this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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For me, it’s CAD software. FreeCAD is trash (sorry, lovers). Fusion360 is honestly the best out there for free. The “almost there” app is Shapr3D, but fuck $40/m.

And yes I’ve tried all the others not listed here.

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[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 92 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Another mobile OS. Something that isn't built entirely to exploit me.

[–] maxalmonte14@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago

I hear you. With Android turning into a closed OS like iOS later this year things are not looking very bright for people like me that uses alternative stores a lot.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 11 points 3 weeks ago

Tell me about it. Like Linux Phone hurry up!

I miss the FirefoxOS concept. Ahead of its time. Basically ran PWAs for everything.

[–] Jakule17@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Theres always e/os, iodeos, grapheneos and other forks

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago

that is still android though

[–] FatherPeanut@pawb.social 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Honestly, I would really fuck with a comprehensive Linux mobile experience. I know some things exist, but they aren't yet fully rounded off. I say this now, but know damn well I'd tinker with something I shouldn't and wind up needing to reinstall the OS like five times.

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[–] Lilim_3000@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

I reccomend donating to postmarketos then. They do awsome work reverse engeeniering phones. Oneplus 6 is usable with pmos. Of course it has multiple problems but its nice seeing people make so much things for on old phones.

There are of course graphenos, calyxos, e/os/ of course. Unfortunatly the issue with every alternative os is that you need specific model of phone to even open bootloader.

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[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 34 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.

Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that'll stick.

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.

I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

So much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.

=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))

Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can pd.to_excel() to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 5 points 3 weeks ago

Also duckdb. Realizing I could do SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx' was a wondrous occasion

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)
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[–] Bitflip@lemmy.ml 25 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Anything closed where the update is "throw it away, buy the new model". Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.

[–] octobob@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Do you work on industrial electrical? Kinda curious about your comment there. The company I work for implements new systems, some of the biggest in the US, but we do plenty of maintenance, refurbishing, tuning, etc on some very very old systems. I've seen working equipment that is from the dawn of the 20th century, still going fine. Maybe we come in and install a new VFD on them, or recently we did a system running 2 setups of 8k amps @ 480V for motors that had gone through a whole entire fire that was so bad the roof collapsed.

Maybe it's just the sector I'm in, which is steel and aluminum mills, but I've seen industrial be the one that does not want change because it comes with a high price tag. The sales guys need to convince these places that they can't keep running everything on electrical equipment from the 70s to 90s

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[–] JesusTheCarpenter@feddit.uk 5 points 3 weeks ago

Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.

[–] KingKong33@lemmy.ml 23 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 6 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

photoshop cs6 was indeed great, it does run fairly well on wine tho

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[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

CS2 is completely free from adobe. It doesn’t understand scaling in windows, and won’t run on the next Mac OS release. But it’s serviceable.

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[–] THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 22 points 3 weeks ago

Literally anything that you have to pay monthly for. I do not care what it is.

I have an old version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that, legally, they still have to provide me a download for. But, holy absolute hell if they didn't make it nearly impossible to just download the version I paid for. Of course, the new one is subscription only. Costs so much I'd have paid more in 3 months than the single one time payment I did for the old version a decade ago.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Operating systems.

Windows is a collection of legacy code with trash strewn over top, but it is ubiquitous.

Apple’s offerings are typically decent and reliable, but the executives spent a lot of time lately kissing the ring.

Linux is simply not something I’m interested in supporting for my family.

I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.

[–] JesusTheCarpenter@feddit.uk 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.

Hey I don't want to preach but if many people were able to learn how to use Chrome OS over the last decade they will be able to learn how to use the latest Ubuntu (or whatever flavor of Linux is now considered the most intuitive and fully featured for new users).

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 6 points 3 weeks ago

I believe Mint is the current "beginner edition" of Linux. Ubuntu has been getting a lot of hate lately from what I've seen.

My latest build is running Bazzite on an HTPC, but it's still a project and not fully up and running quite yet.

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[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 4 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah that ring kissing rubs me.

You could always use HaikuOS (kidding) there’s ZERO evil behind that one!

[–] WagnasT@piefed.world 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.

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[–] darthsundhaft@piefed.social 13 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

PDF or really just an alternative to Adobe that isn't even PDF but a completely different format that is open source by default so that nobody really needs a specific app to make edits. Maybd that's just ODT?

Also, maybe not an alt per say but just want games to work on Gnu/Linux. Like all the AAA titles should be able to run on, for example, Linux Mint natively without Wine. A pipe dream sadly since capitalism dictates what works where but I digress.

Going back to Adobe though, would love something other than Photoshop that isn't GIMP. Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Glimpse which basically did what Linux Mint does for Gnome and gave GIMP a much better interface. Sadly, they shut down their project. Lame.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Closest paid version I can think of is Bluebeam Revu.

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[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 3 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

It’s not for Linux, but Affinity is pretty good for a photoshop/illustrator alternative

Also, if vector is your speed and you want something kinda like Adobe XD, Lunacy is free, cross platform and has a web version

Icons8.com/lunacy-download

lunacyapp.com

affinity.studio

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

Honestly, notes apps. All of the big tech options are fine, but they’re big tech, so fuck them. All of the open source options suck. The best I’ve found is just Nextcloud Notes, but it’s still shit. Basic Markdown syntax, no linking notes, adding attachments is… well idk, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

[–] platypode@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I’ve found Obsidian to work well for me. Its plugin ecosystem is pretty robust, so there’s a lot of room to bolt on features.

And if you really need an open source option with every possible tool and a full customization language… emacs

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yep. Obsidian plugins is like installing Skyrim then thinking, "I'll just go get the essentials from Nexus Mods..."

Three hours later you have an absolute beast that also does note taking too.

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 3 points 3 weeks ago

I keep seeing people say this, but I've never seen a plug-in that seemed to do much of anything that the base engine wasn't already.

[–] new_guy@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Obsidian, Joplin or Logseq. Have you tried any of these?

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I’ve tried Joplin and Logseq. They both are not good for me. Joplin’s mobile experience was terrible.

[–] Lodespawn@aussie.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago

I switched from OneNote to obsidian when I de-windowsed and haven't looked back

[–] crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Give Obsidian a try. Its very mobile-friendly.

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[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 11 points 3 weeks ago

To flip the CAD thing on its head, if I want a Python API for AutoCAD, Creo, or SolidWorks, their response is "fuck you, use our GUI cuz that's easier for us to implement license verification with. And oh yeah, it's all Window only." The only CAD software I find remotely useful is FreeCAD. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's the baseline that all other CAD softwares somehow fail to match.

[–] AstroLightz@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Paint.net. I so wish for something simple with a competent UI on Linux.

Pinta is the closest, but it's too far behind modern paint.net.

GIMP lacks a competent UI, and Krita is too advanced for basic photo editing.

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

When's the last time you tried FreeCAD? I also used to think it's trash, but version 1.0 really changed that and now 1.1 is freaking amazing.

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Like last week. It’s cad software from 20 years ago that’s trying to be everything and not really mastering anything.

I want an open source option that focuses on UI/UX and not… well, whatever freeCAD is doing.

I have the same UI issues with GIMP and Inkscape. When programmers try to make human interface. (No offense to programmers)

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 5 points 3 weeks ago

I've been using GIMP long enough that I've learned where things are. It's not intuitive, but I can usually accomplish what I set out to do without swapping to another program.

Inkscape feels like a foreign language that I don't speak.

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[–] spectrums_coherence@piefed.social 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

This might be controversial, but I want yet another code editor.

Hear me out, I write very little code, but when I do, they are usually in widely different programming languages, and many of them have a comparatively small user base, like Haskell, Ocaml, Lean, Agda, and Rocq. Most of the time I write LaTeX and/or Typst all day, so I need:

  1. an editor that sandbox really well, there is no way I am trusting all my coding environment with my entire user space.
  2. an editor that don't require much tinkering: if it can get to 80% there, I am willing to learn the rest, but I don't want an editor that get 20% there and force me to pull 80 different package just to do things.
  3. preview LaTeX and Typst within the sandbox, ideally just in editor, so I don't need to configure synctex.
  4. reasonable support for comparatively obscure languages
  5. not controlled by a big tech like Microsoft.

So far, I am only able to find vscodium in flatpak that is close to my desire, but it is still mostly controlled by Microsoft.

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[–] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

[…] FreeCAD is trash […]

What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?

[–] kibblebits@quokk.au 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.

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