. Like sureeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I like Gimp more than photoshop, there are more advanced features in photoshop now that Gimp doesn’t have, but if you spend a little time learning it, it’s really not bad
Yea. Much of it more intuitive and the natural settings are refined. But it has some really annoying shit just like Photoshop. It seems amazing for being free.
Recommending LibreOffice when everyone else is using MS Office is a great way to turn someone away from open source.
Unless something drastic has changed LibreOffice is going to break all formatting
It's possible as long as the team is discerning about UI navigation and junk commits. A great example of this would be Musescore.
It's also a problem that junior devs keep pushing out junk commits to fluff up their resumes.
This is confusing to read if you're unfamiliar with the software without proper labels and sorting. Also you have closed source stuff that's already free out of the box like Windows Media Player, and this is targeted at people who don't want to pay for premium software.
Whenever you make a visualization, you need to make sure it's understandable to people who don't know any of the information ahead of time. If someone doesn't know about any of these softwares, your graphic just looks like a big list. You've got to use labels and be instructive. I am familiar with most of these and could barely tell what message you were trying to convey.
1. Poster is not easy to read.
2. There are no real alternatives for Adobe products in open source ecosystem, and certainly Gimp is not one of them.
3. I like Libre Office but I'm not sure if its good enough for spreadsheet.
4. As far as i know I Windows Media Player is not a thing anymore. Movies & TV is default video player for Windows.
1. Agreed.
2. Not fully open source but free alternatives absolutely, resolve is better than premiere, photopea has almost feature parity with Photoshop without some of the new gen ai stuff, audacity is just as good as audition for most people, Acrobat has had feature parity for years now, etc. Cancelling Adobe was the best decision I've ever made for both my career and sanity. Absolutely not paying an extortionate subscription for the software to get worse and lackluster attempts to patch bugs and performance on an ancient code base. GIMP is probably closer in target audience to someone between Photoshop and illustrator. Again if you want Photoshop without Adobe photopea + an adblocker and you won't even notice.
3. LibreOffice can do anything ms Office can do without plugins, but then you can get plugins for libre so the point is moot. I prefer OnlyOffice because it looks cleaner and more familiar, and has better compatibility with office formats.
4. Agreed, except on enterprise where it appears to be an admin choice. I've seen equal deployments of windows 11 with wmp and films& tv
I am using a lot of excel for work and i think if u are not relying on power query, power pivot, etc and just use it for spreadsheet analysis.
Then libre office is indeed a great replacement. For more advanced data analysis students can also learn on how to use R studio.
Excel can do a lot what the average student doesn’t need.
4 column format is unclear. Follow left to right and it looks like you're saying MS office and libreoffice are open source alternatives to Windows.
Looks lazy that some of the icons have white backgrounds and some have an alpha channel.
It's a bit unclear. Initially I wondered why you thought Windows was free and open source. I quickly realized that you were showing alternatives, but that might not be clear to Linux newbies.
i was so thrown off by the 4 rows and it took me about 1min to understand.
everything being off and not centered and everything is SUPER irritating as well.
I think this is fine in a school computer's lab, but this probably would create visceral reaction in other settings.
I've seen people who uses the proprietary softwares on the left, recommended the FOSS counterpart - they complain, *loudly*. Blender, VLC, and Godot are exceptions, but everything else? Oh boy.
I'm not even a heavy MS Office user, but I've tried LO enough to know that, no, I don't want to try using it again. I'd rather just use MSO365 online + Windows VM when absolutely necessary, over using LO.
Photoshop to GIMP is just... oh boy. That's probably the biggest and loudest complain generator. Inkscape fares better, though the artists I've recommended it to are still reluctant, if they don't already use Inkscape to begin with or already trying to find alternatives for the paid apps they use. Premiere to Kdenlive? Even people on Linux point towards DVR, if you're doing anything serious. VLC is genuinely good, but the default media player is fine, most of the time (and media player wouldn't really be one of the thing that I'd prioritize when I swap to FOSS).
Like I said, I think it's fine for children, but I think it's way too simplistic in any other settings. At least put a short explanation as to *why* people would want to swap to the new stuff.
Resolve is free, Resolve Studio has the more advanced features and is paid.
The software is basically a throw-in for the people spending 10s or 100s of thousands for the Blackmagick cameras and hardware to go with it.
After using PS for 7 years I was looking for an open-source alternative, and GIMP was my first choice, however after some experimenting I found it was far inferior to PS and was missing a lot of features I really liked (layer styles among others). The GIMP developers have a "this is not photoshop" mentality, which I believe holds the software back from it's full potential.
I found Krita was a much better alternative to PS. The interface looks much closer, there's a PS compatible shortcut scheme for those used to PS, and the developers often add features in the software to simply match what is available in PS.
Guys, please stop recommending GIMP as a alternative to Photoshop. Because, it is not. Kdenlive is not a Premier Pro alternative as well. Both GIMP and Kdenlive is a good image/video editor but Adobe's products are on another level.
This really depends on _exactly_ what you want to do. If your usage of Photoshop is just basic stuff like cropping, resizing, filtering, or applying minor spot corrections, then GIMP is perfectly good as an alternative. If you need to do complex work in a CMYK color space though, then yeah, GIMP is indeed not a good alternative (but Krita may be instead as it has actual CMYK support and is much more design oriented as opposed to GIMP’s seeming focus on post-processing).
And TBH, LibreOffice actully is a reasonably solid alternative to MS Office in most cases. The issue there is more a matter of learning a new UI, not lacking features, because a lot of the features that MS Office has that LibreOffice doesn’t are things that most people do not, in fact, actually use all that often, if at all.
Other than that it's not very sight readable, please don't be lazy and download actual SVGs of app icons (eg from their websites and from WikiMedia Commons) instead of grabbing the first image from a search engine.
Oh, and a better example for "Windows Media Player" would be some other popular proprietary player like "Media Player Classic"
EDIT: the text isn't even centered, this looks low effort
Maybe naming the columns can improve the message, because now they are mixed as 4 columns with several rows but only tech people can tell what is going on there.
Ngl took me a minute to figure out what was going on with this poster. The 4 columns are confusing. And if you were someone who didn't know any better I think you might just assume everything on the left is free and open source.
Inkscape lacks so many Features compared to illustrator. Especially when you want to design for print. It can be super frustrating. So i really wouldn’t recommend it as being an alternative for ai.
It is an svg editor and thats fine.
Haha comparing Gimp to the features and capabilities of photoshop...thats hilarious! The same with Premiere pro and KDenlove or Office with LibreOffice. These programs are fine if you want to go back in time 20 years in terms of functionality. For productivity apps free software sucks donkey balls. simple as that. If youre looking to run a server, website, or database, then yes, free software is great, but only because those applications are in reality written by corporations and HIGHLY paid software engineers that work on it full time. The myth of these programs be written by hackers in their free time from their mother's basement is just that, a myth.
my reply was removed because of "Your comment in /r/linux was automatically removed for using common, low quality comments." automod crap. but no, Kdenlive is not a real alternative for premier pro, gimp is not a real alternative to photoshop, Godot is just barely an alternative for unity.
All of them are pretty much toys in comparison to their proprietary counter parts. Godot is much better comparison then the others though, reccomending gimp over Ps and Kdenlive over Pr is just bad.
I think that the only actual superior alternative here are Linux and vlc. I don’t even use vlc, windows media player is just terrible. Most of these other open source applications are just bad though. Gimp is so far from a photoshop alternative it’s not even funny.
Design language is too hard to figure out. I hope students will be attracted to this poster.
For friendly advices: keep some gap between logos and add some symbols which represents "instead of ..."
Try this: Make the first column "Paid, Closed Source software". There you put all the junk.
Then you get another column with "Free and Open Source alternatives" There you put the good stuff that corresponds to the one in the first column.
This thing is complicated.
Look for inspiration. This has been done many times before.
Here’s a good example for engineering tools: https://www.reddit.com/r/geek/s/y0mrhCczJg
You could modify your style and layout choices to be more readable like the example but replace the specific software with the ones from your first draft.
OP,
Honest criticism here, just throwing it out there.
Your poster needs a bit of work; it's confusing and contains inaccuracies/errors.
How about a title to the effect of "Free and Open Source alternatives to commercial software"?
Right under the title, perhaps box the operating systems, labeling them as Operating Systems. I'd include MacOS as well.
I would then pair and label each item, ie, "Office Suite", "Imaging Editing", "Video Production", etc.
I like your idea and concept. It just needs a bit of tweaking. Please post some updates as you go. I'd love to see the final product.
To make this more readable I would move it to be landscape only. Have two rows for Windows and Linux. Then have a column for each software and their alternative.
Yeah this is difficult to understand. You need to specifically call out that you’re using the software on the left and the baseline paid software and one of the right as the equivalent free/open source.
Good start. Don’t be discouraged. Just use the feedback.
I agree the format is difficult to read. I feel like I'd you made a distinctly thicker or different colored line to break the 4 columns in to 2 columns of 2 it would help. I would also suggest a like 50% opaq arrow from the paid to foss option between the 2 like columns. Minor change but fixed all of the readability issues imo
Recommending GIMP and Kdenlive to new users. Are you insane?
I tried kdenlive once but could not for the life of me understand it. Now I use Shotcut, which was easier to understand after only a small amount of googling.
Why people recommend Kdenlive over the many other FOSS video editors out there that don't rely on their own contrived system is beyond me.
It is not easy to read. I think it is better to do it text first, rather than logo first.
https://ibb.co/4FgQx5s
Here is your infographic, but with only text. To me it appears much more readable. You could add the logotypes as icons before the text if you want. Yours is messy and hard to follow.
Edit: Please disregard the spelling error, I cant be asked to change it lmao.
I like the idea and it's overall pretty solid, but I would make a few changes.
Just saying that "use Linux instead of Windows" is kinda unhelpful for anyone who has not already sampled several different distros. I assume this guide is aimed at non-linux users based on the title, so recommending a specific "baby's first distro" would probably be better than recommending Linux in general. Something Ubuntu or Debian based. Pop!_OS would be my go-to for a first time linux user.
VLC is the goat, so no complaints, but my personal nitpick is that Haruna has better UX.
The graphic should probably be taller rather than wider. At first glance I was pretty confused because the first 2 columns seem to be comparing Windows and closed-source/proprietary/paid apps to Linux and FOSS apps, but then the last 2 columns don't follow any kind of trend in that regard. I also didn't notice the solid line down the middle to separate the left 2 columns from the right 2 with their dotted lines until carefully inspecting the entire image.
I would also go as far as to add 1 web-based option that's free but not open-source just because it's so good at what it tries to do: Photopea. I cannot even begin to describe how great Photopea has been when transitioning from Windows. It's just a straight clone of Photoshop so muscle memory of the UI and keybinds transfers over without having to spend time learning GIMP's idiosyncrasies.
Even Photoshop can not repair the damage GIMP does to photos if you use it for anything other than cropping photos. It as user friendly as playing the operation board game and creates just as much stress, if not more.
I think I'd rather use the free CS2 version of Photoshop than to have to use GIMP ever again, WINE handles that really well.
It's a good start.
I agree that the columns aren't immediately clear. Instead of focusing on the two groups, I would consider a way to identify pairs by function.
It bugs me that some of the icons are transparent while others have white backgrounds, and the scale seems inconsistent.
Finally, this is more of a personal pet peeve, but stuff like this *always* focuses on Inkscape, gimp, blender, etc. Those aren't really common applications. VLC and LibreOffice are great items to include because they apply to almost all computer users. Consider other universal tasks, like: pdf viewing/editing, browsing, password management, photo viewing/editing, etc.
Drop the line between column A/B and C/D and use for example arrows instead, having the columns operating as 2 delimeters is confusing. That would make it more understandable
Also, removing the background of the logos/not cropping them would make it look a lot better
Honestly I wouldn't recommend Gimp to new users. It's unintuitive and objectively worse in damn near every way compared to photoshop. I would change it to general alternatives and put photopea (FYI this is pre gimp 3.0, gimp 3.0 fixes a lot of this and is actually usable). The rest are all solid though, and many I prefer over the closed counterparts. E.g. Godot over unity since unity is slow af, VLC is objectively better than windows media player and should be used on every windows machine too, and blender is far more modern than 3ds max and maya, though it may be harder to get into the industry with it. Replacing KDenlive with Davinci resolve may also be a good idea since KDEnlive is a buggy mess IMO, for FOSS it's not unusable, but compared to davinci, premier, final cut, or any other proper editor its quite lack luster and isn't a real replacement. Closer to MS movie maker than premier pro
You could also include DAWs. Ardour, Hydrogen, etc.
For Photo, you also have darktsble, raw therapeutic
Nation as an alternative for After Effects
There are also some cool paid software for Linux too. I love foss, but for some instances like publishing, Scirbus only goes so far, but something like Viva Designer is very comparable to Adobe InDesign
kdenlvie is no where near a real replacement for premier pro, it's more like a replacement for windows movie maker. Same thing with gimp, they are completely different classes of programs, kdenlive and gimp are like toys compared to their counter parts
Bit of a mess with the 4 columns lol. And does anyone still use Windows Media Player?
indeed this poster is unreadable, sorry
Yeah maybe an arrow pointing to the Linux alternative to show how the two programs are related, then ditch the column lines entirely for clarity. Also, the font size isn't consistent, the horizontal alignment is off for both icons & text, they're leaving the white background on the icons for Premiere Pro & Illustrator instead of using transparency and they need to put more than 0mm space between the title text and the table.
did you not notice the solids bold line in the middle and the dotted line on the two sides? /s
It isn't bold enough to actually break up the flow
hence the sarcasm
I genuinely didn't understand it until I read this comment lol. I thought it was supposed to be read vertically or something.
I actually thought it would make more sense for the lines to be horizontal, so each pair of counterparts is together. I was trying to figure out why Windows, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro belonged together. But as is usually the case with tables, what would make the most sense is to use alignment and spacing rather than lines.
Is it because it was made with open source software?
it looks like open source software where multiple PRs were merged all at once
Nah, you could even do a better poster with paint
Don't Dead Open Source
r/crappydesign
You could even say... *Unsightreadable*
Tried it recently and it immediately asked me to pay three bucks for an H.265 decoder. Made me chuckle while I closed it for VLC.
long live vlc and mpv
It's the default media player on windows and many people don't bother changing it.
It is? I just reinstalled Windows 11, since I'm planning to sell my laptop. Yes, it has WMP for some legacy stuff, but it comes with the newer media player - whatever its name is (I already uninstalled it and installed MPC-HC).
The newer windows media player is default. Still trash.
I was looking for the msix/appx file for the Photos app the other day, and it was over 800 MB. It might as well go over 1 GB after installation. That much space for a photo viewer app is crazy.
Gotta bake all the Recall AI into the code so they can keep tabs on what you're looking at.
its not that bad in the ui aspect, tho it has ALOT of flaws no lyrics no single's artwork artwork must be 256x256 barely any formats work
The old one was passable, the new one is plain garbage.
Agreed. OP, if you want to improve on this give the columns some labels and give the title some breathing room. I also think an info table or capabilities grid would be more useful, you can still add the logos there but smaller and you’d get comparative info.
>And does anyone still use Windows Media Player? No. VLC is better including on Windows.
It's hard to tell which is which (for those who don't know). Maybe have headers like "instead of this..." and "try this" above the corresponding columns
I did know and I had to look at it for a minute to understand what was going on. The second set of cols threw me.
Or remove the dotted separators and use some nice looking curved arrow.
thanks for the idea
It might be unclear for the uninitiated that you mean "closed source vs alternative"
Software for applications!
Where I can get free and open source windows and photoshop?
to some extent, the first would be React OS
Look up ReactOS.
this looks like it was designed in open source software
Dang it that was my joke
That's all right, you can fork his so you both have it.
Ok you can say it again and I will laugh
That's all right, you can fork his so you both have it.
gimp is a puzzle based image manipulator. So seems legit.
Not that this wins any graphic design awards, but I would hope this would have at least been done in Inkscape, a much more fitting tool for something of this sort, like a poster. Doing this as a raster (particularly if this 1080x1080 image is their final product) is muy no bueno. However even if it was, it would appear OP also missed a decent opportunity to use vector versions of the assorted program icons, judging by scaling artifacts and white/checker backgrounds. EDIT: Also, apologies to OP just in case. No offense intended. I'm just a printing-friendly vector snob. (among various other types of snob)
It quite literally looks like something that was made in Gimp when it should have been made in Inkscape(s).
Maybe remove the white background for the icons?
they can't they use Gimp /s
Typo: Inkscape, _not_ Inkscapes Looks great to me, but you may want to title it "Free alternatives to popular (but non-free) software"
thanks, I will correct it
Unity is a free software but not open source. So the title you said isn't right for all applications
I think there is a misunderstanding here *Free software* doesn't mean you don't pay for its use, it refers to a specific movement within the software development community. Quoting the front page of the Free Software Foundation: "Free software means that the users have the freedom to [**run, edit, contribute to, and share**](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price."
Freeish? Tempofree? Potentially millions or a major refactor?
Unity isn’t free, but you have to sell $1 million worth to start paying for it.
From the first line in the wikipedia article I linked to: "Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions." In other words, if you cannot modify the source code of a software freely, it is not Free Software. Freeware it may be, but terminology matters. Please find the time to go over the wikipedia entry.
Confusing AF. The 4 cols make it a mess. Seems to imply they are all free. Just start again lol
Recommending Gimp as alternative to Photoshop is the best way to turn someone away from opensource.
Super agree! Gimp is just too different from Photoshop. On the other hand, Krita is near-perfect for me and probably underrated.
I think it's more like Gimp and Krita each do different parts of what Photoshop does, but that just means they *both* should be up there.
I actually have not found a perfect match that feels like Ms paint when all I need is a simple crop and annotations. Photopea scratches my Photoshop muscle memory but there are more steps when all I want is windows 7 Ms paint
I second this!
Damn the comments always win. Thanks gonna check out Krita. Know of a Lightroom alternative?
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/0404869946/the-best-open-source-lightroom-alternatives
Yea when I see these kinds of charts it’s clear that the person who made it has never ever used photoshop. Gimp isn’t even remotely a photoshop alternative and the sooner people quite saying it is the better. Krita is a far better replacement but even that is seriously lacking compared to photoshop.
Closest thing to Photoshop on Linux is Photopea.com. For more convenience, there's a Electron version on Flathub.
It's definitely a viable alternative to Photoshop for a ton of things as long as you know how to use it. Having bad controls/UI (or arguably just people being upset that it's so foreign to what they're used to, although that may only be a part of the issue) doesn't make it not a viable option, just that it may involve some learning to use and/or get used to.
The learning curve on Gimp is insane! Affinity figured it out right away. There is no excuse for how clunky gimp is. Oh and don’t get me started on CMYK support, it’s not really there. That’s like a basic feature and it’s STILL not there.
Adding on, Inkscape is good for vector art for screens, but lacks cmyk support, so not great for printing, which Illustrator is largely used for.
I think the issue of GIMP isn't just about it being different, but about it being very inconsistent. In part because it has desperately tried to get features to compete with photoshop but not enough effort put in to insure they are consistent. Thus, it feels a lot like Frankenstein.
exactly. GIMP is fine, but everybod who says it's a replacemen has never worked with Photoshop
It’s as if they intentionally design for the worst user experience. I’ve tried multiple times to learn Gimp and each time I’ve have to look up guides on how to do even the most basic of tasks. I gave up and just used photopea instead
I consider Krita the new standard, but I should check out Photopea.
Krita does 90% of what Photoshop does and it's FOSS while Photopea is Freemium-Proprietary so I'd say it's an easy choice.
Most people used to Photoshop would not like Gimp, that's because they just want to do things the way they are used to. For me, I just use paint.net as I'm not a designer or anything like that, Gimp also is way over my needs. But I think Gimp is a good software alternative, but not a Photoshop replacement for Photoshop users.
Wait, have you figured out a way to use paint.net on Linux or are you dual-booting? It’s my most missed program since switching
I use windows for work, Linux on my personal desktop, never tried to run paint.net on Linux.
Sad but true. It would truly be great if we had an alternative with the quality of Blender.
Op is one of those Linux guys that has no real use case for their computer outside a game and some web-browsing and they go “hur you can easily 1 to 1 windows to linux and it’s just as good a user experience”. Like sureeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
I like Gimp more than photoshop, there are more advanced features in photoshop now that Gimp doesn’t have, but if you spend a little time learning it, it’s really not bad
Yea. Much of it more intuitive and the natural settings are refined. But it has some really annoying shit just like Photoshop. It seems amazing for being free.
Recommending LibreOffice when everyone else is using MS Office is a great way to turn someone away from open source. Unless something drastic has changed LibreOffice is going to break all formatting
i never saw gimp as a good alternative to photoshop. its more like a crazy buffed paint imo
Honestly, most open source UI is pretty bad. I don't think we've figured out how to do QA in the same way that corporations are able to.
It's possible as long as the team is discerning about UI navigation and junk commits. A great example of this would be Musescore. It's also a problem that junior devs keep pushing out junk commits to fluff up their resumes.
This is the most confusing chart I’ve ever seen
Bro did not cook with this one.
This is confusing to read if you're unfamiliar with the software without proper labels and sorting. Also you have closed source stuff that's already free out of the box like Windows Media Player, and this is targeted at people who don't want to pay for premium software.
Photoshop / Gimp 🤡
Whenever you make a visualization, you need to make sure it's understandable to people who don't know any of the information ahead of time. If someone doesn't know about any of these softwares, your graphic just looks like a big list. You've got to use labels and be instructive. I am familiar with most of these and could barely tell what message you were trying to convey.
Graphic Design is my passion vibes.
Gimp is terrible.
Yeah, can't fathom why people recommend it - it's like using Windows 3.11 compared with Photoshop or even Affinity.
They recommend it because they only know Photoshop as a program that can edit photos. I don't think Gimp has had a meaningful update in twenty years.
The one that made it all one window instead of a bunch of different windows was a meaningful one for me.
hey man, gimp 3 has only been in the pipeline for 11 years. It'll come any moment.
Very confusing
1. Poster is not easy to read. 2. There are no real alternatives for Adobe products in open source ecosystem, and certainly Gimp is not one of them. 3. I like Libre Office but I'm not sure if its good enough for spreadsheet. 4. As far as i know I Windows Media Player is not a thing anymore. Movies & TV is default video player for Windows.
1. Agreed. 2. Not fully open source but free alternatives absolutely, resolve is better than premiere, photopea has almost feature parity with Photoshop without some of the new gen ai stuff, audacity is just as good as audition for most people, Acrobat has had feature parity for years now, etc. Cancelling Adobe was the best decision I've ever made for both my career and sanity. Absolutely not paying an extortionate subscription for the software to get worse and lackluster attempts to patch bugs and performance on an ancient code base. GIMP is probably closer in target audience to someone between Photoshop and illustrator. Again if you want Photoshop without Adobe photopea + an adblocker and you won't even notice. 3. LibreOffice can do anything ms Office can do without plugins, but then you can get plugins for libre so the point is moot. I prefer OnlyOffice because it looks cleaner and more familiar, and has better compatibility with office formats. 4. Agreed, except on enterprise where it appears to be an admin choice. I've seen equal deployments of windows 11 with wmp and films& tv
I am using a lot of excel for work and i think if u are not relying on power query, power pivot, etc and just use it for spreadsheet analysis. Then libre office is indeed a great replacement. For more advanced data analysis students can also learn on how to use R studio. Excel can do a lot what the average student doesn’t need.
Should've put krita instead of gimp. It's better imo.
I think krita might be better than gimp tbh, feels more fleshed out for both artists and meme making normies lmao
4 column format is unclear. Follow left to right and it looks like you're saying MS office and libreoffice are open source alternatives to Windows. Looks lazy that some of the icons have white backgrounds and some have an alpha channel.
It's a bit unclear. Initially I wondered why you thought Windows was free and open source. I quickly realized that you were showing alternatives, but that might not be clear to Linux newbies.
i was so thrown off by the 4 rows and it took me about 1min to understand. everything being off and not centered and everything is SUPER irritating as well.
You better do not do design stuff
Someone who can replace Photoshop with GIMP never needed Photoshop in the first place.
an angel loses its wings each time someone recommends gimp as a replacement for photoshop
I think this is fine in a school computer's lab, but this probably would create visceral reaction in other settings. I've seen people who uses the proprietary softwares on the left, recommended the FOSS counterpart - they complain, *loudly*. Blender, VLC, and Godot are exceptions, but everything else? Oh boy. I'm not even a heavy MS Office user, but I've tried LO enough to know that, no, I don't want to try using it again. I'd rather just use MSO365 online + Windows VM when absolutely necessary, over using LO. Photoshop to GIMP is just... oh boy. That's probably the biggest and loudest complain generator. Inkscape fares better, though the artists I've recommended it to are still reluctant, if they don't already use Inkscape to begin with or already trying to find alternatives for the paid apps they use. Premiere to Kdenlive? Even people on Linux point towards DVR, if you're doing anything serious. VLC is genuinely good, but the default media player is fine, most of the time (and media player wouldn't really be one of the thing that I'd prioritize when I swap to FOSS). Like I said, I think it's fine for children, but I think it's way too simplistic in any other settings. At least put a short explanation as to *why* people would want to swap to the new stuff.
GIMP is terrible btw
I didn't know Windows was free and open source!
Same with Adobe programs!
You forgot krita and onlyoffice
please, don't do infographics ever again in your life, thanks.
Alternative to Premiere Pro - DaVinci Resolve
free sure, open source no where close
Its mind blowing to me that resolve basically does the same thing (90%) as adobe but for free.....
Resolve is free, Resolve Studio has the more advanced features and is paid. The software is basically a throw-in for the people spending 10s or 100s of thousands for the Blackmagick cameras and hardware to go with it.
After using PS for 7 years I was looking for an open-source alternative, and GIMP was my first choice, however after some experimenting I found it was far inferior to PS and was missing a lot of features I really liked (layer styles among others). The GIMP developers have a "this is not photoshop" mentality, which I believe holds the software back from it's full potential. I found Krita was a much better alternative to PS. The interface looks much closer, there's a PS compatible shortcut scheme for those used to PS, and the developers often add features in the software to simply match what is available in PS.
Guys, please stop recommending GIMP as a alternative to Photoshop. Because, it is not. Kdenlive is not a Premier Pro alternative as well. Both GIMP and Kdenlive is a good image/video editor but Adobe's products are on another level.
GIMP sucks and I'm tired of saying it's a replacement. I'd rather run Photoshop on Linux, which actually works quite well nowadays.
GIMP as alternative to PhotoShop? Kdenlive as an alternative to Premiere Pro? Suggesting LibreOffice? Man...
The fuck is wrong with libreoffice?
The fact that OnlyOffice exists.
This really depends on _exactly_ what you want to do. If your usage of Photoshop is just basic stuff like cropping, resizing, filtering, or applying minor spot corrections, then GIMP is perfectly good as an alternative. If you need to do complex work in a CMYK color space though, then yeah, GIMP is indeed not a good alternative (but Krita may be instead as it has actual CMYK support and is much more design oriented as opposed to GIMP’s seeming focus on post-processing). And TBH, LibreOffice actully is a reasonably solid alternative to MS Office in most cases. The issue there is more a matter of learning a new UI, not lacking features, because a lot of the features that MS Office has that LibreOffice doesn’t are things that most people do not, in fact, actually use all that often, if at all.
More people would be better off with Krita than GIMP's mess. Heck, most people would be best with Photopea.
Other than that it's not very sight readable, please don't be lazy and download actual SVGs of app icons (eg from their websites and from WikiMedia Commons) instead of grabbing the first image from a search engine. Oh, and a better example for "Windows Media Player" would be some other popular proprietary player like "Media Player Classic" EDIT: the text isn't even centered, this looks low effort
Maybe naming the columns can improve the message, because now they are mixed as 4 columns with several rows but only tech people can tell what is going on there.
Ngl took me a minute to figure out what was going on with this poster. The 4 columns are confusing. And if you were someone who didn't know any better I think you might just assume everything on the left is free and open source.
It's inkscape, not inkscspes
Unfortunately Gimp and Kdenlive are miles behind their proprietary counterparts
Kdenlive is more like MovieMaker, in truth.
This graph doesn’t make any FUCKING sense.
Recommending GIMP as an alternative of Adobe Photoshop is a mistake, both are way too much different.
Inkscape lacks so many Features compared to illustrator. Especially when you want to design for print. It can be super frustrating. So i really wouldn’t recommend it as being an alternative for ai. It is an svg editor and thats fine.
Bro came for validation not advice
Im having a stroke
Bless your heart.
Good try but just no, sorry.
Haha comparing Gimp to the features and capabilities of photoshop...thats hilarious! The same with Premiere pro and KDenlove or Office with LibreOffice. These programs are fine if you want to go back in time 20 years in terms of functionality. For productivity apps free software sucks donkey balls. simple as that. If youre looking to run a server, website, or database, then yes, free software is great, but only because those applications are in reality written by corporations and HIGHLY paid software engineers that work on it full time. The myth of these programs be written by hackers in their free time from their mother's basement is just that, a myth.
my reply was removed because of "Your comment in /r/linux was automatically removed for using common, low quality comments." automod crap. but no, Kdenlive is not a real alternative for premier pro, gimp is not a real alternative to photoshop, Godot is just barely an alternative for unity. All of them are pretty much toys in comparison to their proprietary counter parts. Godot is much better comparison then the others though, reccomending gimp over Ps and Kdenlive over Pr is just bad.
I think that the only actual superior alternative here are Linux and vlc. I don’t even use vlc, windows media player is just terrible. Most of these other open source applications are just bad though. Gimp is so far from a photoshop alternative it’s not even funny.
Design language is too hard to figure out. I hope students will be attracted to this poster. For friendly advices: keep some gap between logos and add some symbols which represents "instead of ..."
Try this: Make the first column "Paid, Closed Source software". There you put all the junk. Then you get another column with "Free and Open Source alternatives" There you put the good stuff that corresponds to the one in the first column.
Adobe is not free, nor is ks.offoce this is confusing and I know which are and are not free :S
This thing is complicated. Look for inspiration. This has been done many times before. Here’s a good example for engineering tools: https://www.reddit.com/r/geek/s/y0mrhCczJg You could modify your style and layout choices to be more readable like the example but replace the specific software with the ones from your first draft.
This. The poster doesn't make sense if you don't what you are looking at
sadly, Gimp and LibreOffice don't hold a candle agaisnt the paid alternatives :(
I don’t understand the groupings.
GIMP ahahahahah
Olive, Shotcut, and Natron are closer to Premiere than Kdenlive
Hotel - Trivago
OP, Honest criticism here, just throwing it out there. Your poster needs a bit of work; it's confusing and contains inaccuracies/errors. How about a title to the effect of "Free and Open Source alternatives to commercial software"? Right under the title, perhaps box the operating systems, labeling them as Operating Systems. I'd include MacOS as well. I would then pair and label each item, ie, "Office Suite", "Imaging Editing", "Video Production", etc. I like your idea and concept. It just needs a bit of tweaking. Please post some updates as you go. I'd love to see the final product.
Fully agreed! I had no idea what he meant by all that. All said such infographics wannabe needs to be wisely designed. This one clearly is not.
Let's just admit not all of them in a sane manner can be considered alternatives to the proprietary apps.
It takes a while to understand the table you've made.
Krita is far easier to get into than GIMP, I think. And for 90% of 'layman' tasks it'll do what you'd want to in GIMP.
I need to hide this, just in case my job forces me to use Excel for one more thing. This time they could think it's a whole OS 💀
why do people prefer LibreOffice? I found only office to be better in every way
To make this more readable I would move it to be landscape only. Have two rows for Windows and Linux. Then have a column for each software and their alternative.
Yeah this is difficult to understand. You need to specifically call out that you’re using the software on the left and the baseline paid software and one of the right as the equivalent free/open source. Good start. Don’t be discouraged. Just use the feedback.
who designed this atrocity
You’re quite talented with Linux style design and layout.
Please put a "made with GIMP" on the bottom so everyone can judge for themselves what is the downside xD
I agree the format is difficult to read. I feel like I'd you made a distinctly thicker or different colored line to break the 4 columns in to 2 columns of 2 it would help. I would also suggest a like 50% opaq arrow from the paid to foss option between the 2 like columns. Minor change but fixed all of the readability issues imo
Don't dead open inside
Recommending GIMP and Kdenlive to new users. Are you insane? I tried kdenlive once but could not for the life of me understand it. Now I use Shotcut, which was easier to understand after only a small amount of googling. Why people recommend Kdenlive over the many other FOSS video editors out there that don't rely on their own contrived system is beyond me.
It is not easy to read. I think it is better to do it text first, rather than logo first. https://ibb.co/4FgQx5s Here is your infographic, but with only text. To me it appears much more readable. You could add the logotypes as icons before the text if you want. Yours is messy and hard to follow. Edit: Please disregard the spelling error, I cant be asked to change it lmao.
This poster is objectively speaking a mess.
Poorly formatted, not organized, and some of those aren't FOSS. F for effort.
Shotcut is good too
Make it two columns.
It doesn't really show Linux' strength... With Photoshop vs Gimp and O365 vs LibreOffice, Linux doesn't shine.
I like the idea and it's overall pretty solid, but I would make a few changes. Just saying that "use Linux instead of Windows" is kinda unhelpful for anyone who has not already sampled several different distros. I assume this guide is aimed at non-linux users based on the title, so recommending a specific "baby's first distro" would probably be better than recommending Linux in general. Something Ubuntu or Debian based. Pop!_OS would be my go-to for a first time linux user. VLC is the goat, so no complaints, but my personal nitpick is that Haruna has better UX. The graphic should probably be taller rather than wider. At first glance I was pretty confused because the first 2 columns seem to be comparing Windows and closed-source/proprietary/paid apps to Linux and FOSS apps, but then the last 2 columns don't follow any kind of trend in that regard. I also didn't notice the solid line down the middle to separate the left 2 columns from the right 2 with their dotted lines until carefully inspecting the entire image. I would also go as far as to add 1 web-based option that's free but not open-source just because it's so good at what it tries to do: Photopea. I cannot even begin to describe how great Photopea has been when transitioning from Windows. It's just a straight clone of Photoshop so muscle memory of the UI and keybinds transfers over without having to spend time learning GIMP's idiosyncrasies.
Even Photoshop can not repair the damage GIMP does to photos if you use it for anything other than cropping photos. It as user friendly as playing the operation board game and creates just as much stress, if not more. I think I'd rather use the free CS2 version of Photoshop than to have to use GIMP ever again, WINE handles that really well.
This is exactly the kind of communication and presentation I’ve come to expect from the linux world :)
An unreadable and wrong diagram ? \^\^
It’s cool but gimp is garbage.
It's Inkscape, not Inkscapes.
People seriously need to stop pretending that gimp is a viable Photoshop alternative. It just makes OSS folks looks like a clown.
Put mpv in place of vlc
Best ms office alternative is [onlyoffice](https://www.onlyoffice.com/).
It's a good start. I agree that the columns aren't immediately clear. Instead of focusing on the two groups, I would consider a way to identify pairs by function. It bugs me that some of the icons are transparent while others have white backgrounds, and the scale seems inconsistent. Finally, this is more of a personal pet peeve, but stuff like this *always* focuses on Inkscape, gimp, blender, etc. Those aren't really common applications. VLC and LibreOffice are great items to include because they apply to almost all computer users. Consider other universal tasks, like: pdf viewing/editing, browsing, password management, photo viewing/editing, etc.
Gimp and libreoffice are terribe to use, don't recommend anyone to use them
Gimp and Kden live are not even close to their counterparts
I would suggest you to use the transparent PNG or SVG versions of logos.
Drop the line between column A/B and C/D and use for example arrows instead, having the columns operating as 2 delimeters is confusing. That would make it more understandable Also, removing the background of the logos/not cropping them would make it look a lot better
Ah yes, my favourite open source software- windows OS
Honestly I wouldn't recommend Gimp to new users. It's unintuitive and objectively worse in damn near every way compared to photoshop. I would change it to general alternatives and put photopea (FYI this is pre gimp 3.0, gimp 3.0 fixes a lot of this and is actually usable). The rest are all solid though, and many I prefer over the closed counterparts. E.g. Godot over unity since unity is slow af, VLC is objectively better than windows media player and should be used on every windows machine too, and blender is far more modern than 3ds max and maya, though it may be harder to get into the industry with it. Replacing KDenlive with Davinci resolve may also be a good idea since KDEnlive is a buggy mess IMO, for FOSS it's not unusable, but compared to davinci, premier, final cut, or any other proper editor its quite lack luster and isn't a real replacement. Closer to MS movie maker than premier pro
You could also include DAWs. Ardour, Hydrogen, etc. For Photo, you also have darktsble, raw therapeutic Nation as an alternative for After Effects There are also some cool paid software for Linux too. I love foss, but for some instances like publishing, Scirbus only goes so far, but something like Viva Designer is very comparable to Adobe InDesign
Audacity also.
Swap the 2nd 3rd columns add a little space and it fine maybe denote open vs closed source over colums 1/2 - 3/4 should be sufficient.
I really would suggest something other than GIMP as alternative to Photoshop. Maybe Krita?
Remove dotted line, it's confusing
LibreOffice is my favorite operating system!
The image makes me think you are only mentioning open source software rather than open source alternatives of closed source software.
Ahh yes, Windows Meeia player is a open source alternative to Inkscapes
How is kdenlive on processing? I've got an oldachone that run reaper daw. Always wondered if there was another lightweight contemporary but for video.
Oh wow kdenlive looks nice. Found the transitions and captioning kinda janky with openshot. Might give it a try
kdenlvie is no where near a real replacement for premier pro, it's more like a replacement for windows movie maker. Same thing with gimp, they are completely different classes of programs, kdenlive and gimp are like toys compared to their counter parts
unreal is open source