If I'm evaluating a potential application whose core functionality does not require external resources/servers (Dropbox for example) and they don't at a minimum offer some kind of perpetual fallback license (aka the Jetbrains annual subscription model), then I straight up bounce.

Examples of good alternatives

- Pixelmator > Photoshop

- Davinci Resolve > Premiere

- Reaper > Audition

I have no interest in renting my tools.

> I have no interest in renting my tools.

While I appreciate the sentiment, the world where you could use the same software for many years without updates is gone. These days developers have to invest significant time and effort into making sure the software just runs on the constantly updated operating systems and platforms — which costs money on an ongoing basis. Expecting your software to be updated regularly without paying regularly makes no sense.

So either you intend to run that exact binary that you downloaded (because that is the tool you bought), or the ongoing costs need to be covered somehow. Some companies do it through subscriptions and some play a game of "no, you don't have to update, but here is this new shiny (more bloated, too) version that we produce every 2 years, you can get it for $50 and OWN IT FOREVER (well, until the next shiny comes along in 2 years time". But it's a game, and the drawback is that there is incentive for bloating software instead of just maintaining it and fixing bugs.

While I do recognize those concerns I'll note that it is still a viable model and not just for indie devs. Look to the DAW world (Ableton, FL Studio, Bitwig, Logic, etc.) if you're ever curious about building a sustainable business model around a flat pricing structure.

The professionals who still use unstable platforms are forced to rent their tools, sharecropper style. What about professionals like me who made the leap to a stable platform? "Exact binary you downloaded" hasn't been in my toolbox for a long time now.

I don't know many people left who pay for their OS these days.

You actually can still buy Office. It's quite expensive though.

I suppose it always was.

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=2113574&CLCID=0x10...

Here's what Microsoft won't tell you: If you buy standalone office and it is not allowed to phone home to Microsoft at least once a month, it stops working. This can happen if you use it on a disconnected computer or you just have a reverse firewall rule blocking microsoft domains.

That's honestly less than I would have expected. I still have an old copy of Microsoft Office 95 though I no longer have the hardware with which to run it. Ditto a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 which I believe was the final version before they went full on subscription.

Isn't it dogmatic to think so. Sometimes it makes sense to rent tools.

Naturally. I've rented an mini excavator in the past to dig up stumps for a one time job. It made sense more sense to rent it since it was for a one-time task, and purchasing the kubota would have cost more than 5k.

Given we're on HN news, I thought it was implied that I was referring mostly to the exhaustion at being faced with a perpetually increasing amount of rent-seeking in the form of SaaS.

Do you have any good alternatives to Photoshop that are open source? And that are not GIMP.

Nothing against GIMP, I just found it too hard to learn coming from photoshop.

I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

There’s Krita…

https://krita.org/en/

GIMP takes some time getting used to, but it's reliable, it will stick around and having used it for the past 20 years, I have issues switching to something else.

> I'm looking for a simple editor that can do color adjustments, crop/resize images, and add text.

Those are all pretty simple in GIMP though? I'm not doubting that they are different from Photoshop but how long could it take to learn the GIMP way?

I'd like to know more about color adjustments. I know GIMP can do them in some form, but I have no idea what the options are or what kind of results I should hope to be able to achieve. Documentation doesn't really seem to address these questions, though it is available if your question is "how do I run this menu item I found?" (Answer: open the menu, and click on the menu item.)

Cropping and resizing are trivial. It would take less than one minute to learn how.

The biggest issue I had migrating as a Photoshop user since 1996 was the key bindings. But using the config files people shared online sorted that.

I'm not going to link to a specific one implying I'm recommending it, but a web search will show multiple.

One important gimp note is if you don't have 3.0+ already, get it. It finally has non-destructive editing, which is the main reason I had to keep using ps for for a long time.

> The biggest issue I had migrating as a Photoshop user since 1996 was the key bindings

RIP GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

I usually used InDesign for presentations on PC. Switching to Scribus now that I run a linux only office has been trivial.

Specific to LibreOffice - as an academic I've had to create a couple presentations in ppt format recently. It sucks, but it was a requirement of the conference. Anyway - LO Impress still has many of the annoyances of PowerPoint, but head to head it's actually an objectively better, faster program than PowerPoint.

I started using OpenOffice a couple decades ago when I got tired of pirating the market leader. Not wanting to start any religious wars, but I still haven't made the leap to Libre.

I'd recommend switching, OpenOffice is basically abandonware. There's been security issues that were reported over a year ago that have gone unaddressed. If you look at OpenOffice's git repo (https://github.com/apache/openoffice), the vast majority of the commits are from two people who solely focus on manually fiddling with the code formatting and fixing typos in the comments.

It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky how Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as the OO.o hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MSOffice finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever lol

https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)

https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)

It also supports WordPerfect formats, Which MS Office dropped. My wife was in a group email editing documents and someone emailed their edits using WordPerfect format. I loaded it in LibreOffice and exported it in DOCX format and it worked.

That is great, hopefully it continues.

I am far from a heavy WP/Spreadsheet user, usually Emacs for me, but at work I need to mess with spreadsheets. I use LibreOffice for that and to me there is no difference.

Working on my taxes now with LO Calc. My resume is in Writer, easily exported to PDF. Been using it since it was called StarOffice. Go LibreOffice and FLOSS!

Google docs doesn’t work?

It works fine for most use cases, but Google Docs and Sheets features pale in comparison full desktop base apps.

Not if you don't have internet access.

It has the worst commenting and track history I've seen. My company went to Google docs about 5 years ago and I have steadily walked the work product of engineers go downhill because of it.

I confess that I've been using a pirated version of office for years and years. When I can no longer use that then I will upgrade to libre office.

Microsoft deactivates pirated versions of Office and tells you to buy a copy.

is there a way to plug say Grok or Chatgpt API into LibreOffice writer or sheets? such that it can have write access to the documents?