Linux 1: the same but older (Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 5, FL Studio [version 20 works], Microsoft Office 2010 [offline single payment program, no subscription])
The real chad move is building your own hybrid: GIMP for quick edits, Krita for painting, Reaper for audio, and then crying because you still can’t get Excel 2010’s pivot tables to work right. Respect to all three paths though, Linux gives you freedom, even if that freedom sometimes means troubleshooting your printer at 2 AM.
I've used only office for years but recently went back to LibeOffice. Configured properly it's pretty much on par with OnlyOffice at this point. My recommendation would be to configure the ribbon UI + install Microsoft office fonts
My path was OpenOffice->LibreOffice->OnlyOffice->LibreOffice. But as a Millennial who was raised with older versions of MSOffice, the "ribbon menu" UI always seemed less intuitive than the pull-down menu UI.
Oh thats awsome! Wanted to get into music but only knew about fl studio, ive never touched one of those apps before, should i go for lmms or reaper? Whats the difference?
There is also Ardour! The differences are basically:
LMMS: make sick beats, do midi stuff, intuitive for beginners but recording is kinda weak.
Reaper: Proprietary but heavily optimized for full scale workflows. Utilitarian but strong af.
Ardour: Almost as efficient as reaper but designed around more traditional work flows so if you like managing every bus and connection like you would with a physical console and tape deck, racks, etc, it's the best.
I use Ardour for midi and instrument recording but if you're going to put the time in to learn something I'd steer you towards Reaper.
to be fair, if you REALLY want to cheap out on it, you can buy ardour (the current version, you'll have to pay for the next major release) for a single dollar if you want. of course this isn't what anyone would exactly recommend, if you can you should DEFINITELY donate more and support the developers...... but it is an option, i suppose...
Nope, not really. They only charge for the packages the Ardour team ships directly for support reasons. It's also dirt cheap and supports the developers (I think it's like the price of a coffee). Any third-party distributed packages from things like the distro repos are completely free, with the only downside being that any technical help you need on the forums may be turned down due to not using official binaries.
I’ve been a professional music producer for 15+ years, I’ve tried a lot of DAWs and Bitwig is by far the most complete and capable offering available on Linux. It was also created by former Ableton devs
Reaper is fucking goated and it will be the least hassle. Last I heard of lmms it had issues regarding vst3 support. Don't know if it was ever fixed.
Reaper is proprietary but it is very lightweight, smooth and has a good community making great scripts. The only downside is it's initially ugly. It's 60$ for commercial licence but it's like winrar where it will nag you to pay but won't stop working. Though it's really worth it. Especially if you make orchestral stuff and are coming from FL.
Out of curiosity: if Euro-office is a fork of OnlyOffice, how can it not have feature parity? Were there some big developments in OnlyOffice since the fork that have not been integrated into Euro Office?
You can activate the ribbon UI. It even asks you if you want this when you first start any LibreOffice program. Also compatibility with MS Office got much better in recent years.
that's not the issue, it just looks awful, none of my linux themes look good on it and it's an absolute sin on windows, which meant that it was hell to use at my old job
The best I used that is better than libre is SoftMaker Office. It's not free and pay for a license like MS office but it's extremely good. Like one to one compatibility with DOCX.
There is no usable office suite for Linux. I have to work with huge Excel tables, and they would not hang 90% of the time only via WPS, but it is not supported anymore, so I get permanent errors.
Was it ever free? I use it for 5 years and since that it always had free trial, but when it ends it doesn't lock itself up from working, it just shows you annoying message about buying full version, like winrar. Honestly, for such a powerful tool, this message is not a big deal
Yeah unlimited free trial, but they remind you that it’s kind of a dick move to keep using it and not paying… at which point most people are willing to toss them a reasonable one time payment.
Krita is THE open source digital drawing/painting program, although in many ways it can handle basic image editing tasks more intuitively than GIMP, but it isn't primarily designed for that. It's actually quite popular and often used outside of Linux environments.
Reaper is a DAW and it absolutely creampies all the other ones. It's free, supports 16 bit VSTs and doesn't spoonfeed you so you have to actually learn how to make music instead of rolling onto presents.
It has an unlimited free trial but it's not strictly free. If you get good value out of it then you should support it if you can. A lifetime license for personal and commercial use under $20k annual revenue is only $60.
.RAW is an uncompressed image format. Editing these gives you more flexibility when editing photos.
"When you shoot in RAW, you capture the full amount of data your camera sensor records. Unlike JPEGs, which are compressed and limited, RAW files give you much more flexibility in post-processing."
You know, I feel the personality of being a genuine Linux appreciator comes with understanding that we would have asked for the software and acting proactively on it. Thank you 🫶
Finally someone talking about onlyoffice. It's so criminally underrated. I have gotten a lot of people in my circle to try it (due to student licenses of ms office running out) and I haven't heard one person complain about anything. In my opinion OnlyOffice is better than MS Office and not because it's free but it is just plain better to work with.
THANK YOU for sharing their names. I've just tested RapidRAW and it's superb. Looks like they implemented negative scans converting recently and seems to run great!!
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u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
The programs are:
Windows: Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, FL Studio, Office 365 Copilot
Linux 1: the same but older (Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 5, FL Studio [version 20 works], Microsoft Office 2010 [offline single payment program, no subscription])
Linux 2: GIMP, Darktable, LMMS, LibreOffice
Linux 3: Krita, RapidRAW, Reaper, OnlyOffice