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[nikolino840]

There Is a lot of open source softwares out there,ever tried? Do you prefer?
I found open software a Little bit messy on menu or to do something...for example gimp or Blender

 

[zeroFiveNine]

In my experience, you can put open source software in one of these categories:

1 - Does the job and comparable to paid software in terms of UI, features. Paid product can be seen as optional.

7zip vs WinRAR

2 - amazing, the best software in it's category:

VLC
OBS Studio
Visual Studio Code/Atom

3 - adequate, paid software is a massive upgrade in terms of features

GIMP vs Photoshop/Illustrator
Shotcut vs Premiere
Audacity vs Audition

Of course there is also unique open source software which is absolute trash and software that can't be found as a paid product.

 

[SurprisedPikachu]

In my experience, you can put open source software in one of these categories:

1 - Does the job and comparable to paid software in terms of UI, features. Paid product can be seen as optional.

7zip vs WinRAR

2 - amazing, the best software in it's category:

VLC
OBS Studio
Visual Studio Code/Atom

3 - adequate, paid software is a massive upgrade in terms of features

GIMP vs Photoshop/Illustrator
Shotcut vs Premiere
Audacity vs Audition

Of course there is also unique open source software which is absolute trash and software that can't be found as a paid product.

This honestly sums it up really well but to add on to the list from a game development perspective.. just off the top of my head Blender < Maya/3DS Max. Don't get me wrong, Blender is great and all but the support in virtually every engine I have ever worked in has always been for 3DS Max and Maya.

Then before they went open source you had the Unreal Engine and CryENGINE/Lumberyard. I don't know anyone who has used the Source engine recently other than when Titanfall used it. People do use Unity, but I don't see many using RPG Maker anymore as a result. Unity 2D has done a really good job capturing that market. Not many people using ID Tech these days and of course you have other in house engines that are exactly that - in house. Frostbite mainly (if not exclusively used) by EA, then you have the engine used for R* games, etc.

There are other engines but, I mean really, not many people really using them these days.

 

[Mihos]

Outside of what work pays for, I think I have only paid for Microsoft Studio, Pinegrow, and of course games.

I spend about 50% of my time in Linux, so using Open Office, Gimp, PyCharm, Blender, Fusion360 (personal license), etc is more convenient.

 

[Xyphie]

Other than Antivirus (and games) I have a hard time thinking of any non-productivity software anyone buys at scale.

 

[Mr Nash]

I use VLC for media and LibreOffice has been a decent substitute for MS Office for what I need the software for. Also use Gimp a fair bit for image editing. Starting to shift a lot more toward open source as it's perfectly serviceable for what I need it for and it gets me away from all the offerings that have been shifting toward software as a service the last few years.

 

[synchronicity]

Well, I'm primarily a Linux user, so I think my position is probably pretty clear.

 

[SurprisedPikachu]

I use VLC for media and LibreOffice has been a decent substitute for MS Office for what I need the software for. Also use Gimp a fair bit for image editing. Starting to shift a lot more toward open source as it's perfectly serviceable for what I need it for and it gets me away from all the offerings that have been shifting toward software as a service the last few years.

I would make LibreOffice my primary office suite if I could, but my company provides Office for me so I just use that.. though I just found out that Excel doesn't save data field identifier for CSV files so I use LibreOffice for that at least.

Name,Address,"Phone Number"
"James John","123 Test Lane, San Diego, California 99999",1234567890

It's stupid because PowerShell exports CSV's with data identifiers, but Excel doesn't. So if you make changes in Excel and save, it REMOVES THE DATA IDENTIFIERS! So. Fucking. Stupid!

 

[One Eyed Willy]

Almost never open source, barring exceptions.

 

[Shifty]

Some of the buggiest programs I've ever used are paid, 'professional'-tier software.

And some of the least-polished programs I've ever used are free and open-source.

Naturally there are exceptions, but in a general sense, pick your poison ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or spend life custom-engineering your own solutions to everything

 

[redfirm]

Blender for life! One of the best modeling software out there

 

[bati]

That's something that's determined on a case by case basis. I used to work as a Linux sysadmin on a project that involved integration of different oss into a unified turnkey IT solution for small and medium business and every single day I gained new appreciation for properly documented and supported software. Which most of the shit I was tasked with implementing, wasn't.

It really gave me new insight into why companies spend obscene amounts on software licenses just to be able to pick up the phone and ask the tech support for a solution or a patch.

Because believe me, you better be the only person in a 50m radius when the only tangentially related answer to the question that's been bugging you for the past week is on some obscure archived mailing list from 2004, and it's not even a complete answer because the guy who figured it out wrote 'nvm solved it'.

Bleeding edge OSS, not even once.

 

[JCK75]

I'm a Blender Fanatic, when I started using it and learning it was so difficult as it was sort of a mess but man it's come such a long way. The latest version that is in RC at the moment but will be in final release soon is a complete overhaul and brings it to being a much more powerful tool than any of the expensive competitors. Also with Epic and Ubi donating millions to it's fund is huge but also Ubi along with a few major movie studios have started using it and contributing to the actual code, so any tools they make to improve their workflow will find their way back to the official release in time which is incredible.

I'm also a really big fan of Krita, it's pretty much everything I hoped Gimp would someday become buy never did.

 

[eddie4]

I will always go with open source if I can find what I need. If not, I'll end up buying it. So far, I didn't have the need to buy any software.

 

[Tesseract]

sometimes paid is better, sometimes not

usually gotta get a community rating

 

[Pagusas]

If I can do something with open source stuff for free that does the job I'll attempt to use it so long as the work isn't mission critical and sustaining.

If I'm doing work that is long term and requires what I'm using to work all the time, and have support if it breaks, I will not touch open source stuff and will only look at paid stuff.

 

[SidViscous]

Open source all the way, it's cheaper (duh), will be continuously improved rather than holding back features for the 'new paid for' version, and tend to not use propriety format, so it's easy to migrate away if you do find something better.

 

[Barnabot]

Paid is better most of the time.
If they don't cost you a outrageous pricing of 500 bucks a year.

 

[joombo]

That depends. I don't trust free services and open source soft too. In my work I used to apply to custom financial software development company EffectiveSoft for professional services and use only paid software. It gives better results.

 

[Squirrel Killer]

Aside from Office, which I buy through work for like $10/seat, I mostly use open source software (Notepad++, Firefox, 7-Zip, VideoLAN, FileZilla, Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, Shotcut, Blender) because:

1. I don't trust companies to not force changes to my workflow or lock my content into a proprietary format.
2. I don't use those tools enough to justify paying for closed source alternatives (except for Notepad++ and Firefox.)

I'm kinda wavering on my NLE (Shotcut is fine for what I need it to do, but it's pretty rough, looking in to Kdenlive and Olive) and still deciding on a digital image workflow tool (i.e. a Lightroom alternative, darktable looks to be the best, but I'd like to get more end user recommendations before committing my ~150Gb photo library.)

All that said, if I was a professional graphic designer/video editor/etc..., I'd totally use Adobe's stuff or whatever the professional environment called for.

 

[Patrick S.]

That's something that's determined on a case by case basis. I used to work as a Linux sysadmin on a project that involved integration of different oss into a unified turnkey IT solution for small and medium business and every single day I gained new appreciation for properly documented and supported software. Which most of the shit I was tasked with implementing, wasn't.

It really gave me new insight into why companies spend obscene amounts on software licenses just to be able to pick up the phone and ask the tech support for a solution or a patch.

Because believe me, you better be the only person in a 50m radius when the only tangentially related answer to the question that's been bugging you for the past week is on some obscure archived mailing list from 2004, and it's not even a complete answer because the guy who figured it out wrote 'nvm solved it'.

Bleeding edge OSS, not even once.

Nailed it. Today I thought "hey, let's install Steam on my Debian laptop!". It wasn't available in the standard repository so I had to google how to add a new repository, and which one to ad. Then I got errors because of several missing libraries, and had to spend a while figuring out I had to install support for 32 bit architecture. Back to the terminal, then. After that Steam still didn't launch correctly and I decided I was going to install different nvidia drivers, too. Downloaded the .run file from nvidia and spent some more minutes to find out how the hell to install a .run file. (Read afterwards that downloading a driver directly from nvidia's site angers the Linux gods) Got an error because I already had another nvidia driver installed through a different method and thus could not be automatically updated. Learned how to uninstall the nvidia driver, and read in that same howto that I had to reboot into a different userlevel. Found out how to do it, and finally got the new driver installed, seemingly without any errors. Computer boots to black screen. Booted to recovery mode and changed userlevel to graphical again, PC still boots to black screen. I have spent a bit more than an hour and a half with this shit. On a Windows PC I download an .exe driver from the manufacturer's site and double click on it, done. The laptop is getting Windows again. Yeah, I could install PopOS, where that stuff comes preconfigured, but I'm not really in the mood to use Linux anymore. And I'm a systems administrator for a large company. Imagine a regular user having to do any of this shit...

 

[psorcerer]

The OP uses a false dichotomy. Closed source software can be free to use: Facebook, Instagram, Neogaf. And open source software can cost quite lot in various added value services.
Overall it can be assumed that paid software is almost dead.
If you try to get money for a startup that will sell software none of the investors would ever give you a penny.
Even in game development, the only industry where people still pay shit-loads of money for software, biggest players work off the royalties and not payments per se.
Overall from a business perspective open source is almost always better than closed source.
And if business is IT-related it should be using 100% open source. You cannot reliably fix bugs and improve closed source software, you're left at the mercy of the vendor who may have other priorities.
And this is reality in the industry: all the major players in IT like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. use open source everywhere.

 

[crowbrow]

Since Linux is my primary OS then open and free software is what I use and love it. I don't really use much paid software.

 

[Ar¢tos]

The last software i paid for was a cd/label printing program about 14 years and it was because it was cheap and it was the only one at the time that accepted my CD printer. NEVER had the need for paid software since then (im a Linux user).

 

[Makariel]

Linux is my primary OS at home, so open source yay! But yeah, open source doesn't mean "free", while closed source doesn't mean paid. That said, I don't trust "free" closed systems. Paid open and closed are fine, free open source is brilliant.

Nailed it. Today I thought "hey, let's install Steam on my Debian laptop!". It wasn't available in the standard repository so I had to google how to add a new repository, and which one to ad. [...] The laptop is getting Windows again. Yeah, I could install PopOS, where that stuff comes preconfigured, but I'm not really in the mood to use Linux anymore. And I'm a systems administrator for a large company. Imagine a regular user having to do any of this shit...

Well, I'm a regular user. I just use a linux disto where steam is included, like Manjaro

 

[nocsi]

The OP uses a false dichotomy. Closed source software can be free to use: Facebook, Instagram, Neogaf. And open source software can cost quite lot in various added value services.
Overall it can be assumed that paid software is almost dead.
If you try to get money for a startup that will sell software none of the investors would ever give you a penny.
Even in game development, the only industry where people still pay shit-loads of money for software, biggest players work off the royalties and not payments per se.
Overall from a business perspective open source is almost always better than closed source.
And if business is IT-related it should be using 100% open source. You cannot reliably fix bugs and improve closed source software, you're left at the mercy of the vendor who may have other priorities.
And this is reality in the industry: all the major players in IT like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. use open source everywhere.

You're comparing social media sites (facebook & instagram), by nature they have to be free to use since their model is having a userbase. And no, paid software isn't dead. Users easily understand that paying for software and its license is a one-and-done type thing.

Also disagree, from a business perspective, neither open source nor closed source matters. What matters is the availability of a support plan. There are plenty of open source solutions that offer support plans, in addition to the closed source ones that offer the same. Open source doesn't matter because no real business will justify their workers to constantly hunt down bugs that should be handled by the vendor.

 

[psorcerer]

And no, paid software isn't dead. Users easily understand that paying for software and its license is a one-and-done type thing.

Paid software is dead, you cannot raise money for it.

Open source doesn't matter because no real business will justify their workers to constantly hunt down bugs that should be handled by the vendor.

Google for business doesn't have any real support, yet it's used by millions.
AWS did not have any support till recent, still was outgrowing any other cloud provider.
Rackspace being the cloud vendor with the top support combed in and started to provide support for AWS.

You're living in the past.

 

[n0razi]

I use both

 

[neobiz]

Whatever gets the job done that I need done without a giant curve

Let me ramp up my curve as I see fit, thanks