No Stupid Questions

3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don't hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I'm not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they're hard - but basic modeling features.

Hell, I'd even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are "free but terrible" and "you need a mortgage to use this".

I'd love to see a user-friendly, easily-implemented FOSS alternative to the entire Android system.

The options that exist now often can't get past all the defenses that Android and phone manufacturers put into systems to secure their own data collection/revenue. I have an older Motorola phone that I literally can't install another operating system on.

We desperately need a stable, user-friendly, and hardware-adaptive replacement for Android. I don't want that shit on my phones any longer.

A big one for me is Microsoft office (desktop), Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don't come close,

What, exactly, is missing? MS Office pretty much peaked, feature-wise, in like 2003 (or, arguably, 2007), and LibreOffice is ahead of that. I also find the workflow to be closer to "classic" Office and, to a slightly lesser extent, WordPerfect, which I appreciate.

You can even give LibreOffice the ribbon menu if you want (it's in preferences somewhere). The default button icons may be rough (though recent versions have improve), but you can even customize those.

The entire phone-based ecosystem.

I'm sorry but... 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

huh, i much prefer libreoffice to msoffice, i can't even think of a reason why anyone could prefer msoffice.

Im a but gobsmacked at the notion.

what do you use the drawing for?

Business Accounting software under FOSS is abysmal. Poor quality, poor documentation, poor functionality, limited locale support and limited local support.

CAM software under FOSS is limited to three axis at best, but most is two and a half axis.

Office functionality is covered with LibreOffice. Your assertion that it's 20 years behind is in my experience not based in fact.

Source: I've been using FOSS for over a quarter of a century.

Tax filing software

That's amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn't do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that's what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we'd switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

Adobe After Effects!! PLEASE DEAR GOD

This is the singular thing still keeping me using Adobe software. If this was replaced then I could be FREEE

Hmm, LibreOffice may not be the prettiest, but it works. For my own documents and presentations I use Typst nowadays. That's a blazing fast modern typesetting alternative to LaTeX. That being said, I can't stand WYSIWIG stuff but that might not be everybody's cup of tea.

I mostly run into stubborn manufacturers like Roland that only release their musical instrument companion apps for Mac/Win and leave Linux Digital Audio Workstations hanging.

MS Office isn’t better than LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, they all do the same task of making docs, spreadsheets, and presentations with very similar UI. It’s a no brainer to use the one that doesn’t bug you to use OneDrive.

Linux gaming has come a long way, especially with the introduction of things like Proton and popularisation of it by the Steam Deck. If you can play games on the Steam Deck, those games run on Linux :D

The main reasons (mind you, not only reasons) why people don’t just switch to Linux is:

• it’s different (humans naturally gravitate towards things they are familiar with)
• partly because Linux has a few things that are unintuitive to the average user (e.g. using terminal), but distros like Mint have mostly solved this issue
• Switching itself is really annoying (I would say I’m in this boat, but I’ve installed Linux on my old computers and will definitely do it again if I ever get a new computer)

I heard https://www.onlyoffice.com/ is good, but have no personal experience.

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don't know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don't, and I'm just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the "crutches") and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it's WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don't care. :-)

Project management. There is one very good but old solution, open project is barely bearable.

MS Onenote. Nothing comes close to it. With stylus support etc...

I have still quite literally found no other tool, even paid products, that can interior-crop the way IrfanView can (select row/column Y in XYZ if the entire image was XYZ, and crop out that inner part and auto-tuck X and Z directly against each other). And it's had this feature for decades, I think.

The only one I really miss is an NFC payments app, but a local LLM for Android that's FOSS would be cool too - PocketPal is free, but not open source or on F-Droid.

Also LibreOffice for desktop is great, but on mobile there aren't any easy to use ones in the same way Google Docs is, I've tried LibreOffice for Android and Collabora

I’m with you on the “FOSS office alternatives are shit”, but unfortunately MS office is also shit. Google is the closest I have found to a good office suite but even that is becoming a bit chaotic and awkward. LyX is a promising word processor but also pretty awkward to use in its own way. I’ve got nothing, there.

As far as gaming, this sound less kind than intended but you deserve any shit you get for saying Linux gaming is bad these days. Apart from a few AAA games with anti-cheat where the devs just don’t want to, basically every game just works without any extra effort. Even obscure indie games. I can’t think of the last game I wanted to play that didn’t run on Linux, and often it is better under proton than Windows or native.