The gaps are massive in several electrical/silicon CAD verticals and simulation. Due to IP secrecy, no OSS Verilog/VHDL synthesis alternative exists for Vivado/ISE/Quartus and the Intel/Xilinx line of FPGAs. I don't think any practical alternatives exist for Mentor Graphics' line of silicon design or simulation software, nor have I seen any OS software capable of complex mixed domain simulations like COMSOL or Ansys - many of the pieces exist, but it takes a lot of work to verify that algorithmic physical models actually work together.

On average I agree they are on par. Sometimes OSS is better (ffmpeg), sometimes commercial stuff (adobe after effects).

In this specific case I think it might be beneficial if you can spend a lot of money on gathering training material and tweaking the network. But then again someone here mentioned the quality 4chans fake porn has reached, so maybe I'm wrong after all.

This might actually be one of those edge cases where commercial is better, but the government's secret version is by far the best.

Like what though? Historically what tech does did governments have that was unknown to commercial domains?

People are motivated by money, governments pay little and there’s no way to get rich working there so it doesn’t make that much sense.

Around WWII Computers, Radar, Nuclear power, crypto, jet aircraft, rockets.

Around 1960 space flight, supersonic flight.

More recently hypersonic flight, and we don’t really know becase people back in WWII had no idea.

True but now all that stuff is pretty much produced in the private sector by government contracts with these big companies. DARPA doesn’t have better scientists than MIT and there are a lot of extremely intelligent scientists who have moral issues about working for the military.

MS Office is still miles ahead of any OSS “alternative“, despite the many glaring bugs.

MS Office is still miles ahead in the benchmark of opening it's own proprietary files.

There is no competitor, proprietary or open, that comes close to Excel. It's been relentlessly, extensively polished for years and years, and keeps gaining new features every year.

And this sticking to the spreadsheet concept, which is very limiting.

---

Contrast for example Tableau -- it's a great idea and generated a lot of enthusiasm for a while, but never quite took off as an office package one needs to have. The normal awkwardness of its first versions is still there; they don't have the deep <whatever> that the Excel team has.

Tableau is great, but it has a much narrower use case: given one or more tables of data, generate graphs for presentation or for exploring the dataset.

In comparison, Excel can do that too (just worse), but it can also solve equations, do your company's bookkeeping, and pretty much every other task that relies mostly on numbers.

I would argue Open/LibreOffice Calc comes fairly close to Excel if you ignore the worse user interface (which is fair in the original assertion that it's "mostly polish and small incremental improvements")

> if you ignore the worse user interface

considering that's a major part of "better" that's big ask!

Yes, but given switching costs and habit formation, why would people care about something that's not strictly Pareto dominant?

Adobe have definitely bested most oss competitors in their space. Although with the amount of man power at their disposal it would be hard to beat.

The vast bulk of Adobe's advantage is in UX, not technical algorithms. Which makes perfect sense because that tends to be the case with most F/OSS software—technically brilliant but with an face only a programmer could love.

Yes, Adobe do have some remarkable algorithms that would be difficult to replicate (e.g. heal brush and content aware fill) but these are a small minority of Adobe's software advantage.

The one that irritates me the most is vector drawing programs: open source programs (and even paid competitors) just can't touch Adobe Illustrator for the sort of work I do. I'm sure at least 50 percent of it is familiarity and muscle memory, but I've desperately tried switching to a few different options like Inkscape or Affinity and left wildly disappointed.

You're right that UX is one of the biggest problems they have. One thing that is also hard to replicate it how well Adobe's software works together. Embedding smart objects and illustrator files in photoshop documents, right clicking a clip in Premiere and sending it to After Affects and back again without rendering an intermediate file etc.

I would be interested in a Lightroom alternative if anyone can recommend one though.

for content aware fill and heal brush both GMIC ( https://patdavid.net/2014/02/getting-around-in-gimp-gmic-inp...) and resynthetizer ( http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer ) are working quite OK.

Gimp even had content aware fill first, It was based on a SIGGRAPH paper iirc.

Do you use the Astute plugins for AI, or the native pen tool? Affinity feels different, maybe less precise, but the functionality was way better compared with the native Adobe tool. You should try Figmas pen tool, I like it.

My uses are relatively trivial- logo design, SVG generation, basic layout work and PDF tinkering. My main need is fine control of beziers with auto-guides to ensure consistency.