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.
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.
Re: email. Have you tried Port87?
Never heard of it.
Give it a try. :)
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.
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.Also duckdb. Realizing I could do
SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx'was a wondrous occasion
Yeah, excel really is hard to beat. Good one.
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.
I started using it after 1.0, still haven’t gotten anywhere with it because it’s just not intuitive and I’m constantly running into problems where I have to go into the documentation. If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues. I found a YouTube series that someone recommended that looks pretty good though so I’m going to lock in and go through that and try again because I really don’t have any other choice. At least it doesn’t crash every time you fuck up constraints anymore.
Forgot to say: 1.1 has quite a lot of QoL improvements, so make sure you learn from a source made for 1.1 and not 1.0 or earlier.
If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues.
I don’t think this is true. Professional software is usually very hard to switch between. Be it CAD, video editing, 3D modeling, animation, programming, painting, freaking file sharing, or pretty much any other field of endeavor. Each program/tool/suite prescribes a certain workflow, and it almost never matches the workflow of another tool designed for the exact same purpose.
For exactly the same reason, it’s hard to switch between operating systems, especially if you’re a power user who knows a lot about how things work in the OS you’re used to. It’s not a sign that either OS is better than the other, it’s just how used the user is to a certain way of doing things.
I think this is also why Adobe and Autodesk are still doing alright. A large part of their customer base are just people who would have too much friction switching to a different, better (imo) suite of tools, so staying with the tool they know is worth the cost.
I don’t know your situation, but from your comment I think I can recommend pushing through the re-learning period with FreeCAD. It’s good.
I understand things not being the same. I’ve switched between software and OS’s before and dealt with these kinds of issues. I worked in IT support for years and have had to learn about how all sorts of software works on the fly. I’ve switched between several CAD programs I used successfully before landing on Fusion360. FreeCAD is a whole other level compared to pretty much anything else I’ve dealt with. Blender is the only other app I can think of that I’ve had so much trouble with.
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)
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.
Outlook
Have you tried Microsoft Exchange? ;) 📎
[…] FreeCAD is trash […]
What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?
Not OP, but FreeCAD auto-constraints in sketches are all over the place, and figuring out which constraint is a problem and selecting the right element in the UI is terrible.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but FreeCAD tells you when a constraint is redundant, and clicking on it highlights the respective constraint in the sketch:
[1]References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-11T23:44Z.
The redundant constraint detection works pretty well and FreeCAD usually remove them.
The main issue for me is that certain auto-constraints will not work as they advertise on your cursor.
The biggest culprit for me is the coincident constraint.
Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied.
And the other thing for me is that navigating which part of a line (and which line) is selected is not intuitive and correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
[…] correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
[…] Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied. […]
What you’re describing sounds more like a bug to me. At any rate, I wasn’t able to confirm the behavior you described (maybe I’m misunderstanding you?):
[1]I was able to get both a symmetric constraint (green arrow), and a coincident constraint (red arrow) on the two 90 degree lines.
References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-12T22:47Z.
I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.
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I suggest:
Household Acoustic Notification Standard (HANS)
Where it’s a standard protocol or noise making system you can configure with some kind of device. Perhaps it also outlines LORA notifications as well.
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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.
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).
Yeah no, one toe past extremely basic and you might end up in a quagmire of shit and googling usually makes things worse with misinformation.
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.
Yeah that ring kissing rubs me.
You could always use HaikuOS (kidding) there’s ZERO evil behind that one!
A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.
you can always pirate SolidWorks. its the best, and if you pirate it its completely free.
dassault only goes after businesses so feel free to pirate for personal use.
Word of caution on this, make dang sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Dassault systems has a reputation for tracking pirates down and billing out the ass, and that reputation doesn’t come from nowhere.
Still not saying not to pirate it, but do tread on very light waters.
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.
I just want apple notes self hosted.
Disregard, my original comment since first using this program it looks like it’s been ensloppified, what a tragedy
~~I like Trillium https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium~~
Oh god, yeah. Their README starts with an AI slop ad. :(
Trilium Notes is great for note taking. It can do complex formatting and attachments and all that stuff. And you can self host the server and keep it synced across devices. I use it every day
Someone else recommended that one, but apparently it’s coded with AI now, and I’d like to avoid AI generated software.
Obsidian, Joplin or Logseq. Have you tried any of these?
I’ve tried Joplin and Logseq. They both are not good for me. Joplin’s mobile experience was terrible.
I switched from OneNote to obsidian when I de-windowsed and haven’t looked back
Give Obsidian a try. Its very mobile-friendly.
It’s proprietary!
I know, I know. The notes you create are still yours. They’re just Markdown files. And they have a huge ecosystem of community-developed extensions that aren’t proprietary. The company is almost as far as you can get from Big Tech. I pay the $5/month for their sync service just to support them, but since your notes are simple Markdown files, you can just as easily sync your notes any other way for free.
Can you help me? I have obsidian on my phone and am trying to use it but I dislike the UI (feel there is too much information / clutter, would rather have something distraction free like a terminal) and I think it is only possible to sync notes from computer to cellphone if I pay a fee or do it manually? Is that right?
Aren’t there any ways of taking simple txt notes on computer syntaxed or not and have them automatically appear on my phone?
Hope you can enlighten me
You can sync your notes in any way that you want.
Dropbox, Google drive… Generally people recommend Sync thing if you can configure it (it’s not hard. Just harder than Dropbox and Google drive)
my response was mostly meant as a hint to other readers, but I’d also like to add that the canvases are not markdown, but a custom json schema basically. not necessarily an issue, but noteworthy due to portability issues with that specific feature.
markor on android seems pretty good for me, have you tried it?
No, but I use iPhone. Ideally I’d want something self hosted that works on all platforms.
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
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.
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.
I’ve stuck with notesnook for awhile, but i might switch it up after my premium subscription ends.
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
Yeah, Creative Suite era, before Creative Cloud. That for every Adobe product.
Anything closed where the update is “throw it away, buy the new model”. Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.
Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.
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
I don’t know why I said industrial. Just old nerdy junk, like a digital embroidery machine that needs xp to load designs. A media player locked in a similar situation. My car is 12 years old, gimme the source to the janky is on the head unit. Abandoned firmwares.
Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?
photoshop cs6 was indeed great, it does run fairly well on wine tho
I have an issue with it that really makes it unusable: every input renders one frame behind. I make a gesture, I see most of the stroke, but not the last bit until I click again. I select and cut something? Doesn’t disappear until I give one more input. I zoom to a certain level, then click and it zooms the last little bit. It’s bizarre and makes it surprisingly unusable.
i did have some glitches and switched away from it to gimp eventually but your issue kinda seems different from mine. are you on x11 or wayland? if x11 are you running a compositor like picom?
I haven’t been able to get it working with winetricks, bottles or lutris. Any tips?
What about Affinity Photo?
PhotoPea works pretty well for me, though I am not using it for anything other than fun projects.
I have used photopea before and it works shockingly well, but I don’t like having to rely on a web-service.
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.
Resin printing slicing software.
There’s currently two main options, Lychee and ChituBox. I’ve only used Lychee (after giving up with Chitu) so I can only speak on that. Lychee has mostly everything I want in terms of features, but customization is very limited (ie keybinds, default behavior etc), and some aspects of the UI can be VERY clunky. And the best part: 90% of the features that you need to slice somewhat effectively are locked behind a paywall. They do offer a 30 day trial, so I have a backup file of all my settings, and every 30 days I make a new burner account.
It’s a nightmare compared to the plethora of slicing options available for filament printers.
Oh and it’s monthly too? That’s the worst. For CAD I only print something like once or twice per month. I cannot justify any cost monthly.
Have you tried any of the Elegoo.com products? I know nothing about resin printing, but they supposedly support it
My filament printer is actually from them. I have a love-hate relationship with that machine. It’s like, 20% stock at this point, and it isn’t the fastest or the cleanest printer out there, but it works well enough.
I’m not aware of a resin slicer made by them, but without doing the research, my guess would be that it’s relatively subpar. I haven’t been resin printing for terribly long, but once or twice a year I’ll go online to see if there is any discussion of better alternatives to Lychee or Chitu, and the conversation has always stayed the same. Everyone is in the same boat in that those two programs are the only really viable options, despite being… not great.
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.
GIMP really should just copy the Photoshop interface. PhotoGIMP helps a little bit, but not much.
Closest paid version I can think of is Bluebeam Revu.
Revu blows acrobat put of the water … it is equivalently priced though so not much help for plebs …
Yeah Revu is great at work, not so friendly for home.
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
affinity.studio
You can run Affinity in linux.
Not native, is what I mean.
Sure, and at some point they might want to curtail linux usage, but right now is an option, which Adobe is not, so it is worth having it in mind.
Is it true that canva may be planning to port affinity to Linux in the future?
Unlikely.
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.
