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Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
271–280 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently spent time at work trying to get OpenFOAM to do, well, anything using FreeCAD. I couldn't get it to install properly on linux or windows. On windows, you're supposed to use some part of their autoinstaller through the freecad UI, which apparently didn't set some environment variable somewhere. On linux, I had package incompatibilities (using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). It... needs work.
> It... needs work. Hah, very true. I have been working directly with OpenFOAM upstream to improve the packaging situation on Debian/Ubuntu but unfortunately I didn't get started in time for the 18.04 release. It's a bit tricky too in that many FreeCAD developers use Linux but I would bet most of our potential engineering end-users would be on Windows. Thanks for your feedback.
If they had a PPA, it would solve the issue.
The problem is they don't.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes it is desirable to not have optimistic locking like git. Often you want to signal that you don't want a file/asset modified for a period.
I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on that. I've found that locking a file from any changes entirely almost always causes more problems than it ostensibly solves, and is a massive impediment to productivity on any team larger than a single person. The vast majority of the time it's entirely unnecessary anyway.
Absolutely agree with you when it comes to textual/structural information where merge conflicts can be solved easily. But for binary like formats, I feel often there is no way to resolve a conflict.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#274Clipboard manager Given the hugely abstract data driven world we live in and the inability of the human brain to have long term cache it should be important. Open source versions exist but they are simply not up to scratch to paid versions, they are simply crap to be honest. Most paid versions have demo modes to see whats good but even the paid versions could do with improvements. Don't get bogged down in making it w…
Out of curiosity, what do you need out of a clipboard manager that Ditto (Windows) or CopyQ (cross-platform) don't offer?
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'am about to try DaVinci Resolve as an alternative to Premiere (I used Premiere in the past). But I don't want to fork $20 per month because I don't use it that often. A good opensource video editing software (or NLE non-linear editing as they call it) would be great.
Wait, isn't DaVinci Resolve a one time purchase of $299? Or am I missing something?
Free if you only use one GPU. DaVinci Resolve is a pretty solid choice.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed I do not. If game developers (and/or game engine developers; looking at you, Unity3D...) showed similar restraint, then they likely wouldn't feel the need to tie themselves to 90's-esque version control schemes.
The game industry has a completely different way of working compared to other tech fields. Most of their practices seem old fashioned, or anti-patterns, etc. if you look at them from an outside point of view. But they're trying to do something very hard: control both quality and deadline. It's not like an open source or enterprise IT project. The game has to be finished, good, by a given date. To do that they do many…
> But they're trying to do something very hard: control both quality and deadline.
Do you believe other tech fields are not trying to do the same exact thing? Do you believe that enterprise IT projects are somehow less beholden to both quality and deadlines than video games?
Controlling both quality and deadlines is what literally every (professional) software development project should be doing. The implication that game developers are somehow better about or more cognizant of this (let alone specifically because of broken development workflows) is pretty rich considering how frequently big-budget video games end up in development hell (see also: Duke Nukem Forever) and/or end up riddled with bugs (see also: literally everything Bethesda's released in the last decade or so).
(Not saying that enterprise IT is necessarily better in either regard, of course; bugs and delays are inevitable as software complexity grows, be it an RPG or an ERP...)
> If hard locking saves them time
It doesn't save time in aggregate, though. It maybe saves time for one specific corner case (conflicting edits on binary files) at the expense of slowing down everything else.
And if you're at the point where "conflicting edits on binary files" is no longer a corner case, then that betrays at least one of two dysfunctions:
- You're using some sort of container format instead of sanely keeping things split into separate texture/model/animation/normal/behavior/etc. files (and then - if the amalgamated container file is indeed necessary - combining it as part of the build process). If you're really running into a lot of cases where multiple people are trying to edit the exact same normal map at the exact same time, then...
- You've got a communications breakdown somewhere. You can band-aid over that with file locking, but that still doesn't address the issue of two people trying to independently edit something in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed I do not. If game developers (and/or game engine developers; looking at you, Unity3D...) showed similar restraint, then they likely wouldn't feel the need to tie themselves to 90's-esque version control schemes.
You're not really going to get away from large binary files in game development. They need to be version controlled somehow. Adding more layers of indirection for how that actually happens is just kicking merge vs file locking can down the road.
> You're not really going to get away from large binary files in game development. They need to be version controlled somehow.
Yes, but if they really can't be split up into smaller components, then there's always the option of using a different repository and VCS specifically for binary assets. Yes, it's kicking the can down the road, but at least it's kicking that can away from the actual code.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#278Music production software. Any of the proprietary options is better than the best open source DAW like Audacity or Ardour. Even Reaper gets enough paying customers to have a good combo notation editor/piano roll in it. Open source has produced some good periphery stuff like Helm and MuseScore. LMMS is the best of the bunch when it comes to open source DAWs.
That's not to say the open source stuff is bad. I get that they don't have the resources to do as much UX refinement as the others. If you can't afford the proprietary stuff or prefer open source, then you can get by. The actual audio handling systems inside are probably world class.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#279There was another thread about Aspera on HN the other day.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the suite of Excel + Powerpoint is incredibly hard to replace. The entry level to power user path of Powerpoint and Excel specifically make it easy to jump in and then get very powerful usage from very quickly.
Once you see Apple Keynote i never went back. But true for Excel
Powerpoint's for sending information to and between C-level folks. It's basically the only file format you can send them that they'll maybe actually open. Its use in actual presentations is secondary.