Shoutouts
Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!
- bruhduh
- Toes
Free Open Source Alternatives
[Visual/Graphical]
For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]
Relevent XKCD : https://xkcd.com/743/
Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.
If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.
Until it gets bought by some big corp and suddenly has spyware integrated and goes into subscription anyway Happened to a lot of good proprietary software, and this is a reason why open source is superior.
FOSS is always a better option, as of today I don’t think anything compares. And since they aren’t a big company doing shady things, the licensed version is permanent, no big company buyout is going to impact anything other than upgrades.
WinRAR style
So we basically never have to pay?
No, just a nag. If you’re recording/editing a few times a year, it won’t be a bother. If you’re in there often, it’s worth the few bucks.
Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.
Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.
Removed by mod
Man thanks for not suggesting GIMP I hate that thing so unintuitive, like bro you’re no blender, you’re not allowed to be unintuitive
^me as I’m in the middle of editing and just about to add Gimp to the post when I see your comment😅
Shotcut for video editing
thanks for the comment I’ll add it to the post!
Also lmms https://lmms.io/ for music, you’re doing some great post, word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
added this as well!
you’re doing some great post
no worries🤗
word needs to be spread about foss alternatives to commercial apps so people can have some alternative
hell yea!✊
🤗 You’re doing great