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Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alterna

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

dagmx 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity? "Substantially better" is a fairly large claim. To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.
- TrevorJ 6y ago
  I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts. To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
the__alchemist 6y ago
Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  However, Krita seems really good also. Probably on par with Corel Painter.
  - meshmonki 6y ago
    I'd also vouch for Krita. While I'm not a fan of it's window or layering system I think it has a nice balance of features compared to other digital painting software like Paint Tool Sai, Fire Alpaca, Corel, or Photoshop. I made the (mostly) full transition to it earlier last year and don't regret it.
    - TrevorJ 6y ago
      I agree, Krita is quite good. Out of curiosity, what do you not like about the layering? AFAIK it's pretty similar to PS, no?
      - meshmonki 6y ago
        It certainly is. I just find it has some quirks like group layers being hidden behind a tiny arrow suspiciously close to the paint layer button.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  Library management quirks aside, KiCad is pretty close to competitive unless you need simulation or other cutting edge features. If you're familiar with it and know what you're doing it'll get you where you need to go. Also check out realthunder's freecad fork, they've made some good progress on topological naming (with the effect of keeping models far more stable through minor changes). It's still unusable for all but the lightest duty professional work but it's an improvement.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Have you tried Horizon EDA?
    - katmannthree 6y ago
      I have! About a year ago -- it has great library management, and is overall a very good effort that could take over KiCad's place over the next decade if they stagnate. My criticism is mainly that the PCB layout tools were still buggy. I believe it is/was using some of KiCad's router code, but it took more work to get a layout done than doing the same thing in KiCad would. It also tended to get glitchy with increasing layout complexity. The schematic editor is a lot slower than KiCad's and not as feature-rich. The GTK widgets look and work very nicely on gnome-based environments but have issues on kde / windows. To be fair that's a GTK issue and not a Horizon issue, but unless Horizon has changed a lot lately I'd have a hard time recommending it over KiCad right now for professional use.
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    > Library management quirks aside, KiCad is... Didn't they address that sometime in the past two years? I remember updating KiCad and having some issues with the parts libraries, but after that it seemed as good as I could expect it to be. I use it very, very rarely so really don't remember more than that.
    - katmannthree 6y ago
      It has gotten better and IIRC is supposed to continue to improve this year with v6, but it's still fragmented, clunky, and lacking features for professional use. Footprints and schematic symbols should belong to a parent component class with provisions for inventory tracking, etc. Their library manager works fine for hobby level work but if you're doing production you'll have to have a separate component management process that you integrate yourself. What they have is fine, it works, but it's a far cry from what you get with siemens eda (mentor graphics) or altium.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Don't forget Inkscape, Firefox, and LibreOffice.
  - zingplex 6y ago
    Of those three, I think Firefox is the only one that could be said to be on par with their commercial counterparts. Inkscape is powerful, but the UI isn't very responsive or intuitive. LibreOffice is slow and buggy whenever I use it.
- omegote 6y ago
  +1, thank god we've finally come to acknowledge and accept that Gimp has never been and will never be a professional alternative to Gimp for many users.
  - Wistar 6y ago
    To Photoshop?
- qchris 6y ago
  I tried designing a relatively simple assembly in Freecad recently (again, as I've come back to it multiple times), and remembered how uniquely terrible some the design decisions have been. I mean, fundamentally user-hostile approaches to the most basic functionality, like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order and sketch lines not being created with center points. And when a user tried to give them feedback (someone else, not mine) civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it." I did end up having to fire up my Windows machine for Inventor. I'm sure it has some level of feature parity with commercial CAD buried somewhere, but it's so hard to get to even on the new 0.19 pre-release that I genuinely wouldn't try to put it in the same conversation as Blender or KiCad as open alternatives to commercial software. It's just not there.
  - katmannthree 6y ago
    When you say rotating a part do you mean rotating the view or using the draft rotate (or some other workbench's rotate) command? FYI if you use the draft workbench you can snap to midpoints and then convert the autocad-equivalent draft workbench sketch to an inventor-equivalent part design / sketcher workbench sketch. You can also use the symmetry constraint in the sketcher workbench to constrain a point to the center of a line. If you get familiar with it you can technically model almost anything you want[0], but if you want to go back and change a feature (which is kinda the entire point of parametric cad) it'll likely destroy your part if you're not using the topological naming branch. Freecad realistically needs 5-10 more years to get basic feature parity with professional CAD from the early 2000's and then another release or two focused entirely on stability. [0]: Their opencascade geometry kernel has some moderately serious deficiencies for complex operations/objects, the assembly workbenches are just now approaching the point where they're stable enough that you can use them without having to rebuild your assembly every week, and while the new TechDraw workbench theoretically gives you the features you need to make manufacturing drawings (which is really the end goal for any professional CAD package, those are what you need to get your parts made) in practice it's too buggy to use with even simple assemblies.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Try solvespace: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl It's exactly what I want of a CAD tool: a parametric solver with a 3D UI and 2D sketches. I haven't really have an opportunity to use it a lot since I discovered it, though. Kicad is quite nice, though.
- billfruit 6y ago
  I sort of disagree on Photoshop, most of the love for Photoshop seems to be just lock in to its existing work flow. I have not used Photoshop before using gimp, and for my use cases Gimps multiple window interface seemed to me the more usable interface. Photoshop's UI is nothing great.
  - TrevorJ 6y ago
    Due to the subscription model, the UI is getting actively WORSE as well. You have to push new features to justify a subscription, and most of those seem to be taking the form of useless UI clutter and cruft. There hasn't been a truly valuable new feature in PS since around the CS2 days IMO.
  - Inityx 6y ago
    Photoshop has fundamentally different editing paradigms (e.g. layer styles, adjustment layers) that make it incomparable to GIMP.
pjmlp 6y ago
Blender was a commercial product that was latter open sourced and existing customers put the effort to keep the ball rolling. Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.
- TrevorJ 6y ago
  This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Well, I bet the big pie that makes a living out of it is on pay checks from studios.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      It's not real Open Source if the community pays for it? Studios en-mass deciding to fund a shared, Libre resource that anyone can use so that every studio can all benefit and get better features at a faster pace is basically the dream for most Open Source efforts. There's nothing for anyone to be ashamed about from that model, it's good for Open Source to be funded by the players who are most invested in having a really good industry standard available to everyone.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        The point being these are snowflake projects, only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks, the large majority of Linux users pays zero anything for desktop software. Donations and patreon like schemes hardly allow to pay for a mortgage, supermarket, healthcare, transport every single month.
        danShumway 6y ago
        > only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks I don't understand what you're getting at. You're arguing that user donations and patreon schemes don't pay enough, but there's something wrong with Blender being funded by the companies that use it? The companies paying for Blender are a substantial portion of the community. They're funding a common resource that all of them share, and that common resource is being made available to everyone, decreasing the barriers of entry for new talent to get into 3D modeling, increasing the quality of potential hires they can bring on because of its wide availability, providing a common target for addons and tutorials, and providing those same studios with a Libre base that they can build on top of if they need to. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in Open Source, people pay for it because it's a common resource that they care about. That's why companies are investing into it. What is the funding model for Open Source that you consider legitimate? Pulling in enough money to full-time hire an entire development team doesn't count because you don't like the primary user base? Pretty much everything that Blender is doing here is a success and more Open Source projects should be looking at their governance model and learning from it. I don't understand a viewpoint that says that Patreon and individual-funded projects are uncompetitive and unsustainable, but also that corporate-funded projects with large donors don't "count" as Open Source success stories. It feels to me like you're defining Open Source as a project with zero funding, and then complaining that it has zero funding. Is Matrix a snowflake project? Is Krita? Is Linux itself? And anyway, all of this ignores the facts that: A) Even outside of corporate donations that make the majority of its funding, Blender has also been comparatively way more successful than other OS projects at getting individual user donations (I even donate to Blender just as an individual), because they approach PR and community in a really smart, engaging way that drives enthusiasm. And B) Blender's funding model has nothing to do with the original thing this thread was talking about, which was just that FLOSS software can be of comparable or better quality than its commercial alternatives. You're kind of jumping around, from first arguing that Blender doesn't count because it started as commercial software, and now arguing that Blender doesn't count because it has funding and that's not typical for other projects. If FLOSS software overall can pull off commercial competitiveness in many cases underfunded, that's almost more impressive. Imagine how good the Open Source ecosystem would be if we as individual and corporate communities started funding more stuff to the same level as we fund Blender.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Blender has always had a decent source of funding compared to other open source projects, the ability to have full time devs has made a huge difference. Their open source media releases were also a huge success because they pushed the program and feature set to what people actually need when doing real work. Really an awesome project overall.
- hallarempt 6y ago
  Well, that's all by intention. GIMP and Inkscape have always avoided trying to find that sort of funding: inkscape even allowing their lead developer to be hired away without making a fight for it at one point. It's why I have been trying to copy blender's model for Krita since forever.
  - lambda 6y ago
    What is Blender's funding model? I recall that its initial open source release was essentially crowdfunded before that was a trendy thing, but I haven't been keeping up with how they've been funding continuing development. They seem to be doing pretty well at that, so I'm curious about where the majority of revenue is coming from.
edhelas 6y ago
Darktable >>> Lightroom for my case

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

dagmx 6y ago

Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity? "Substantially better" is a fairly large claim. To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.

TrevorJ 6y ago
I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.
- dagmx 6y ago
  Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts. To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.

the__alchemist 6y ago

Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.

codetrotter 6y ago
However, Krita seems really good also. Probably on par with Corel Painter.
- meshmonki 6y ago
  I'd also vouch for Krita. While I'm not a fan of it's window or layering system I think it has a nice balance of features compared to other digital painting software like Paint Tool Sai, Fire Alpaca, Corel, or Photoshop. I made the (mostly) full transition to it earlier last year and don't regret it.
  - TrevorJ 6y ago
    I agree, Krita is quite good. Out of curiosity, what do you not like about the layering? AFAIK it's pretty similar to PS, no?
    - meshmonki 6y ago
      It certainly is. I just find it has some quirks like group layers being hidden behind a tiny arrow suspiciously close to the paint layer button.
katmannthree 6y ago
Library management quirks aside, KiCad is pretty close to competitive unless you need simulation or other cutting edge features. If you're familiar with it and know what you're doing it'll get you where you need to go. Also check out realthunder's freecad fork, they've made some good progress on topological naming (with the effect of keeping models far more stable through minor changes). It's still unusable for all but the lightest duty professional work but it's an improvement.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Have you tried Horizon EDA?
  - katmannthree 6y ago
    I have! About a year ago -- it has great library management, and is overall a very good effort that could take over KiCad's place over the next decade if they stagnate. My criticism is mainly that the PCB layout tools were still buggy. I believe it is/was using some of KiCad's router code, but it took more work to get a layout done than doing the same thing in KiCad would. It also tended to get glitchy with increasing layout complexity. The schematic editor is a lot slower than KiCad's and not as feature-rich. The GTK widgets look and work very nicely on gnome-based environments but have issues on kde / windows. To be fair that's a GTK issue and not a Horizon issue, but unless Horizon has changed a lot lately I'd have a hard time recommending it over KiCad right now for professional use.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  > Library management quirks aside, KiCad is... Didn't they address that sometime in the past two years? I remember updating KiCad and having some issues with the parts libraries, but after that it seemed as good as I could expect it to be. I use it very, very rarely so really don't remember more than that.
  - katmannthree 6y ago
    It has gotten better and IIRC is supposed to continue to improve this year with v6, but it's still fragmented, clunky, and lacking features for professional use. Footprints and schematic symbols should belong to a parent component class with provisions for inventory tracking, etc. Their library manager works fine for hobby level work but if you're doing production you'll have to have a separate component management process that you integrate yourself. What they have is fine, it works, but it's a far cry from what you get with siemens eda (mentor graphics) or altium.
phkahler 6y ago
Don't forget Inkscape, Firefox, and LibreOffice.
- zingplex 6y ago
  Of those three, I think Firefox is the only one that could be said to be on par with their commercial counterparts. Inkscape is powerful, but the UI isn't very responsive or intuitive. LibreOffice is slow and buggy whenever I use it.
omegote 6y ago
+1, thank god we've finally come to acknowledge and accept that Gimp has never been and will never be a professional alternative to Gimp for many users.
- Wistar 6y ago
  To Photoshop?
qchris 6y ago
I tried designing a relatively simple assembly in Freecad recently (again, as I've come back to it multiple times), and remembered how uniquely terrible some the design decisions have been. I mean, fundamentally user-hostile approaches to the most basic functionality, like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order and sketch lines not being created with center points. And when a user tried to give them feedback (someone else, not mine) civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it." I did end up having to fire up my Windows machine for Inventor. I'm sure it has some level of feature parity with commercial CAD buried somewhere, but it's so hard to get to even on the new 0.19 pre-release that I genuinely wouldn't try to put it in the same conversation as Blender or KiCad as open alternatives to commercial software. It's just not there.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  When you say rotating a part do you mean rotating the view or using the draft rotate (or some other workbench's rotate) command? FYI if you use the draft workbench you can snap to midpoints and then convert the autocad-equivalent draft workbench sketch to an inventor-equivalent part design / sketcher workbench sketch. You can also use the symmetry constraint in the sketcher workbench to constrain a point to the center of a line. If you get familiar with it you can technically model almost anything you want[0], but if you want to go back and change a feature (which is kinda the entire point of parametric cad) it'll likely destroy your part if you're not using the topological naming branch. Freecad realistically needs 5-10 more years to get basic feature parity with professional CAD from the early 2000's and then another release or two focused entirely on stability. [0]: Their opencascade geometry kernel has some moderately serious deficiencies for complex operations/objects, the assembly workbenches are just now approaching the point where they're stable enough that you can use them without having to rebuild your assembly every week, and while the new TechDraw workbench theoretically gives you the features you need to make manufacturing drawings (which is really the end goal for any professional CAD package, those are what you need to get your parts made) in practice it's too buggy to use with even simple assemblies.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Try solvespace: https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl It's exactly what I want of a CAD tool: a parametric solver with a 3D UI and 2D sketches. I haven't really have an opportunity to use it a lot since I discovered it, though. Kicad is quite nice, though.
billfruit 6y ago
I sort of disagree on Photoshop, most of the love for Photoshop seems to be just lock in to its existing work flow. I have not used Photoshop before using gimp, and for my use cases Gimps multiple window interface seemed to me the more usable interface. Photoshop's UI is nothing great.
- TrevorJ 6y ago
  Due to the subscription model, the UI is getting actively WORSE as well. You have to push new features to justify a subscription, and most of those seem to be taking the form of useless UI clutter and cruft. There hasn't been a truly valuable new feature in PS since around the CS2 days IMO.
- Inityx 6y ago
  Photoshop has fundamentally different editing paradigms (e.g. layer styles, adjustment layers) that make it incomparable to GIMP.

pjmlp 6y ago

Blender was a commercial product that was latter open sourced and existing customers put the effort to keep the ball rolling. Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.

TrevorJ 6y ago
This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Well, I bet the big pie that makes a living out of it is on pay checks from studios.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    It's not real Open Source if the community pays for it? Studios en-mass deciding to fund a shared, Libre resource that anyone can use so that every studio can all benefit and get better features at a faster pace is basically the dream for most Open Source efforts. There's nothing for anyone to be ashamed about from that model, it's good for Open Source to be funded by the players who are most invested in having a really good industry standard available to everyone.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      The point being these are snowflake projects, only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks, the large majority of Linux users pays zero anything for desktop software. Donations and patreon like schemes hardly allow to pay for a mortgage, supermarket, healthcare, transport every single month.
      - danShumway 6y ago
        > only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks I don't understand what you're getting at. You're arguing that user donations and patreon schemes don't pay enough, but there's something wrong with Blender being funded by the companies that use it? The companies paying for Blender are a substantial portion of the community. They're funding a common resource that all of them share, and that common resource is being made available to everyone, decreasing the barriers of entry for new talent to get into 3D modeling, increasing the quality of potential hires they can bring on because of its wide availability, providing a common target for addons and tutorials, and providing those same studios with a Libre base that they can build on top of if they need to. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in Open Source, people pay for it because it's a common resource that they care about. That's why companies are investing into it. What is the funding model for Open Source that you consider legitimate? Pulling in enough money to full-time hire an entire development team doesn't count because you don't like the primary user base? Pretty much everything that Blender is doing here is a success and more Open Source projects should be looking at their governance model and learning from it. I don't understand a viewpoint that says that Patreon and individual-funded projects are uncompetitive and unsustainable, but also that corporate-funded projects with large donors don't "count" as Open Source success stories. It feels to me like you're defining Open Source as a project with zero funding, and then complaining that it has zero funding. Is Matrix a snowflake project? Is Krita? Is Linux itself? And anyway, all of this ignores the facts that: A) Even outside of corporate donations that make the majority of its funding, Blender has also been comparatively way more successful than other OS projects at getting individual user donations (I even donate to Blender just as an individual), because they approach PR and community in a really smart, engaging way that drives enthusiasm. And B) Blender's funding model has nothing to do with the original thing this thread was talking about, which was just that FLOSS software can be of comparable or better quality than its commercial alternatives. You're kind of jumping around, from first arguing that Blender doesn't count because it started as commercial software, and now arguing that Blender doesn't count because it has funding and that's not typical for other projects. If FLOSS software overall can pull off commercial competitiveness in many cases underfunded, that's almost more impressive. Imagine how good the Open Source ecosystem would be if we as individual and corporate communities started funding more stuff to the same level as we fund Blender.

camjohnson26 6y ago

Blender has always had a decent source of funding compared to other open source projects, the ability to have full time devs has made a huge difference. Their open source media releases were also a huge success because they pushed the program and feature set to what people actually need when doing real work. Really an awesome project overall.

hallarempt 6y ago
Well, that's all by intention. GIMP and Inkscape have always avoided trying to find that sort of funding: inkscape even allowing their lead developer to be hired away without making a fight for it at one point. It's why I have been trying to copy blender's model for Krita since forever.
- lambda 6y ago
  What is Blender's funding model? I recall that its initial open source release was essentially crowdfunded before that was a trendy thing, but I haven't been keeping up with how they've been funding continuing development. They seem to be doing pretty well at that, so I'm curious about where the majority of revenue is coming from.

edhelas 6y ago

Darktable >>> Lightroom for my case