It’s also about how much time you need to put into the apps. The UX as stated elsewhere on this thread with these alternatives just doesn’t measure up.

For one off, simple jobs, used sparingly…those FOSS alternatives are fine.

If I need to spend more than 10 minutes of time using them…I’m frustrated beyond measure at their UX issues.

These are newbie children learning their first apps. They don't need "professional" features or ground-breaking UX. Not to mention these apps are generally better than MS stuff from the 90s, which were good enough.

Learn a spreadsheet, pick up any spreadsheet easily for the rest of your life.

If the cost to entry is lower, but the costs to maintain is higher, to the point where it’s a wash or worse (according to some comments on this thread from people managing education tech), why wouldn’t you use the de facto standard?

Seems to me the only reason to push FOSS in that case is for activism purposes over any real value to the student.

Such extreme short-term thinking, resulting in the propping up of monopolies. At school no less. The point of school is to support society, not corporate earnings.

Not to mention any so-called deficiencies could be remedied in two years by directing 1% of the budget from private jets to FLOSS.

> Not to mention any so-called deficiencies could be remedied in two years by directing 1% of the budget from private jets to FLOSS.

Not sure there are too many school districts with private jets, but if you are referring to the corporate software publishers, i am pretty sure there would be much better things to spend 1% on other than supporting FOSS to benefit and support society.

The right software for kids allows them to be productive in minutes, has a limited feature set, focuses the child on the core subject matter, and gets them excited for more.

I don't think that either Photoshop or GIMP meet this for the vast majority of students and classes. I definitely could see some advanced students and high school courses making use it, though.

I think LibreOffice and Notepad++ are just fine and could be used as a drop-in replacement.

This is dependent on your goals and what your age cutoff is. Violins are one of the hardest musical instruments to become proficient at but kids still learn it and become adept. Programming languages, using the command line and other steep learning curve tools have the potential to offer large rewards for learning how to use them, even if they're hard to learn.

In terms of the specific pieces of software, I don't think Photoshop is so much easier to learn than GIMP and GIMP has the added benefit of being libre/free and gratis. There's also Krita [0].

[0] https://krita.org/en/

>Gimp is really not adequate for everyday usage compared with Photoshop? Really?

Yes, really. You may as well be comparing calc.exe to Excel, same comparison.