For me, it’s CAD software. FreeCAD is trash (sorry, lovers). Fusion360 is honestly the best out there for free. The “almost there” app is Shapr3D, but fuck $40/m.
And yes I’ve tried all the others not listed here.
This might be controversial, but I want yet another code editor.
Hear me out, I write very little code, but often in widely different programming languages. Most of the time I write LaTeX and/or Typst all day, so I need:
- an editor that sandbox really well, there is no way I am trusting all my coding environment with my entire user space.
- an editor that don’t require much tinkering: if it can get to 80% there, I am welling to learn the rest, but I don’t want an editor that get 20% there and force me to pull 80 different package just to do things.
- preview LaTeX and Typst within the sandbox, ideally just in editor, so I don’t need to configure synctex.
- not controlled by a big tech like Microsoft.
So far, I am only able to find vscodium that is close to my desire, but it is still mostly controlled by Microsoft.
(ideally, self hosted) overleaf with texlive-full installed?
Outlook
Have you tried Microsoft Exchange? ;) 📎
Social media app with circlejerk auto-hide would be Awesome. Would have to be politically agnostic.
That would just turn into a bunch of AI trying to figure out which kinds of dicks you like to jerk and which you don’t.
No, I said politically agnostic, and more than enough discussions are not circlejerks.
Sounds like you want to touch a bunch of limp dicks. I dunno if there is a filter for conversations about opinion topics that prohibit any opinions.
Microsoft Exchange.
How many grandkids do you have? ;) ;)
How many competitors does it have that can do email, contacts, calendar, shared versions of the above items, and hybrid connect to exchange online.
I can’t think of a single option besides groupwise which is dead.
Have you tried OnShape? Web based, and the free account is full featured except you can’t make designs private, which as a hobbyist is no drawback for me at all.
Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.
Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that’ll stick.
Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.
I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.
So much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.
=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can
pd.to_excel()to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.Also duckdb. Realizing I could do
SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx'was a wondrous occasion
Re: email. Have you tried Port87?
Never heard of it.
Give it a try. :)
Yeah, excel really is hard to beat. Good one.
Resin printing slicing software.
There’s currently two main options, Lychee and ChituBox. I’ve only used Lychee (after giving up with Chitu) so I can only speak on that. Lychee has mostly everything I want in terms of features, but customization is very limited (ie keybinds, default behavior etc), and some aspects of the UI can be VERY clunky. And the best part: 90% of the features that you need to slice somewhat effectively are locked behind a paywall. They do offer a 30 day trial, so I have a backup file of all my settings, and every 30 days I make a new burner account.
It’s a nightmare compared to the plethora of slicing options available for filament printers.
Oh and it’s monthly too? That’s the worst. For CAD I only print something like once or twice per month. I cannot justify any cost monthly.
Have you tried any of the Elegoo.com products? I know nothing about resin printing, but they supposedly support it
My filament printer is actually from them. I have a love-hate relationship with that machine. It’s like, 20% stock at this point, and it isn’t the fastest or the cleanest printer out there, but it works well enough.
I’m not aware of a resin slicer made by them, but without doing the research, my guess would be that it’s relatively subpar. I haven’t been resin printing for terribly long, but once or twice a year I’ll go online to see if there is any discussion of better alternatives to Lychee or Chitu, and the conversation has always stayed the same. Everyone is in the same boat in that those two programs are the only really viable options, despite being… not great.
you can always pirate SolidWorks. its the best, and if you pirate it its completely free.
dassault only goes after businesses so feel free to pirate for personal use.
Word of caution on this, make dang sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Dassault systems has a reputation for tracking pirates down and billing out the ass, and that reputation doesn’t come from nowhere.
Still not saying not to pirate it, but do tread on very light waters.
[…] FreeCAD is trash […]
What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?
Not OP, but FreeCAD auto-constraints in sketches are all over the place, and figuring out which constraint is a problem and selecting the right element in the UI is terrible.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but FreeCAD tells you when a constraint is redundant, and clicking on it highlights the respective constraint in the sketch:
[1]References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-11T23:44Z.
The redundant constraint detection works pretty well and FreeCAD usually remove them.
The main issue for me is that certain auto-constraints will not work as they advertise on your cursor.
The biggest culprit for me is the coincident constraint.
Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied.
And the other thing for me is that navigating which part of a line (and which line) is selected is not intuitive and correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
[…] correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
[…] Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied. […]
What you’re describing sounds more like a bug to me. At any rate, I wasn’t able to confirm the behavior you described (maybe I’m misunderstanding you?):
[1]I was able to get both a symmetric constraint (green arrow), and a coincident constraint (red arrow) on the two 90 degree lines.
References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): “1.1.1”. Accessed: 2026-06-12T22:47Z.
I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.
A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.
To flip the CAD thing on its head, if I want a Python API for AutoCAD, Creo, or SolidWorks, their response is “fuck you, use our GUI cuz that’s easier for us to implement license verification with. And oh yeah, it’s all Window only.” The only CAD software I find remotely useful is FreeCAD. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s the baseline that all other CAD softwares somehow fail to match.
Honestly, notes apps. All of the big tech options are fine, but they’re big tech, so fuck them. All of the open source options suck. The best I’ve found is just Nextcloud Notes, but it’s still shit. Basic Markdown syntax, no linking notes, adding attachments is… well idk, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Disregard, my original comment since first using this program it looks like it’s been ensloppified, what a tragedy
~~I like Trillium https://github.com/TriliumNext/Trilium~~
Oh god, yeah. Their README starts with an AI slop ad. :(
I just want apple notes self hosted.
I’ve found Obsidian to work well for me. Its plugin ecosystem is pretty robust, so there’s a lot of room to bolt on features.
And if you really need an open source option with every possible tool and a full customization language… emacs
Yep. Obsidian plugins is like installing Skyrim then thinking, “I’ll just go get the essentials from Nexus Mods…”
Three hours later you have an absolute beast that also does note taking too.
I keep seeing people say this, but I’ve never seen a plug-in that seemed to do much of anything that the base engine wasn’t already.
markor on android seems pretty good for me, have you tried it?
No, but I use iPhone. Ideally I’d want something self hosted that works on all platforms.
Obsidian, Joplin or Logseq. Have you tried any of these?
I’ve tried Joplin and Logseq. They both are not good for me. Joplin’s mobile experience was terrible.
I switched from OneNote to obsidian when I de-windowsed and haven’t looked back
Give Obsidian a try. Its very mobile-friendly.
It’s proprietary!
I know, I know. The notes you create are still yours. They’re just Markdown files. And they have a huge ecosystem of community-developed extensions that aren’t proprietary. The company is almost as far as you can get from Big Tech. I pay the $5/month for their sync service just to support them, but since your notes are simple Markdown files, you can just as easily sync your notes any other way for free.
my response was mostly meant as a hint to other readers, but I’d also like to add that the canvases are not markdown, but a custom json schema basically. not necessarily an issue, but noteworthy due to portability issues with that specific feature.
Can you help me? I have obsidian on my phone and am trying to use it but I dislike the UI (feel there is too much information / clutter, would rather have something distraction free like a terminal) and I think it is only possible to sync notes from computer to cellphone if I pay a fee or do it manually? Is that right?
Aren’t there any ways of taking simple txt notes on computer syntaxed or not and have them automatically appear on my phone?
Hope you can enlighten me
You can sync your notes in any way that you want.
Dropbox, Google drive… Generally people recommend Sync thing if you can configure it (it’s not hard. Just harder than Dropbox and Google drive)
I’ve stuck with notesnook for awhile, but i might switch it up after my premium subscription ends.
Trilium Notes is great for note taking. It can do complex formatting and attachments and all that stuff. And you can self host the server and keep it synced across devices. I use it every day
Someone else recommended that one, but apparently it’s coded with AI now, and I’d like to avoid AI generated software.
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
Yeah, Creative Suite era, before Creative Cloud. That for every Adobe product.
When’s the last time you tried FreeCAD? I also used to think it’s trash, but version 1.0 really changed that and now 1.1 is freaking amazing.
Like last week. It’s cad software from 20 years ago that’s trying to be everything and not really mastering anything.
I want an open source option that focuses on UI/UX and not… well, whatever freeCAD is doing.
I have the same UI issues with GIMP and Inkscape. When programmers try to make human interface. (No offense to programmers)
I’ve been using GIMP long enough that I’ve learned where things are. It’s not intuitive, but I can usually accomplish what I set out to do without swapping to another program.
Inkscape feels like a foreign language that I don’t speak.
I started using it after 1.0, still haven’t gotten anywhere with it because it’s just not intuitive and I’m constantly running into problems where I have to go into the documentation. If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues. I found a YouTube series that someone recommended that looks pretty good though so I’m going to lock in and go through that and try again because I really don’t have any other choice. At least it doesn’t crash every time you fuck up constraints anymore.
If it was good someone familiar with other CAD software would be able to switch to it without so many issues.
I don’t think this is true. Professional software is usually very hard to switch between. Be it CAD, video editing, 3D modeling, animation, programming, painting, freaking file sharing, or pretty much any other field of endeavor. Each program/tool/suite prescribes a certain workflow, and it almost never matches the workflow of another tool designed for the exact same purpose.
For exactly the same reason, it’s hard to switch between operating systems, especially if you’re a power user who knows a lot about how things work in the OS you’re used to. It’s not a sign that either OS is better than the other, it’s just how used the user is to a certain way of doing things.
I think this is also why Adobe and Autodesk are still doing alright. A large part of their customer base are just people who would have too much friction switching to a different, better (imo) suite of tools, so staying with the tool they know is worth the cost.
I don’t know your situation, but from your comment I think I can recommend pushing through the re-learning period with FreeCAD. It’s good.
I understand things not being the same. I’ve switched between software and OS’s before and dealt with these kinds of issues. I worked in IT support for years and have had to learn about how all sorts of software works on the fly. I’ve switched between several CAD programs I used successfully before landing on Fusion360. FreeCAD is a whole other level compared to pretty much anything else I’ve dealt with. Blender is the only other app I can think of that I’ve had so much trouble with.
Forgot to say: 1.1 has quite a lot of QoL improvements, so make sure you learn from a source made for 1.1 and not 1.0 or earlier.
Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?
CS2 is completely free from adobe. It doesn’t understand scaling in windows, and won’t run on the next Mac OS release. But it’s serviceable.
PhotoPea works pretty well for me, though I am not using it for anything other than fun projects.
I have used photopea before and it works shockingly well, but I don’t like having to rely on a web-service.
photoshop cs6 was indeed great, it does run fairly well on wine tho
I have an issue with it that really makes it unusable: every input renders one frame behind. I make a gesture, I see most of the stroke, but not the last bit until I click again. I select and cut something? Doesn’t disappear until I give one more input. I zoom to a certain level, then click and it zooms the last little bit. It’s bizarre and makes it surprisingly unusable.
i did have some glitches and switched away from it to gimp eventually but your issue kinda seems different from mine. are you on x11 or wayland? if x11 are you running a compositor like picom?
I haven’t been able to get it working with winetricks, bottles or lutris. Any tips?
What about Affinity Photo?
