>I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good.

Hah, this is rich. Many open source products are far better than their proprietary alternatives, especially developer oriented products (which is natural considering that developers tend to use open source and tend to improve their own tools).

I'll give you (some) software development tools. Still, things like Sublime Text, Visual Studio, and the entire Jet Brains lineup which give lie to the "especially" part of the developer orientated toolset.

But...

Gimp is far better than Photoshop and Illustrator?

Blender is far better than 3DS Max and Maya?

Libre Office is far better than Microsoft Office?

Darkroom is far better than Lightroom?

Honestly, I can't even think of an open source CAD one that can even compare favorably to SketchUp, let alone AutoCad.

If you have to, there are many tools available to do a job on Linux, with a backup of VMs and Wine. They are not, however, "far better".

Yeah. Making software to sell forces you to listen to the market (not the same thing as just listening to your existing customers) if you want to grow your sales.

Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say, but it's vastly inferior in terms of learning curve and UX. There are some things I'd rather do in it than in IntelliJ, but it's not what I'm going to use for day to day Android dev, say. Or what I'd point newcomers at.

> Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say

Depends how you define "powerful;" IntelliJ understands a lot more about your code than most Emacs plug-ins.

On the other hand, when it comes to categories like games, video game console emulators, office productivity applications, document publishing, etc., the open-source alternatives are generally way worse.

Open source video game console emulators are certainly not worse. If anything, the best by far emulator (Dolphin) is open source, but even beyond that almost every open source VGC emulator is also open source and those emulators tend to be the most long running ones (almost always because the developers of the closed source emulators lose interest). For some systems, you have only open source emulators.

There are several systems where your only option is Windows, unless the situation has changed drastically since I last looked into it. I remember Dreamcast, Saturn, DS, PSP, and PS2 being in this category, and also the options for N64/PSX not being very good, the last time I was interested. Of course, someone can respond to arguments about any program being missing with "well, I don't care about those," but you can't expect anyone to find that persuasive if they're not already converted.

Dreamcast: https://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator

Saturn: https://yabause.org/

DS: https://desmume.org/

PSP: http://www.ppsspp.org/index.html

PS2: https://pcsx2.net/

All of these are open source, support Linux, and have good compatability.

The situation may have improved, but the last time I tried this Yabause was a joke and the non-Windows versions of Desmume and PCSX2 were like a year behind and clearly not the main priority for anyone.

I can't say I know much about Yabause, but Desmume and PCSX2 have worked quite well for me on Linux, no problems whatsoever. PCSX2 was last updated in December on Arch Linux, and Desmume is up to date with the latest stable release for all platforms.

With respect, you should be looking these things up for yourself before you make claims like the ones you've been making in this thread.

Why the hell do I have to "look up" personal experiences I had that made me dislike using Linux and OS X? It's great to hear some of my issues were out-of-date but come on. I tried using these non-Windows operating systems and eventually switched back because I didn't like the experience. An imperious series of posts telling me that I'm wrong because there has been an improvement and, anyway, shouldn't want to do what I want to do, is not exactly persuading me to feel differently.

Because you're posting in a public forum and spreading misinformation about the platform with your ignorance.

I see you haven't understood what I said. The specific examples I cited were real in the past. Even if those, specifically, are now solved, am I to believe this will never be an issue again? Because I think what's more likely is that non-Windows emulators will be behind by a few years in the future as well.

They're not behind, I doubt they've ever been behind, and if they get behind, it's a trivial matter to prod the package maintainer for an update. These emulators support Linux as a first class platform and hell, for several of them Windows is probably a second-class platform.

There are emulators on Linux in active development for all the systems you've mentioned, most even being available in Debian (and derivative) repositories.

I mean, great, but I don't want something that will maybe work in a few years when there's something that works well now.

>games

See pretty much every other reply in this thread for my take on this

>video game console emulators

Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.

>office productivity applications

"way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.

>document publishing

I don't know what this is supposed to be. LaTeX is pretty good, though.

> Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.

As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.

> "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.

Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.

>As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.

The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while).

>Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.

If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case. Writing new documents should use ODF, which MSWord supports fine (often transparently, non-technical users will probably see a file with the same MSWord icon and no file extension).

> If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case.

You sound like someone who never collaborated on an Office file with someone from another company.

If a company wants to be taken seriously, and some of their work involves exchanging and collaborating on presentations, text documents or tabular files, you cannot not use MS Office.

Even Mac Office used to be really bad here, although I think the newest versions are significantly closer to the real thing.

I feel like this is kind of an extreme example of something I see a lot on HN: hackers who literally cannot imagine ways of using a computer that are outside of their experience.

In some contexts it is a big deal, though. I suppose the answer to that is that everyone who uses Word should learn to use Latex instead but that's not realistic.

> An open source project ... will never be able to compete with ... pays developers ...

There are plenty of examples where they have done just that. Blender is probably the most obvious.

Blender is just the worst example that you could have picked. It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. It is like GIMP: just enough for those with simple needs.

KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too.

What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?

> What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?

I feel confidant in saying that yeah, there probably are. They're being paid to implement features and fix bugs found by their companies, who use R and Jenkins.

> It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field.

How so?

Oh boy, this is going to get depressing.

Blender cannot cope with the kind of stuff that is thrown at commercial DCC tools in feature production. Parts of it don't scale, others fall short of what would be required. Many features are kind of there on paper, but are not fleshed out that well.

Blender faces a sort of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't push it, you can't find out what needs fixing. But nobody in the industry is willing to try because they know that it will break too easily.

This is sort of why the Blender Foundation creates these open source movie projects: they are there to figure out what needs fixing. A ton of new features had to be created for each new short. Last time I bothered to check, many of these features were stuff that would have been considered absolutely essential in VFX workflow at the time the Blender developers managed to implement it.

The downside to these projects is that they also lead to the addition of features like compositing and editing workflows that are out of place in a DCC tool (especially the editing part). Blender started to overextend itself and ended up with too few developers to push all of these areas equally well.

To be honest, it can be summed up with one sentence:

Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around.

A more "business" orientated sentence:

Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing editor, and a game editor; Maya and 3ds Studio do not.

Blender just can't keep up. It's a good tool, no doubt about it, but few professional users will end up using it to make money.

I can comprehend what you are saying, but I disagree.

Over the past decade or so, Blender has been on par, and even ahead of "industry standard" tools.

It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.

The biggest benefit is that it has all of these tools in a cohesive environment.

Instead of a photoshop/GIMP-like menu of functions, Blender is a cohesive manageable UI.

There are, in fact, a wide variety of professionals using Blender to make money. You don't hear about it, because telling you what they use is not their perogative.

What features to Maya/Max/etc. have that Blender is really behind on today? I can't think of any.

Blender is overextended. That's what Blender developers said openly. Parts like the compositor don't get much love at all. They were merely included because they were needed to fill huge gaping holes in the production pipeline for their demo movies. After that, interest in them dropped to near zero, but there were no better alternatives for a long time.

Now, there is at least Neutron as an open source compositing tool that seems to be filling that particular hole now much more competently than Blender ever could.

I do not understand how you can consider Blender's UI "manageable" in any way. There are much better ways to build UIs for enormously complex DCC tools. My go-to example for that has been Maya for a long time, but since a couple of years, Autodesk has bolted on features in a way that spectacularly breaks the internal consistency, logic and general discoverability of features in Maya. Even though, Blender's UI is still an unsorted mess compared to that.

> It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.

Expanding feature sets is something commercial software fails at? The biggest reason nobody professionally uses the open-source alternatives is they're missing features.