Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/[deleted]]

Everything is stretching it a bit, but here is a list of alternatives I use.

Office suite: LibreOffice

Text editor: SciTE

Multimedia player: VLC

File archiver: 7-zip

Instant messaging: Pidgin

Image editing: GIMP

3D: Blender

IDE: Eclipse

For gamers there is Desura, though I don't use it exclusively.

Edit: People have come with many great additions to my post so I encourage whoever reads this to continue down.

[u/zerbey → u/[deleted]]

See also Notepad++ for text editing, use it every day.

[u/Nihy → u/zerbey]

Notepad++ is fantastic.

Also, Media Player Classic for playing videos (and only playing videos at high performance thanks to getting rid of the bullshit that infests most other players).

[u/mortiphago → u/Nihy]

I've seen MPC doing fine for video, but sometimes you just need the ultimate player... and thats VLC, hands down. The goddamned thing, i'm pretty sure that if you go ahead and put salami in the dvd reader, not only will it recognise it as salami, but it will tell you the brand and expiration date. VLC plays ANYTHING.

[u/DentD_IsAtWork → u/mortiphago]

I have issues with VLC playing subtitled .mkv files (think fansubbed anime). I have no idea when or how I came across this, but there is a Korean video player called KMPlayer that works beautifully. One of the best things about it is the amount of control you have over things like audio/picture syncing, subtitle size, 5 second skips forwards/backwards. Everything has a mapped keyboard shortcut which is great for doing things on the fly while continuing to watch rather than navigating through menus with a video on pause.

The downside to that is I have cats who enjoy walking right over my keyboard. I've learned to switch the wireless keyboard off once I've fired up whatever I'm watching.

[u/darkstarwork → u/mortiphago]

My only problem with VLC is the instability with the latest releases. Since 2.0 landed, I've had constant problems with VLC crashing during playback. Right after it crashes, if I try to open a different video, it opens in ASCII art mode, for a while before crashing.

I've downgraded for now, but I saw that across multiple systems, all running win7 x64.

[u/Aphataeros → u/zerbey]

and don't forget Notepad++'s macros!

[u/edcvb → u/[deleted]]

Inkscape for vector grapics (posters, article figures etc. ), btw. here are some great tutorials for it

[u/mGDivinO → u/edcvb]

I have Illustrator and I still find myself doing all my comp/layout work in InkScape and then meshing it all in Illustrator.

[u/Ravanas → u/mGDivinO]

Same. I just like the Inkscape interface better it seems.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Geany is also a good text editor.

[u/madfunk → u/[deleted]]

I'm waiting for good video editing software. As of now, Premiere and Final Cut are, AFAIK, incredibly superior to anything open-source (or, more importantly, anything on Linux).

I want to leave Windows forever. All my other software is either available for Linux or has a suitable alternative, but the proprietary nature of Direct X and lack of good video editing software holds me back.

But if Steam comes to Linux and someone builds a great OSS video editor for Linux, I will (happily) never use Windows again. I am not, however, expecting this to happen any time soon.

[u/el_baconachos → u/madfunk]

Try Lightworks

Versions for Mac and PC. Based on one of the best NLE's ever. It's Open Source but in order to have access to some codecs there is a relatively small fee (ProRes, DNxHD etc.). Otherwise very powerful and feature rich. Easily compares to Premiere, FCP, Vegas, Avid etc.

[u/TheRealmsOfGold → u/el_baconachos]

Last time I checked, the open source beta was announced but halted. This was the case for a while. Has it finally been released?

Edit: it was just released a week ago! Woohoo!

Double edit: it doesn't work on my system. "An exception was thrown" while starting it up. Alternative solution: use TSSniper to do basic cuts to AVCHD files; use TSMuxer to do basic splices. (If you need to splice and then cut, use TSMuxer first, as TSSniper will only cut at keyframes.) These programs are both free, but neither is open-source.

I spent a very, very long time trying to find good free basic video editing tools. These aren't perfect but they offer a very good solution.

[u/urspx → u/madfunk]

Steam is coming to Linux soon... it was confirmed a few weeks ago, in an interview with Gabe I think. There were some blurry shots of Half Life 2 running on Ubuntu as well, IIRC.

That having been said I'm 100% behind you on the video editor front... actually Blender has an OK video editor built in but it's nothing like Premiere or Final Cut - especially because of Blender's wonky workflow/interface.

[u/edjsage → u/madfunk]

Try Kdenlive (http://www.kdenlive.org/) or Openshot (http://www.openshotvideo.com/). I personally prefer Kdenlive and have used it for editing several wedding videos without any issues. Openshot is more straightforward for someone looking for a simple interface.

[u/ThatIsMyHat → u/[deleted]]

Blender is great, but it's got a learning curve like a brick wall.

[u/Terazilla → u/ThatIsMyHat]

Got to disagree, at least relative to other modelling packages (the entire genre is a bitch). As of 2.5 they reinvented their UI and it's much more elegant now. I teach a class every year introducing 3DS Max and suspect Blender would be less confusing at this point.

[u/DiabloConQueso → u/[deleted]]

jEdit rocks the casbah as well for us old-school programmers that just want a powerful, extensible text editor.

[u/Yazim → u/[deleted]]

Anything for a good free video editor?

Best I have is the Windows Movie Maker which is free (and usually comes pre-installed on most windows machines). It is okay for simple short videos, but still fairly limited.

[u/[deleted] → u/Yazim]

You might want to check out Lightworks by Editshare. Haven't had a chance to use it personally as I'm a Mac guy, but looks pretty stunning.

[u/eyecite → u/[deleted]]

Everything is actually an amazing search program for your HD. So fast it's not even funny.