11 ms·

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software

• PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
  > Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche OBS is on line 2 ....
  • Forgeties79 11mo ago
    I use OBS regularly but vMix is definitely the superior option in the professional livestreaming world. OBS is missing many key features for professional operations and vdo ninja only covers some of those gaps.
• jsheard 11mo ago
  Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.
  • manifoldgeo 11mo ago
    The studio that makes Evangelion moved from 3DS Max to Blender as their primary 3D software according to this article: https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/ https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...
    • adamhartenz 11mo ago
      The fact you can point out specific examples of when Blender is used says a lot. It tells me it is the exception.
      • frontfor 11mo ago
        Agreed. You haven’t really won until it stops becoming noteworthy and “oh look X is using Blender!!” Nobody talks about how Linux dominates the server space anymore. Nobody talks about how “git is winning” or getting “battle tested”. These are mundane and banal facts. I don’t believe the same has happened to Blender yet.
    • MichaelEstes 11mo ago
      That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.
      • wlesieutre 11mo ago
        I'm sure "major project" is a subjective label, but Flow made headlines earlier this year with an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature) and Golden Globe (Best Animated Feature Film) https://flow.movie/ https://flow.movie/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/ https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...
  • deleted 11mo ago
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  • _bent 11mo ago
    What Blender achieved is that lots of university programmes have started teaching Blender or becoming 'tool agnostic'. Studios have also started diversifying their pipelines (this coincidences with studios adopting Unreal and increasing usage of Houdini). So while Maya is currently the standard, I don't believe that it's growing. It'll probably be around still in 20 years, with lots of studios having built their pipelines and tooling around it, with lots of people being trained in it, and because it's at the moment still better than Blender in some aspects like rigging and animation (afaik).
  • underscoremark 11mo ago
    Blender is the go-to for struggling artists/developers, and industry outsiders, like me. I'm stuck at Blender 2.93.18 because I don't have the budget for better hardware, let alone a Maya license! However, even that version of Blender still gets it done for me. And also, how can you say Blender is not battle-proven? I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven.
    • wkat4242 11mo ago
      Why not use a later version? Is it much heavier? I haven't used blender much. It's too focused on animation. I mainly make more engineering style things for 3D printing. Even though it can technically do that, the interface just rubs me the wrong way somehow. And i can use Fusion 360 for free.
      • underscoremark 11mo ago
        It's a hardware issue. Blender 3.0+ requires a graphics card and drivers with OpenGL 4.3 support. I don't have that hardware. I have used Blender for 3D printing, though. Architectural design, as well. The interface is a rub at first, and then again after you get used to it and have to use something else. :-)
    • jerbearito 11mo ago
      > until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree
    • oblio 11mo ago
      > I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven. Those are different niches. Not even Apple has managed to budge Window out of corporate environments, though it is a lot more present than 20 years ago. I imagine it's similar with Blender and Maya: do they fill the exact same space? Or is Blender adopted by different types of companies (probably smaller)?
      • 11mo ago
  • forgotoldacc 11mo ago
    Depends on the industry. Within game development, I don't know a single person not using Blender. People who were big into Maya and 3DS a few years ago have pretty much all moved on.
  • qwertox 11mo ago
    Maya's API is so much better than Blender's. You pay the fee for the OS that Maya is, but the API is so much better than anything open source. Like Postgres is an OS for databases. Blender is not yet there. IIRC you need to compile entire Blender just to change a node.
    • mroche 11mo ago
      Blender gives you two paths for extension: a) fork it and layer your changes directly onto the app, or b) you create a plugin via the Blender Python API. For vendors, the former is obviously a no-go. The latter has the issue of be throttled by Python, so you have to effectively create a shim that communicates with an external library or application that actually performs compute intensive tasks. Most (if not all) industry DCCs provide a dedicated C++ SDK with Python bindings available if desired.
      • bobajeff 11mo ago
        I'm curious as someone who's thinking of making a blender plug-in that will need to use some native-ish (not C++ though) libraries/modules for performance. What are the issues with using a Python interface instead of a dedicated C++ SDK?
        • mroche 11mo ago
          The Python API is limited by Python itself. You're restricted to a GIL environment, so your ability to maximize throughput and reduce latency will be limited. For small/average scenes this may not matter for your addon, however larger scenes will suffer. There are a few popular options to developing Blender functionality: 1. Extend Blender itself. This will net you the maximum performance, but you essentially need to maintain your own custom fork of Blender. Generally not recommended outside of large pipeline environments with dedicated support engineers. 2. Native Python addon. This is what 99% of addons are, just accessing scene data via Blender's Python interface. Drawbacks mentioned above, though there are some helper utilities to batch process information to regain some performance. 3. Hybrid Python Addon. You use the Python API as a glue layer to pass information between Blender and a natively compiled library via Python's C Extension API. With the exception of extracting scene data info, this will give you back the compute performance and host resource scalability you'd get from building on Blender directly. Being able to escape the GIL opens a lot of doors for parallel computation.
  • mroche 11mo ago
    > on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been. Super small nit (or info tidbit), but it doesn't take away from your overall message regarding production and scene scale. Pixar does not and has not used Maya as the primary studio application, it's really only used for asset modeling and some minor shading tasks like UV generation and some Ptex painting. The actual studio app is Presto, which is an in-house tool Pixar has developed over the years since its earliest productions. All other DCCs are team/task specific. Dreamworks is similar with their tool, Presto, IIRC. Walt Disney Animation Studio (WDAS) does use Maya as the core app last I saw, but I don't know if they've made any headway with evaluating Presto since 2019...
    • jsheard 11mo ago
      Good to know! > Presto, which is an in-house tool Pixar has developed > Dreamworks is similar with their tool, Presto, IIRC. I guessed that's a typo though and yeah, the Dreamworks animation tool is called Premo.
      • mroche 11mo ago
        > I guessed that's a typo though and yeah, the Dreamworks animation tool is called Premo. Bah, I thought I proofread that! Yes, super late night typos strike again...
  • flohofwoe 11mo ago
    > open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard IMHO that's only still true because large studios can't afford to move their entire highly customized production pipeline which they had built around Maya for nearly three decades to any other tool (Blender or not), even if they desparately want a divorce from Autodesk. Autodesk basically has them locked in and can milk them until all eternity or the studios go bankrupt. I bet that the next generation of CGI and game studios will be built around Blender (and not based on the quality of those tools, but because of Autodesk business practices). (edit: somehow my brain switched Adobe and Autodesk - forgiveable though because both use the same 'milking existing customers' strategy heh)
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  > It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. really? I haven't done 3D rendering in a long time, admittedly, but back then Maya and Lightwave were miles ahead of Blender. Rhino3D too. Even 3DSMax was better. Lightwave seems to have sadly fallen off (unfortunately, IMO it was the best at one point, had excellent ray tracing). I didn't really Blender had come such a long way -- that's great. Since you mention niches: Adobe InDesign has no OSS competition at all, and Illustrator is still much better than Inkscape.
• Aerolfos 11mo ago
  Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast
  • fletchowns 11mo ago
    Kdenlive is awesome. I am only a hobbyist but I cancelled my subscription to Premiere when I found it.
    • presbyterian 11mo ago
      Does Kdenlive still lack GPU playback and rendering? It did when I last used it, and that'll be a non-starter for most professionals
  • Forgeties79 11mo ago
    Resolve Studio vastly outshines Premiere IMO. For $300 flat it’s a no-brainer.
    • tombert 11mo ago
      I'm not a pro or anything, and I don't edit video super often, but I would like to point out that Lightworks is quite good, and offers a perpetual license [1] for $420 that is very often on sale. I don't have the ability to compare these things in intimate detail, but Lightworks has at least been used for "real" productions [2] so I think it's production-ready. [1]https://lwks.com/pricing https://lwks.com/pricing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks#Users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks#Users
      • Forgeties79 11mo ago
        Resolve Studio is more feature rich by a significant margin and 2/3rd’s of the price. Lightworks is a respectable program but I can’t really see picking it over resolve studio tbh. Definitely not for professional work. I still root for them though. More NLE’s is good for the editing world as a whole and who knows, BMD could heel turn on us and ruin resolve. I’ve gone through 3 different NLE’s since 2011 (FCPX->briefly Premiere->Resolve) so I definitely don’t plan for more than 3-5 years ahead lol
• 0xFF0123 11mo ago
  Possibly Audacity, given the direction v4 is taking. Great video essay / update here: https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38 https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38
• btreecat 11mo ago
  > Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks. Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders. I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.
  • HKH2 11mo ago
    LibreOffice, GIMP, FreeCAD and Inkscape all have their quirks (and bugs), but they're probably seen as features by their core users so they won't change.
    • legends2k 11mo ago
      Not sure about FreeCAD but got a lot done with Gimp, Inkscape and LibreOffice in my personal projects. Totally worth my time!
      • HKH2 11mo ago
        Me too. I guess a majority of people don't have the patience to work around counterintuitive things nor do they want to take measures to avoid bugs. On the other hand, Blender and Krita seem to give UX a higher priority, so they're more likely to catch on.
      • Mashimo 11mo ago
        I dislike using Gimp. Always have. There is just something about it that does not click with me. Just selecting a foreground object even when the background was almost white never worked for me. Just so fiddly. I can get stuff done with it.
        • wltr 11mo ago
          Try PhotoGimp plugin, it solves some annoyances for me by introducing the shortcuts I used to, and a slightly more familiar interface. The rest, I just got used to, and actually now I like Gimp more than Photoshop (which I don’t like too much, even though I know it for two decades now).
• WhitneyLand 11mo ago
  >>It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete Hadn’t heard that. How many AAA vfx studios have left Maya for Blender?
• crote 11mo ago
  > I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies. With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them. From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market. KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.
  • tommica 11mo ago
    Glad to see they have a good amount of sponsors: https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/ https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/
    • thenthenthen 11mo ago
      Also some dubious ones (What is ‘Far Field Exploits’?)
      • svelle 11mo ago
        I think they build body worn and other antenna systems.
        • thenthenthen 11mo ago
          For…?
    • 11mo ago
• Cadthrowaway 11mo ago
  >FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks. I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.
  • alex1138 11mo ago
    Yeah but objects in mirror are closer than they appear
  • simonbw 11mo ago
    I tried it for the first time the other day after having heard how much better it's gotten recently, and it made me really wonder how bad was the UX _before_ all these recent improvements. I don't want to bash on it too hard, because it's clear that a ton of hard work has gone into it, but it was really a struggle for me to get some pretty basic things done. The only feedback for a lot of things I tried to do was some not-very helpful error messages in the console, or just the whole program crashing. After trying hard for quite a few hours, reading lots of docs and watching tutorials, I ended up giving up and going back to Fusion 360.
    • wkat4242 11mo ago
      Agreed. I tried it 2 months ago and found the game. Also back to Fusion which is free for hobbyists anyway.
    • racnid 11mo ago
      It's an acquired taste. The sketcher is actually pretty good these days and way snappier than Fusion 360 on my machine.
  • bombela 11mo ago
    I have been using freecad extensively. Almost daily. It's an absolute utter mess. It barely works. But it's essentially the only open source CAD. So I keep trucking. The most important improvement is the toponaming heuristic solver spearheaded by Realthunder. Since that was merged into mainline, it seems that the devs keep breaking the UX and shortcuts without rythme nor reason, while the fundamentals are broken beyond repair. I would never recommend freecad to anybody, even though this this the only CAD I use, and I actually write python for it for some automation. I cannot live without freecad. But damn it's a mess.
• Forgeties79 11mo ago
  I’m rooting for gimp but they are truly a decade behind photoshop. I don’t know how they can compete. Luckily it does not seem like they are in the market for professionals so the need to match Photoshop isn’t quite as high
• mortoc 11mo ago
  As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines. Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.
  • john_minsk 11mo ago
    Do you think the next generation of Roblox will be a dominating games engine?
    • rf15 11mo ago
      Roblox is strung up in its own closed and exploited ecosystem, so hopefully no.
    • mortoc 11mo ago
      I really hope not, but I wouldn’t bet against it. The nature of products that take high capex to build and then have nearly zero marginal cost to reproduce is monopolies.
• omnicognate 11mo ago
  > Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.
  • broodbucket 11mo ago
    OBS smashing XSplit comes to mind
  • savolai 11mo ago
    Git is an interesting case in its obscure ergonomics. Maybe Linus was right in that for his initial user target group that turned into advocates, algorithmic elegance was a more important quality, so git won regardless of ergonomics for wider audience. So various projects have come up ever since to try to patch the UX.
    • gary_0 11mo ago
      Interesting thought. "Nerds as advocates" is how Firefox rose to prominence, and later giving the nerds the finger contributed to its downfall, IMO.
    • thyristan 11mo ago
      Git ergonomics were far far better than the rest because of one reason that all the supposedly more ergonomic projects like Bazaar, Mercurial, SVN, ClearCase and lots of others failed miserably at: Performance. Since the CVS days, Version Control Systems got slower and slower. Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner, making people wait for locks, wait for checkouts, wait for diffs, wait for everything. But even the distributed ones like bzr or hg were slow as hell. What git enabled was the far superior ergonomics of not having to get a coffee while running a "git diff" on a project the size of the Linux kernel, X.org or LibreOffice. All the whining about inconsistent command line options and weird subcommand naming is totally secondary to this. Nowadays, many of the aforementioned competitors either died out or worked on their performance problems. Nonetheless, git is still unmatched in this regard.
• peatmoss 11mo ago
  MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.
  • viraptor 11mo ago
    Have you seen the classic?... https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
• bko 11mo ago
  How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing? https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
  • autoexec 11mo ago
    The load time of GIMP is one of my biggest complaints. It's fine once it finally opens, but that start up time is punishing. The last version of photoshop I used wasn't all that much better though. photopea is a browser app so it's not really a valid comparison. I much prefer open source local applications that leave my web browser out of it.
• alex1138 11mo ago
  The comment I've heard is that Office (or was that Word?) doesn't necessarily beat LO, some people are just forced to use it because of file formats
  • oblio 11mo ago
    Office as a whole wipes the floor with LibreOffice. Cleaner interface, generally more stable, especially on Windows, Excel is and remains a powerhouse, etc. Word and PowerPoint are also very solid. Outlook is meh. If anything, OnlyOffice is incredibly polished. I don't know how they did it but it seems to work better and have a much cleaner UI than LibreOffice even though it's much newer.
    • italovignoli 11mo ago
      OnlyOffice is proprietary software, or freeware if you prefer (they modify the AGPL licence with clauses which are not compliant with the OSD), and by natively supporting the proprietary Microsoft Office document format locks in their users to Microsoft (the company controlling the closed and proprietary format). True free software advocates should avoid it.
• pier25 11mo ago
  2D motion graphics maybe? DaVinci Resolve is getting better but still not comparable to After Effects. Blender already has a lot of pieces in place to tackle this.
• Waterluvian 11mo ago
  QGIS is pretty amazing. And it is helped along by not trying to pull you into a cloud ecosystem that ArcGIS does.
  • elsjaako 11mo ago
    I love QGIS, but ArcGIS is still the major industry player.
• flipthefrog 11mo ago
  "It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete" Wow, that is great news. I guess its support for Pixar USD is equal to Maya and Houdini then, so all the big studios can finally switch
  • john_minsk 11mo ago
    OpenUSD got just 1 mention in the release notes. Also wondering what is the state of this feature. May I ask your opinion, as industry insider, regarding what makes a good and bad OpenUSD support?
    • mdre 11mo ago
      That would be both feature completeness of the implementation and also some kind of a native USD authoring mode (editing the structure and layering multiple USD files properly), like Houdini Solaris or Nvidia Omniverse. For now Blender can’t even read/write MaterialX properly. (I’m not an insider though)
• rr808 11mo ago
  Microsoft Office is dying. Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office. Most of our docs are on wikis or email now.
  • fuzzzerd 11mo ago
    Docs, sure but excel is still excel.
  • bdangubic 11mo ago
    most grads also use C++ :)
  • buster 11mo ago
    But, in my experience enterprises are moving to office365. Ten years ago I would have bet on the Google suite but it looks like Microsoft is winning this game in the corporate world. Google gets all the private users, Microsoft the companies. So, no, sadly, MS Office is not dying. I wish it would.
    • keyringlight 11mo ago
      What I've occasionally seen pointed out for a whole range of separate microsoft software is it's not the merits of on individual bit of software that gets enterprises to use it, it's the M365 package deal of all of them, and once you're in that ecosystem then you might as well use it. Teams is the common example where this comes up, where it's shortcomings are well known but the costs of licensing and setting up an alternative can't get over the threshold.
  • oblio 11mo ago
    Graduates in which domain?
  • lenkite 11mo ago
    > Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office Not true of business grads - who btw are the ones who have the purchase power for enterprise wide M$ Office when they join orgs. STEM grads need to kneel and obey their purchasing decisions.
• popalchemist 11mo ago
  Maya is the industry standard. Blender may offer most of what Maya offers from a features standpoint, but Maya had the first mover advantage / network effects advantage of an ecosystem of third party plugins sprouting up over the last 20 years which VFX / Mograph houses now depend upon, thus forcing vendor lock-in despite Blender now being on par.
• theanonymousone 11mo ago
  Isn't it more like the other way around, i.e. Office being an exception of a category where open source solutions lag far behind the proprietary ones? Of course Blender is a marvelous piece of software, no doubt in that.
• pjmlp 11mo ago
  Blender has the advantage of having been a commercial product that went open source, thus many people on the initial core team cared about stuff that other projects don't, plus they already had an installed base. You don't see the same success with Gimp, Krita,...
  • badsectoracula 11mo ago
    Have you actually tried that "commercial Blender product"? Before open-sourcing it, Blender 2.2x was incredibly user hostile and barebones in terms of features. For example, in mesh edit mode you could only work on points - no edge or face selection. It was very primitive, both in its UI (which was inscrutable) and its rendering capabilities (e.g. except for spotlights, lights did not cast shadows - and spotlights could only do shadowmaps). Very basic usability features were added pretty much as soon as the project was opensourced. Remember that Blender was opensourced was because it failed commercially. Its commercial background is completely irrelevant to its success - which took years to achieve and most 3D artists for more than a decade saw it as a toy (undeservedly IMO because even by 2.44-or-so it became very capable, but the UI despite its massive improvements was still very undiscoverable and alien for most users). You can download "Blender Publisher 2.25" from blender's own site which was the last commercial release to check it..
• cageface 11mo ago
  I'd add postgres to that list.
• germandiago 11mo ago
  > It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete Is this even true? My understanding is that 3D Studio and Maya used to be ahead.
• kasool 11mo ago
  Maybe obsolete in the sense of feature to price ratio (infinite in Blender's case), but Maya is still very much used for the sole reason that entire studio pipelines are likely built around it. Years of tools programmers and artist knowledge build-up don't go away just like that. Licensing costs are a drop in the bucket compared to all the other overhead. Of course that's mainly concerning big productions, there's obviously no reason hobbyists or indies should be using anything except Blender. I will say w.r.t to sculpting specifically ZBrush is still king mostly due to how its technology is fundamentally unique in its ability to easily handle huge poly counts. Blender is still not quite there in the high-fidelity regime. I suspect in general "big companies" and the ecosystems they operate in are the main reason adoption (and subsequent investment and development) hasn't happened. The Microsoft Office suite is a good example, since many companies likely run the full Office + Teams + Outlook stack. It all "seamlessly" (not really lol) works together, and it's attractive to sell corporate solutions like that.
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  GIMP really has tons of issues. I can barely compile it these days. GIMP 2.x was IMO better. Also much easier to compile and get running. Fewer things to worry about. I think you paint a rather selective picture here though. Quite a lot open source software is really really bad.
• Mashimo 11mo ago
  In the 3D printing realm most slicers are open source. And I think a lot of professionals are also using them. Though maybe not in the very expensive end of industrial printers.
• dig1 11mo ago
  > it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. gcc? It’s hard to imagine any of the projects mentioned without a good compiler.
• bluecalm 11mo ago
  >>Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. GCC and now Clang has beaten Intel compiler (and others). Nginx has beaten/replaced commercial web servers. Stockfish has beaten commercial chess engines and Lichess is much better than commercial chess sites. Just 3 examples that came to my mind reading your comment.
• leakmanatz 11mo ago
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• andrewingram 11mo ago
  To me, the really impressive thing about Blender is that it now has a pretty good UI. I'm pretty snobby about the GUI apps I install, and Blender is probably the only professional-level (as in professional users) open source tool that feels pretty good to use on a Mac. In the early days it was pretty rough, but it's rare to see open source software UI consistently improve like this. On aesthetics, it definitely beats out Lightroom Classic, which is a closed-source paid tool (sidenote: I really miss Aperture).
• deleted 11mo ago
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• amelius 11mo ago
  > FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks. I'm curious, what are the main points where it's lacking? I hear stability is one of them, but what about features?
• deleted 11mo ago
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• Itoldmyselfso 11mo ago
  If you ignore the massively easier learning curve, better usability and presentation, purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom. Not saying it will replace it at all though, it's software for power users, while Lightroom is for both novices and pro's who prefer UX over features.