alt Hacker NewsIf LibreOffice were good enough already, it would already be popular. It's the same with GIMP. On paper it's a Photoshop alternative, but we've all struggled with it. These projects need to take the same route as Blender did. Originally it was a clunky open source alternative, but it went through a complete UI transformation and now blows the competition away.
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someperson • today at 5:38 PM
Octave is a similar old-school open-source replacement tool (to Matlab) that could benefit from similar investment. Though Octave's issues involve some ecosystem compatibility dynamics too, last I checked.
ArtCraft is great for this. They try to recreate proprietary apps 1 to 1 so there's no real innovation, but it creates a baseline for new open source projects that can be even better than the original.