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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

OpenOffice is "good enough"; where Word isn't an option, it does the job. GIMP isn't even trying; it's not in the same market as Photoshop or casual image editing, which is well served by web apps these days. (One wonders what it is for; padding developer CVs, possibly) Finally, nonlinear video editing hardly qualifies for "general purpose" -- and is there anything worth mentioning as for open source offerings?

Mathematica, on the other hand, is squarely in the terrain usually covered by open source.

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OpenOffice is "good enough"...

This is a matter of debate, depending on what circles you're traveling in. If you're working in a "mixed environment" where some people are using OpenOffice and some people are using Microsoft Word, you're likely to run into problems that range from minor annoyance to show-stoppers very quickly. Some of this can be blamed on Microsoft's weird file formats, but this is true not only for .doc files but for the better-documented (if arcane) .docx and, in my experience, even with RTF. I'm in contact with a fair number of small-to-medium press fiction editors, and while a fiction manuscript is one of the simplest use cases you can imagine in terms of formatting, almost every editor I've talked with has complained about OpenOffice (and to a lesser degree LibreOffice) screwing up comments and revision tracking. I don't really want to use Microsoft Word, but so far I haven't found an open source equivalent for my needs that is good enough. (The closed source Nisus Writer Pro and even Apple Pages seem to do better, ironically. But that's not to say they don't have their own problems.)

I tend to think of open source's most well-established terrain as languages and server-side components where UI is not really a major issue.

Microsoft doesn't have the greatest support for OpenOffice/LibreOffice odt either, although they try (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Differences-between...).

The fact that 90% of the world is using Microsoft's format is certainly relevant for everyday use, but it's orthogonal to the question of whether an open source project can achieve feature parity with a closed source product.

File format compatibility is always hard and I'm not convinced MS does a better job reading odt than LibreOffice does with OOXML. But LibreOffice does have a reasonably comparable feature set, even if the UI is not as attractive.

> LibreOffice does have a reasonably comparable feature set

Pile up all the features Office has but LibreOffice doesn't on one side, pile up all the features that LibreOffice has but Office doesn't on the other. What pile's larger?

It's kind of a pointless argument over whether or not LibreOffice has ENOUGH features; enough features for who? It's a global question with local answers. It's pretty easy to count who has MORE features, though, and Microsoft Office wins there.

GP was suggesting Word's superiority comes from its ability to read its own file format, which certainly makes it superior in practice, but has little bearing on OSS vs. closed source.

But, FWIW, most of the new "features" Microsoft adds to Word seem to be UI improvements (e.g. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-new-in-Word-...). And if you want to claim that Office is more usable than LibreOffice, and that this is generally true of closed source vs. open source projects, you won't get any arguments from me.

Did I misunderstand or are you arguing GIMP is for "padding developer CVs"? That's a... fringe opinion, to say the least.

Well, GIMPs UI at least is totally unusable. I ended up using Krita instead, which actually has a UI that makes sense. Additionally, even Krita supports a lot more stuff than GIMP – from proper animations, keyframes to all kinds of color spaces. (Yes, 32-bit floats for CMYK color spaces are possible in Krita)

Yes, GIMP's UI is pretty awkward. No disagreement here.

Still, for a lot of people, GIMP is a very valuable open source alternative to Photoshop; not as full-featured, of course, but then again, nothing is. There are lots of tutorials for achieving interesting effects using GIMP. I've never heard it described as something people learn to pad their resumes.

Krita is pretty cool, too. If I'm not mistaken, it's not a full-featured Photoshop replacement either.

Presumably they meant the resumes of those working on GIMP, not users of it.

Gimp's UI is almost as awkward as its name.

I wonder how so many people manage to use "totally unusable" program. Krita is nice and all, but it's quite different product than GIMP, designed specifically for drawing, when GIMP is sort of "general stuff", like Photoshop is. And Krita is free and open source as well, so it doesn't support the original claim.

And GIMP doesn't really lack many features Photoshop has, and even has some that Photoshop doesn't. UI could be much better (especially controls for transformations), but it's not that horrible either. The reason why GIMP sucks in comparison with Photoshop is that few features it lacks are absolutely game-changing. Like effect masks. If you use effect masks (and pretty much every proficient Photoshop user does), software without them is not an option for you. And I believe it isn't that easy to introduce them to GIMP either.

Yes. But that’s exactly the thing – Krita, while focusing on being a drawing application, has exactly those features that GIMP, a general purpose image editing tool, is missing.

Like colorspaces, effect masks, etc.

I found Krita to be a far better photoshop replacement than GIMP, actually. (With two differences: moving selections is a bit more complicated, the option for that is hidden by default, and it does not have a simple contrast-brightness slider filter)

If nonlinear video editing isn't general purpose, then I don't see how Mathematica is.

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