What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good?

3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don't hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I'm not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they're hard - but basic modeling features.

Hell, I'd even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are "free but terrible" and "you need a mortgage to use this".

I'd love to see a user-friendly, easily-implemented FOSS alternative to the entire Android system.

The options that exist now often can't get past all the defenses that Android and phone manufacturers put into systems to secure their own data collection/revenue. I have an older Motorola phone that I literally can't install another operating system on.

We desperately need a stable, user-friendly, and hardware-adaptive replacement for Android. I don't want that shit on my phones any longer.

A big one for me is Microsoft office (desktop), Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don't come close,

What, exactly, is missing? MS Office pretty much peaked, feature-wise, in like 2003 (or, arguably, 2007), and LibreOffice is ahead of that. I also find the workflow to be closer to "classic" Office and, to a slightly lesser extent, WordPerfect, which I appreciate.

You can even give LibreOffice the ribbon menu if you want (it's in preferences somewhere). The default button icons may be rough (though recent versions have improve), but you can even customize those.

I'm sorry but... 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

huh, i much prefer libreoffice to msoffice, i can't even think of a reason why anyone could prefer msoffice.

Im a but gobsmacked at the notion.

what do you use the drawing for?

Business Accounting software under FOSS is abysmal. Poor quality, poor documentation, poor functionality, limited locale support and limited local support.

CAM software under FOSS is limited to three axis at best, but most is two and a half axis.

Office functionality is covered with LibreOffice. Your assertion that it's 20 years behind is in my experience not based in fact.

Source: I've been using FOSS for over a quarter of a century.

Tax filing software

I'm not sure I follow. LibreOffice is at least as good (if not better) than Offics365 unless maybe if you're doing advanced shit in Excel, or need specifically coded macros.

Considering Microsoft's push to make everything into a webwrapped application, I think LibreOffice is only going to be a better and better alternative as time moves on.

That's amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn't do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that's what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we'd switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

@VirusMaster3073 music DAWs. I think the only real option is Ardour, but I tried it and was struggling to just figure out how to create a couple instrument tracks. Could be skill issue, but honestly I'm pretty good at figuring out UIs so if I was struggling a lot with the basics, it's probably not just me. So I'm still on garageband for now which doesn't get in my way when I'm trying to make music

Adobe After Effects!! PLEASE DEAR GOD

This is the singular thing still keeping me using Adobe software. If this was replaced then I could be FREEE

I'd like to see an open-source decentralized game store, like a competitor to Steam, GOG, etc. However, I think it should also target emulators. There's still an unfounded stigma toward emulation even though emulators themselves are legal, and even though the big AAA game companies themselves are now using them as a lazy way to repackage and resell their old games on new platforms.

One of the biggest barriers to entry into emulation is the setup. Even with super user-friendly frontends like Emulation Station, people are still required to either go out of their way to either legally backup the games they already own, or told to "do some searches," because of legal issues. Nevermind how this exposes new users to potential malware.

But people still make new games for these old systems. It's entirely possible to make a store that can sell ROMs legally - one already exists, itch.io. But imagine a federated open-source game store, one where game makers can choose to legally sell their own games, and then create plugins for the emulation frontends to allow people to buy roms directly from those interfaces. It would turn emulation into a fully complete console-like experience, all while being available on more platforms than any console could ever hope to be (including those same consoles when they're jailbroken!)

I also think it would be the final puzzle piece that legitimizes emulation.

MS Office isn’t better than LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, they all do the same task of making docs, spreadsheets, and presentations with very similar UI. It’s a no brainer to use the one that doesn’t bug you to use OneDrive.

Linux gaming has come a long way, especially with the introduction of things like Proton and popularisation of it by the Steam Deck. If you can play games on the Steam Deck, those games run on Linux :D

The main reasons (mind you, not only reasons) why people don’t just switch to Linux is:

• it’s different (humans naturally gravitate towards things they are familiar with)
• partly because Linux has a few things that are unintuitive to the average user (e.g. using terminal), but distros like Mint have mostly solved this issue
• Switching itself is really annoying (I would say I’m in this boat, but I’ve installed Linux on my old computers and will definitely do it again if I ever get a new computer)

Hmm, LibreOffice may not be the prettiest, but it works. For my own documents and presentations I use Typst nowadays. That's a blazing fast modern typesetting alternative to LaTeX. That being said, I can't stand WYSIWIG stuff but that might not be everybody's cup of tea.

I mostly run into stubborn manufacturers like Roland that only release their musical instrument companion apps for Mac/Win and leave Linux Digital Audio Workstations hanging.

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don't know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don't, and I'm just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the "crutches") and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it's WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don't care. :-)

MS Onenote. Nothing comes close to it. With stylus support etc...

I heard https://www.onlyoffice.com/ is good, but have no personal experience.

Project management. There is one very good but old solution, open project is barely bearable.

I’m with you on the “FOSS office alternatives are shit”, but unfortunately MS office is also shit. Google is the closest I have found to a good office suite but even that is becoming a bit chaotic and awkward. LyX is a promising word processor but also pretty awkward to use in its own way. I’ve got nothing, there.

As far as gaming, this sound less kind than intended but you deserve any shit you get for saying Linux gaming is bad these days. Apart from a few AAA games with anti-cheat where the devs just don’t want to, basically every game just works without any extra effort. Even obscure indie games. I can’t think of the last game I wanted to play that didn’t run on Linux, and often it is better under proton than Windows or native.

I have still quite literally found no other tool, even paid products, that can interior-crop the way IrfanView can (select row/column Y in XYZ if the entire image was XYZ, and crop out that inner part and auto-tuck X and Z directly against each other). And it's had this feature for decades, I think.

Obd2 software so I can diagnose and repair my car. This is more than a dtc scanner, I need to be able to trend values and flash/program modules without a $15k tablet with $50k of yearly software.

Xodo pdf annotator

It seems all pdf annotators are allergic to letting me have

1. The ability to change the text I've highlighted without deleting the entire highlight
2. Several different highlighter colours and opacities

They seem like really silly requirements, but they make a huge difference to how long it takes me to get through my readings for class.

Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don’t come close

I really only use Word and Excel, and I find the FOSS alternatives just fine. I can understand if power-users might find the newer features worthwhile, but for basic word processing and spreadsheets the FOSS options are good enough.

Writer in Libre Office is fine if you install the correct fonts on Linux. Calc needs some work people that know how to use power pivot in excel use it all the time. So not having that makes the switch hard.

https://www.visidata.org/ is way, way, way, way better than excel and it's FOSS.

As for the rest:

• I don't really miss Word because WYSIWYG editing is just kinda bad across the board. Much better to write with markup rather than fighting an auto-formatter all the time.
• I thankfully have not needed to make much of any PowerPoints, but I think I would probably feel similarly about them and want them in some kind of markup language as well.
• Teams just sucks ass compared to many other alternatives, though I'm admittedly not familiar with good FOSS ones
• Outlook is basically just a dinosaur and there's a million ways to do email better. Frankly, FOSS has it beat by a huge margin

The rest of Office isn't really even worth talking about tbh.

I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as "an alternative". I'm really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.

Luckily I'm not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.

There's also many things that proprietary software just can't do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) ... MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time ...

One of the most frustrating programs for me is digiKam. On paper, it's the perfect DAM/photo manager. But it's kinda slow for day-to-day use. The user interface is janky in a lot of ways. It doesn't see constant refinement either. It doesn't even speak to me as a metadata nerd because I don't want to turn my metadata into a janky mess. Yeah, you have a powerful metadata editor. It's like a welding torch without any eye protection.

I'm using ACDSee on Windows, because it's operating on pretty much the same principle (image file metadata is canonical, app database is just for indexing), but it's faster and smoother to use. Not perfect, it has its mild limitations (like why the hell doesn't it support OpenStreetMap - Google Maps kinda sucks for nature trails, you'd think photographers would have pointed this out), but it's just so much more efficient. If digiKam ever gets a huge UI overhaul, switching over will probably be fairly easy though.

Also about a decade ago, I would have said that as far as novel writing software/large structured document word processors go, nothing beats Scrivener. Scrivener is still probably the best software in its niche, but it looks like a bunch of open source word processors in this niche have come a long way. Currently looking at novelWriter, which seems really rad.

Microsoft Access. I have one database that I need that's written in Access, and although I suppose I could convert it to some other system it would be a chore and I'm not that driven to make the change.

I've moved almost everything else onto Linux.

Not as in "FOSS alternative", as it is already open, but simply a Linux version: Tortoise SVN, the file manager integrated UI for SVN. That is actually one of the two things missing in the Linux portfolio. The other being a native port of Notepad++, although this at least runs fine under wine.

Screenreaders.

The one half-decent libre screenreader is Orca, and it only works by hacking X into doing things X was never intended to do. Wayland is much cleaner and more sensible, which means that Orca doesn't work on it at all. This means blind and visually impaired users are physically unable to use modern Linuxes or BSDs.

And Orca was only half-decent.

A decent alternative to Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher

Microsoft Exchange/outlook. It’s such a good email platform, not just because of legacy email/smtp, but all of the other collaborative features that show up in Outlook.

I wish there was a good FOSS (or just works on Linux) alternative to adobe lightroom so I could stop fixing broken windows shit on my wife's computer.

She's a photographer and does a lot of heavy editing stuff. I know there's some alternatives but she says nothing comes close for what she needs to do, and from the few examples she showed me I agree.

I don't know what the fuck Microsoft is doing but almost everytime there's an update something breaks on her laptop. The only thing she does is use lightroom, occasionally Photoshop and Firefox.

I recently had to use her laptop to make a windows installer USB for someone and Rufus was cool. When installing windows though it just didn't see any of the drives in the laptop? Apparently I had to load storage drivers specific to that laptop, which weren't available anywhere online I could find. I managed to get it working by loading a bunch of unrelated drivers for a different HP model laptop, none of them related to storage. I think it was the Bluetooth driver that got it working, after it installed nothing was working, no mouse, speakers, USB ports. I had to install all of those same drivers again for some reason. Before that just to make sure the drive wasn't bad I installed Debian on there and what do you know, it just did it, because of course it did, and everything worked.

I got way off topic, but again what the fuck is microsoft doing?

Project scheduling programs. Primavera, Microsoft Project, Asta Powerproject. All of them are uniquely awful in their own way, and yet I still have to pay for them in order to work in my field.

I dearly miss Playnite on Linux. Having Games from a lot of different sources, only Lutris supports more than Steam/Epic/GoG, and it's missing a lot of features from Playnite and it's plugins. Managing my Gamelibrary without it sucks.

Ticktick and obsidian. Ticktick is an awesome to do, habit, and calendar app with nothing like it. Obsidian is the best note taking app.