A wiki to explain how to do without commercial applications (brainstorm)

[michaeljt]

This is related to (promoting :) ) an idea I put on Brainstorm - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7343/ The thought behind it is the common complaint that Linux-based systems lack a lot of popular commercial applications available on other systems. While this may be true, it is often possible to get along well without those commercial applications by using free alternative solutions. The idea is for a wiki which describes how to do this for particular pieces of commercial software (the entries could also describe workarounds and suchlike, not just a single free replacement for the software). And it should let people post "support requests", saying which commercial software they can't live without, so that others can find free alternatives.

What do you think? (If you like it, vote on it!)

[Saint Angeles]

i think anything explaining how linux can be used as an alternative to proprietary software is a good thing.

anytime i see somebody that has completely switched to linux, i smile.

[ad_267]

There is this already: http://www.osalt.com/

[LightB]

Indeed, and I think it's no secret what people ask (or complain) about the most, as far as lacking a good alternative to commercial software, myself included, not that I expect results or consider it my demand. At least the main things are well known though. Photoshop, etc, etc. This is a gray area anyways, because if you truly can't live without a commercial program, you won't, such as in the case of work, education, or dealing with the government. The people that can do with free alternatives will do so anyways since the commercial standards are probably not indispensable to them. For instance, if people are just playing around or doing some unofficial bit of work.

And keep in mind I'm not talking about much more than things like multimedia work and the like. Movie editing, graphics, sound. Cinelerra is nice but far too buggy and cumbersome. Gimp is also unwieldy, and in my experience, even the stable versions are a little buggy for serious work. Audacity, it will do the job in many cases, but it's pretty raw compared to the commercial stuff.

These are just examples related to my experience. But at least now I know not even the Gimp devs are so stubborn that they won't improve their program. If you look at the Gimp 2.5 development version, they are finally changing the gui to main window style. Can't wait! I hope it works out. Meanwhile, I've still used commercial programs for 2d animations, Gimp-GAP is not very useful to me there.

Then the other time I was trying to rip/copy an old game console CD, which is in a mixed mode format, info quickly trickled into cdrdao, but the thing recorded the audio as static. I just broke down and got the Nerolinux trial which did it perfectly. Later I found out how to do it properly with cdrdao, but that still seemed buggy and unpredictable. One time it worked, then another time, errors. Maybe I needed to look more closely, but that's not the point.

Anyways, I guess my point is that there really is no use in trying to promote the idea that open software is infallible and that it covers all the bases. Heck, not even commercial software does. Still though, a lot of important, mainstream tech things ARE covered in open.s. and often times better.

[michaeljt]

This is a gray area anyways, because if you truly can't live without a commercial program, you won't, such as in the case of work, education, or dealing with the government. The people that can do with free alternatives will do so anyways since the commercial standards are probably not indispensable to them.

I quite agree there. These people will only use free software if it is up to the standard of the commercial competition. They can't afford to otherwise.


Then the other time I was trying to rip/copy an old game console CD, which is in a mixed mode format, info quickly trickled into cdrdao, but the thing recorded the audio as static. I just broke down and got the Nerolinux trial which did it perfectly. Later I found out how to do it properly with cdrdao, but that still seemed buggy and unpredictable. One time it worked, then another time, errors. Maybe I needed to look more closely, but that's not the point.

That was actually more my point. The idea was that if people can quickly find out how to do that sort of thing (i.e. I need *this* piece of commercial software and *this* particular functionality - how do I achieve that using free software?) then they won't give up on the free alternatives because they can't get the things they want to done in a reasonable time.

I was mainly "aiming" at the more hobby sorts of people who can put up with a bit of discomfort as long as they can get their stuff done.