31–40 of 283 posts
apply policy based on AD user or group membership
block/apply protocols rather than ports (allow ssh doesn't care what port ssh runs on)
advanced url categorization. allow Facebook but disallow Facebook chat
etc
Despite how great Inkscape is, it's no where near Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer (and you can't run them on WINE either).
I love the work that the Inkscape team has done and it does do some stuff that illustrator doesn't do easily but it's no where near a replacement for illustrator. I haven't looked but I suspect it's not in their mission statement to be a replacement for Illustrator.
Hats off to Adobe for producing the world class tools they produce so consistently for basically the length of my adult life but man I think it would be good if there was something that was aiming to be an open source Illustrator alternative.
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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…
The MS Office suite is far more user friendly than the alternatives. I still use Libre Office on Ubuntu and I wonder why they chose to be so different. It would be great if they could completely copy MS Office in UI/UX, but there's probably some kind of copyright there right?
3D CAD software is light years behind in the open source ecosystem, but competing with Solid Works or Auto Desk is a enormous task... Although Blender seems to be catching up in 3D animation!
Openscad? Or that doesn’t do everything?
Almost all drafters and fabricators just want to interact with the 3D model with the mouse. Dragging and adding features.
Also 2D drawings are the main output of a CAD program, to build the designs from. Which Openscad doesn't provide.
ManyCam - software that creates a virtual webcam on Windows and thus allows one to: - use one physical webcam in multiple apps simultaneously - switch which physical webcam software is using seamlessly - add live video effects - use a static image or video file as the webcam source (If there is something like this already, then I have missed it!)
OBS Studio has a plugin that enables virtual webcam output on windows. I’ve used it to create a more reliable webcam output from Blackmagic capture cards, as not all software likes to recognize the included webcam driver. https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/
Thanks for sharing!
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The MS Office suite is far more user friendly than the alternatives. I still use Libre Office on Ubuntu and I wonder why they chose to be so different. It would be great if they could completely copy MS Office in UI/UX, but there's probably some kind of copyright there right?
The thing is, OpenOffice (and by descent LibreOffice) did copy MS Office's UI/UX. Then Microsoft switched to the "Ribbon" interface, throwing all that shared knowledge out the window. Recreating the Ribbon in LibreOffice is an active development task, last I checked.
Excel alternatives might be uncountable. Implementing spreadsheet basics is an advanced beginner exercise. But even Google’s billions only get it a distant second best because Microsoft is still working hard despite the lead. Sure Google and Apple can meet most needs most of the time. They’re good enough mainly because they are free beer. Not because they are open source. Obviously. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a GNU fanb…
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; that operator is someone you need to get to know before feeling too certain.
There's money in replacing that person and fucking the whole thing up so they are stuck with a long tail of consultants. I never ran that sort of business. However on a couple painful occasions I overzealously pitched what python and psql could do to solve a problem and later had to eat crow.
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Why’s perforce not replaceable by git?
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…
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 into which I want to merge and then try applying all the changes from my branch") and you end up with a pretty coherent idea of what changed and in what order.
Having used both branch-oriented (like Git) and locking-oriented (not Perforce specifically, but my current dayjob involves very similar version control schemes), I vastly prefer the former. Less ceremony around doing things in parallel, and less risk of development deadlocks (e.g. Alice locked A.cpp for editing, Bob locked B.dds for editing, Alice now wants to edit B.dds, Bob now wants to edit A.cpp, now Alice will have to revert her lock on A.cpp, wait for Bob to do everything he needs to do, then relock A.cpp and redo her changes all over again (probably also having to debug new things because of new bits and pieces Bob added) - or Bob will have to do so for B.dds - and cue fistfight in the breakroom).
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That all being said, binary files are indeed a weak spot for Git, so if you really do want to version control your textures and models and sounds and such, then sure, perhaps a different VCS tailored for that use-case would be more ideal. In my experience, though, that tends to be an anti-pattern; generally better to keep code and assets separate (I'm well aware that tools/engines like e.g. Unity don't play the slightest bit nicely with that separation), using separate version control systems tailored to the specific content.
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The thing is, OpenOffice (and by descent LibreOffice) did copy MS Office's UI/UX. Then Microsoft switched to the "Ribbon" interface, throwing all that shared knowledge out the window. Recreating the Ribbon in LibreOffice is an active development task, last I checked.
Is there any limitations on how much they can copy? Surely Microsoft have some of the design and specs locked down with patents
Excel alternatives might be uncountable. Implementing spreadsheet basics is an advanced beginner exercise. But even Google’s billions only get it a distant second best because Microsoft is still working hard despite the lead. Sure Google and Apple can meet most needs most of the time. They’re good enough mainly because they are free beer. Not because they are open source. Obviously. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a GNU fanb…
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;…