The IDA disassembler is pretty irreplaceable. Or at least it was until the NSA released Ghidra - I haven't tried it to know.
Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
111–120 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#112There are some projects that have solutions, but not great ones. My definition of great is something that people with very little technical knowledge can set up themselves, correctly and securely. This is based on my experience, trying to show non technical people how to self host some things. - File, email self hosted and e2e encryption has Nextcloud, but only technical people can set it up. There should be a happy-…
> Web based chat servers that scale.
Riot is nice. https://about.riot.im/
Mozilla just adopted it for corporate communications. https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/19/welcoming-mozilla-to-matr...
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#113GUI clients for SVN. There are plenty for git, but when I started working at an SVN company I had no luck finding a free one. Ended up paying for SmartSVN, which is okay but still not as good as even some of the OSS git clients.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#114foobar2000 (media player for Windows)
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#115Dual pane file manager with GUI, in other words: a proper alternative to Total Commander on Linux. Fast, simple UI, has all required functionality built in and can be extended using plugins. Krusader is probably closest one, but still has few minor paper cut issues.
Double Commander?
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#116High level multiphysics, RF, and CAD tools and simulators. Autodesk, Ansys etc. still dominate the field. The state of tools like OpenFoam is like the early days of Gimp and KiCad; theoretically possible to use but only if your background is in software engineering and/or if you are really, really poor and desperate e.g. a grad student on a tight budget. If you look at software like open source FTDT sims, almost all…
One of the goals of the FreeCAD project [1] is to be a high-level interface for tools like OpenFOAM (via the CfdOF workbench [2]), and other solvers/meshers like CalculiX, Elmer, Gmsh, and Netgen. Its modular, workbench-based, Python-around-C++ core approach provides an environment for people to make their own specialized tools, like the Arch Rebar tool [3] that was created as part of a Google Summer of Code project.…
> interface
What are some ways that FreeCAD can solve the problem of paying the rent of people who walk around holding their users' business problems and UI frustrations in their head?
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#117There might be an opening for an OSS alternative to game engines like Unity and Unreal. There are scores of open-source game frameworks out there, but there's nothing I'm aware of that comes close to the ease-of-use and cross-platform-build support that Unity has. Of course, you might have an uphill battle because both of the above are free for smaller projects and have fairly generous pricing models that scale based on income.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#118Sketch, Figma
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not an Excel user. Genuinely curious: Is it really that the alternatives are worse, lacking features, unstable, or does it come down to "they're not Excel", in that they're not a drop in replacement that can perfectly load and run every Excel sheet ever created. Because that would be my gut feeling: Not interoperable enough, since some things just work differently, but not necessarily much worse. If you can't sen…
My impression is that Microsoft has sweated the details of Excel, the way that Apple sweated the details of the iPhone, so that it is extremely smooth and quick. This in turn makes it literally less physically laborious to use. Things like casually swiping the mouse across a range of cells to select them. I suspect making it work this way requires an army of developers and some corporate will power. Having an inside…
> sweated the details
I strongly suspect you are correct. As stale evidence of culture, I offer some writing by a software developer who used to work for Microsoft on Excel:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#120Qualitative Data Analysis systems. RQDA and QualCoder are under development, but the pace is generally slow and many features are buggy and remain untested on common operating systems. Some products out there on the market are better than others (I use MaxQDA) but come at a hefty price, even with a student discount.
Also transcription software. Not voice recognition, but software that assists with manual transcription. I'm amazed that no open source alternative to F5 exists out there, since it's a relatively simple mechanism (keyboard shortcuts to denote speaker, paste timestamp, include annotations, etc and ability spool back to rewind 2 seconds).