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


[Audio]

For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to


[PDF]

Acrobat Reader to


[Video]

Premiere to


There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]

  • realbadat@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    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.

    https://www.reaper.fm/

    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.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • realbadat@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Reaper is great, but unfortunately I’ve never been able to get my VSTs properly working on linux, especially ones with a full GUI like a lot of drum vsts do. It’s literally the only reason I still dual-boot windows on that machine.

      • realbadat@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        I get that, there is a list of Linux friendly vsts out there that work well. I think they have a link to the list, but I don’t really use drums in my workflow so couldn’t give you any examples unfortunately. I did have to go into windows for some work stuff where I needed a specific vst though, definitely understand the issue.

      • realbadat@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        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.