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Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
131–140 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#132I'm surprised no one has said "PowerPoint" yet. LibreOffice and Google Slides are nowhere close. Animations, theming, diagramming tools... I run an Ubuntu laptop and have been missing PowerPoint so much I tried to get a Windows VM for it. Couldn't get graphics support in VirtualBox working correctly :(
I find PowerPoint to be the most easily replaceable program in the Office suite because effective presentations do not depend on cool animations or themes to get the message accross. The best presentations I've seen have had black text on a plain white background with clear and precise language. Either that or presentations that only consist of images or diagrams and no text.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet with taking 30-40% of revenue (as you claim) Uber is still running at a loss.
Uber and Lyft take 35-40% of each ride, that's the number that multiple drivers have told me and this article confirms it https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-take-rates-hig... I also know a few people at food delivery companies and they all take around 35% of each order.
Sure, but my point stands - 35-40% is not enough to turn a profit for them.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#134Google Desktop Search (it is dead now anyway). Was brilliant while it lasted. There were some other alternatives as well but I think GDS starved them to death before Google got bored and killed GDS. (Please le me know if there are good alternatives, free/paid/open source, everything is interesting as long as they fo the same things GDS did and can convince me that they don't upload my data.)
X1 is pretty great https://www.x1.com/
No affiliation but I run this on several big workstations and it “just works” , it’s not free but I like that it works locally and doesn’t seem to choke with tons of files (and maybe 40GB of emails)
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#135GUI 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.
Find out if a git-svn bridge would help you. Back in the days, if you're an Emacs guy - I've found magit-svn to be excellent.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
For about 10 years I had a consultancy that in the latter half focused on B2B. One of the biggest qualifier pitfalls was thinking we could replace Excel with anything else. There are a myriad of reasons this fails to work. I swear some of them are near voodoo. Google Sheets is a fit in some situations but the real facts are that Excel is amazing and when someone has been running core biz logic on it for a long time;…
I know what that voodoo may be. Of the many failed "replace Excel" projects I've seen in the investment banking \ hedge fund world over 20 years, the usual mistake is that the focus was on the specific Excel model itself and not the generic building capabilities that Excel provides. An Excel model, i.e., the specific map from inputs to outputs, is typically fairly easy to replace with another tool. But what you've do…
Excel is the code and its interpreter. You don't want to lose the REPL flow for development, but maybe you can add an AOT compiler for production?
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#137Video editing. There’s Kdenlive and OpenShot that are maybe the most well-established, but they we’re both very buggy the last time I dealt with them, and they’re nowhere near featureful as what’s available commercially. I think we could benefit from a well-know MovieMaker equivalent. Something that isn’t featureful, but is reliable (read: doesn’t crash) and intuitive.
The low-end video editing market also hasn't been satisfied with closed source proprietary software either.
Yes, there are a lot of players, especially on the Windows side in the under $100 price range, but nothing I've used has been comparable to iMovie on the Mac. It's the one void that hasn't been filled for me since switching from Mac to Windows.
I've purchased Cyberlink PowerDirector, Corel VideoStudio and Premiere Elements, and I didn't find them to be very good. There's too much of a sloppy "kitchen sink" mentality to them.
I actually found Windows Movie Maker to be better than the aforementioned products, but that got discontinued without a replacement for quite some time. There's now a "Video Editor" application which is part of "Photos" that is serviceable, but I would gladly pay a Windows app that is akin to iMovie - simple, focused and functional.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber and Lyft take 35-40% of each ride, that's the number that multiple drivers have told me and this article confirms it https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-take-rates-hig... I also know a few people at food delivery companies and they all take around 35% of each order.
Sure, but my point stands - 35-40% is not enough to turn a profit for them.
That's because they're buying growth. Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that.
My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#139VLC
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perforce has a locking mechanism for files, which is important for the large binary objects that are used in game development. Git doesn't really have that concept, so it requires more out of band communication to make it work for that use case. Git LFS might handle this, but it's just not something that Perforce shops have to even think about, train their people on, etc. It's just "there" and there's somebody that t…
> Git doesn't really have that concept Of locking files? Sure it does; if two people modify the same piece of code, then there will be a merge conflict, and whoever's doing the merge will have the opportunity to reconcile those two versions. It's like a lock, but you don't have to think about it / explicitly lock and unlock the object you're editing. Combine this with rebasing (git-speak for "switch to the branch int…
Merge conflicts are definitely not the same thing as file locking. At the point where you're getting a merge conflict, it's too late. How are you going to resolve conflicts in an audio file?
File locking is a way to communicate in advance that nobody should attempt to make changes to a particular file until the lock is cleared. Merge conflicts are communication in arrears (so to speak) and at that point, effort has already been wasted by at least one person.