Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
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The Affinity Suite is so worth it. Pay a single time and get all the apps on all major OSes instead of the stupid subscription bullshit Adobe tries to lock you into.
They got bought out by Canva though, so I’m sure the enshittification will follow. Such a shame.
Also udemy has some fantastic courses to learn the whole suite, each can be purchased for lifetime access for $10-15 USD. The instructors I bought from are still actively updating their courses and I get all the new stuff, even though I bought when AD was still on v1.3.
If you’re looking to learn it’s a really affordable way to do it.
Which courses do you recommend?
Here’s the main one I used to get started.
I’ve started one on creating abstract art in Affinity that seems pretty good and I have a few others in my learning queue from him on specific parts of affinity that look really good but I haven’t done yet.
Him and Lindsey Marsh have a bunch of content out there on the whole suite. I took Lindsey’s course on graphic design theory that was pretty good but that course used adobe so i used it more for general concepts. I think either of them would be a good place to start.
Awesome, cheers!
No Linux support though, which is a bummer these days.
Or Android, so for people who sketch on a tablet they have to use ipad.
so not all major OSes
I mean, windows and Mac. So yes, all major OSes. The whole “year of Linux” has been a nice meme… For a few decades now.
The world runs on Linux
Yeah Linux is absolutely not a major OS (nor will it ever be)
GIMP is unfortunately not a good competitor, the UX/UI is atrocious, and that’s after spending 25 years using it now… I switched to Krita for most things at this point. GIMP needs some sort of revamp.
Seriously, gimp is barely usable for anything, they need to put the damn thing our of our misery.
And it spawned gtk, which is yet another monument to software masochism.
Will give krita a shot, this shouldn’t be that hard.
Like maybe a GIMP 3.0?
I see two new features that look fantastic, but the rest of the UI seems likely unchanged. I’ll definitely give it a shot though.
What’s the Audacity/Tenacity deal?
Apparently Audacity has been bougth by a company which subsequently did crap with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/s9isqj/help_tenacity_a_fork_of_audacity_after_its/
Not sure how good Tenacity currently is
the trademark got bought. it’s still FLOSS, and they pledged to keep it that way, for whatever that’s worth. code can’t be retroactively un-gpled, so if they did decide to close it down they couldn’t just take it offline, only do new development in private. the big fishy thing was that they added a CLA to their repo, which only affects developers. as an end-user you’re fine.
also, the “crap” was a draft proposal of opt-in telemetry, which was subsequently scrapped. the company in question is based in the EU, anyway, so they would have to abide by the gdpr for any collected information.
A few years back Audacity got acquired by a commercial entity. They then proceeded to cause some controversy regarding user privacy.
I think they walked back some of them, and changed the installer to allow disabling the data collection; but by that time, a few forks have started popping up. Tenacity seems to be what many people eventually settle on.
God out of all the software I’ve used over the years, to see Audacity go to hell like that is sad. I was not expecting that. And to think once upon a time, i replaced a little program called Cooledit Pro (which was bought by Adobe if I recall), with Audacity.
Enshitification by owners of Audacity including telemetry. They eventually backed down, but that was after Tenacity forked off it and people started using and improving it.
Don’t know if you can call this “enshittification” as that implies it got progressively worse. It was bought out by a corporation and immediately turned to shit while also being neglected.
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Works great for me
Same. Although I only use it for very basic things. Honestly I mostly have switched to Davinci’s Fairlight, which is built into Resolve.
I can’t press the record button without it crashing and it fails to see half of my audio inputs, so I’d say not great.
The sad reality of audio software has been that usually the paid commercial software is better and more reliable. I’ve used Audacity alot for work, and it gets it the job done, but tools like iZotope RX are light years beyond in features and UI/UX.
I have no idea what any of those things really does and it’s way too much to learn given how much GIMP and Krita do
Krita is not just good, I think the meta points it as the best drawing software in the market*
It’s unreal how good Krita is. The small team behind it has accomplished something amazing.
Wish there was a good FOSS Acrobat/Blue beam alternative.
I use those tools for the majority of my work as an engineer.
bluebeam is great
Ive been using Sumatra for pdfs. It’s open source too.
Does anybody have a similar list of alternatives but for the Autodesk Suite/Ecosystem? Some open source CAD and BIM programs, some FOSS modeling and rendering programs?
If you are looking for FOSS CAD, then FreeCAD 1.0 is about the only game in town. SolveSpace is fine for fairly simple uses but lacks all the advanced toys one might like. Nor has it been updated in 3 years now. Siemans SolidEdge has a free community edition, but it’s Widows only. OnShape is is a popular alternative to Fusion, and is fully cloud based, but it is restricted like Fusion.
As an acolyte that wears the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD, there is a growing community of tutorials, (I highly recommend MangoJelly on youtube) for beginners to learn with. But the learning curve can be steep as you get past the basics. There is a FreeCAD community here, but it’s small and not very active. Sadly the best place for answers remains on reddit.
I’ve spent the better half of six months trying to answer this question. (not continuously, just passively)
For some background, I used fusion 360 for a number of years, so I witnessed it turn to absolute shit, but that means parametric CADs are my cup of tea.
Here’s my thoughts.
FreeCAD: I tried this, but I’ll admit I gave up quickly.
It doesn’t feel like a complete solution. It feels like more and more tools have been tacked on without the realisation that people who haven’t been using it for years are going to have even less of an idea of where to start.
I do want to come back and give it another shot, as it hit 1.0 recently.Plasticity:
I was originally interested in it because if how easy it could be to model something. After having used it for a number of days, I agree that it’s relatively intuitive to get something going, but it lacks the precise feeling of a parametric CAD. Don’t get me wrong, you can be precise with it, but it feels something akin to a 3D paint and less like a CAD program.
I can imagine if you just want to do something small, it would be sufficient.OpenSCAD: I’ve been a programmer for 15+ years, and I expected to like this.
Sadly, if you lack a strong maths background, you’ll find this difficult to master.
I’ll be the first to admit my maths isn’t as great as it used to be.
The beauty of a parametric CAD is that I don’t need to know how to position everything exactly, I can just give it the constraints and it manages it for me.
With this, it felt like I kept on testing a value, measuring the resulting dimension that I was trying to go for, tweaking it again, rinse and repeat.
Didn’t feel like I was programming, it felt like I was writing the 3D model itself with a DSL.
The lack of fillets and chamfers was also frustrating.And this brings me to my current recommendation:
SolveSpace:
I’ve been using it for about a month now, and I’ve been happy with it.
It didn’t take much to understand what it’s trying to do.
It’s completely parametric and I felt at home pretty quickly.
You can do fillets and chamfers easily, it just requires a bit of creative work.Let me know if you have any other questions.
I’d be happy to answer them.I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the 1.0 of freecad.
I don’t use CAD professionally, and even my hobby usage is less than it was, and it was only a dozen or two small projects.
I had never used freecad, always fusion 360. I’ve been away for awhile, and also switched to Linux in the meantime. I needed to make a simple object, and tried freecad 1.0, and I literally could not intuit how to begin. Not a single shape, I was so lost, it was very frustrating.
I tried onshape and got a bit further, but still don’t like the corporate nature of it.
I’m not trying to slam freecad, I really want it to work, and when I have more time to sit down and study it, I want to try again. But in the meantime I went back to fusion 360 in a VM, which was very sluggish, but at least I knew where everything was.
Try blender. I use it for CAD.
It really isn’t made for that anymore but I too find myself using it for CAD occasionally too.
Draw from LO is pretty meh for a lot of things, but I use it a lot to edit pdfs, and it is very consistent
Affinity Photo is an excellent Photoshop alternative. I switched a while ago and have used it for all of my major projects since.
Really nervous to get into that ecosystem after they were bought by the Canva crew
someone else may have already said this to you elsewhere, but as an affinity haver I more recently got an email from affinity indicating that to use the generative AI the user must manually allow it and activate it on their own account/program and but for how long that pro-choice statement lasts, I don’t know.
I will never choose to install it on my affinity suite though.
The whole suite is great.
lol. coreldraw is fucking terrible
Why isn’t Okular on the list? Way better PDF reader than Acrobat.
Acrobat is Adobe’s pdf editor and the listed alternatives are pdf editor, which isn’t the same as a pdf reader.
Sorry, I didn’t know Acrobat is a PDF editor. I don’t think I’ve ever had to edit a PDF in my life.
No need to apologize flies away
Shout out to pdfgear.
Does almost all the pdf file manipulation anyone needs and it’s free.
I hate that there is not a good alternative to InDesign that works on linux.
If only the Affinity suit were to work on linux, even just with wine, I would be alright with the fact that it still is proprietary software. It was somehow able to replace my whole Ph/Ai/Id workflow but it is till keeping me from trying to switch to the penguin.
Sorry, there just are no alternatives to Photoshop, with Affinity Photo being the closest replacement nowadays, to the classical PS functions. Affinity Designer feels the same for Illustrator.
What about Krita? Not sure exactly what Adobe product it would be an alternative for though. I know a lot of what people use it for used to be done with Photoshop, but I think Photoshops core demographic is a slightly different use case. Also Inkscape as an Illustrator alternative?
For drawing/painting yeah, krita is comparable, especially if you set the presets to be similar to ps. I haven’t tried krita with photo editing much though
Thank you very much for this, I already use four programs out of those, time look into more 😉
