Is it my imagination, or are ‘free’ phone apps and web apps much, much better than Open Source Linux installed apps?

  • A spreadsheet is my favourite tool. Although I don’t like to support Google, I would rather use Google Sheets than Libre Office Calc, if only for the simple reason that I can refer to a column range from a specific top-most cell to the bottom of the column, whatever its row number is.
  • A stick-and-box drawing tool is my second favourite tool. Visio was my favourite of these, but only on Windows, and I don’t have access to Visio any more. There is no native Linux app that is even close to the standard of Visio. Web-base draw.io is quite usable, and there is an installable Elektron version, so that it close.
  • Words are an essential part of what I do; Libre Office Writer is ok, but is too complex, and tries to be bug-compatible with Microsoft Word. Once again, Google Docs does what I need, and can include diagrams from draw.io.
    • Actually, I found NewDeal Office to be even better for its time, back in the 2000s or so. The word-processor and spreadsheet were completely interoperable: a table in a word-processor document was a genuine spreadsheet, and each cell in a spreadsheet had all of the formatting capabilities of a word-processor.
    • I really don’t want to go back to LaTeX…
    • Those tools are acceptable with tables and pictures, but don’t handle line-drawings, snippets of music scores and other picture-like objects properly – you can import an image, but they don’t adjust properly for differing views (on-screen vs. printed, etc).
    • If I use a lIghtweight markup processor (Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, NaturalDocs, etc, etc), it must handle those pcitueverything I want to put generally don’t a
  • For photos, my phone has an adequate touch-up tool, for cropping, straightening the horizon, and adjusting exposure levels. Actually, there are some acceptable tools on Linux: shotwell and digiKam. I don’t often need to use the full GIMP experience, but sometimes want to remove unfortunate power-lines or expand the background to achieve a particular aspect ratio – Liquid Rescale to the rescue, probably available on my phone too by now.
    • But there is no easy way to mark up a photo, screenshot or map: to circle a feature in red, to point something out with an arrow or map-pin, to draw a line or add text.
  • For audio editing, I use either Audacity (for trimming rubbish off the start and end) or Ardour (for cuts and fades, filters, etc. Audacity is generally ok, but I don’t like that it overwrites the original. Ardour is a bit finicky to set up for casual use, but once going, and you are used to it, works well.
  • I use one of three Linux programs for processing videos – shotcut, flowblade and pitivi. They are actually not too bad for the things I need to do: taking full-length videos of a performance from multiplle camera and assembling them with cuts and cross-fades into a sensible video, synced with audio from a separate audio recording. They all work, and at least they don’t crash the way they used to. None of them are any good for making up an export-workflow to export to a number of different formats; they all assume that you will export your video once and upload it to YouTube; not what I do.
  • For music score editing, MuseScore is wonderful. There is nothing to compare with on the phone. I have not used the big-name score editors much (Sibelius and Finale), but Musescore seems up there with them.

I started out thinking that Open Source Linux apps are much worse than phone apps and web apps, and wanted to rant about them. It turns out that it is only the office tools that suck. The photo, audio and video editing tools are fine; the music score editing is first class.

I will have to re-write this post as an impartial assessment of these tools.