# Commercial Software You Would Like to see on FreeBSD



## Phishfry (Jul 6, 2016)

I have a penchant for old software that just works. Two of my favorite old programs are Adobe Photoshop 3.01 for Unix and Main Concepts Main Actor for Linux. Both were around early on and just never gained much traction. Both provided sorely needed desktop features that are still illusive to this day in my opinion. Some of this is due to the open plugin architecture that these programs provided. They created an ecosystem. I paid good money for features(plugins) I needed because it increased my workflow. It was also a way to differentiate your work from anothers in a cookie cutter world.

What commercial software that ran on open source was abandonded ahead of its time in your opinion?


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## Phishfry (Jul 6, 2016)

I am old enough to remember when CorelDraw was a great product. More dust in the wind. Shoot i bought the stock and lost. Poor investment.


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## kpa (Jul 6, 2016)

FreeBSD has pretty much lost the battle when it comes to commercial end user desktop software. It lacks something that makes OS X still a serious contender in that market and that is its own full fledged graphics stack that is fully tailored for the OS. FreeBSD has none of that, it only has borrowed bits from Linux (the kernel drivers) and the incredibly fast aging X11 (the Xorg implementation) that nobody is targeting anymore because of its unsuitability for real application development.


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## xavi (Jul 7, 2016)

kpa said:


> FreeBSD has pretty much lost the battle when it comes to commercial end user desktop software



A recent thread (with over 300+ comments) on HN discussing why the FreeBSD desktop lost the battle (amongst other things) can be found here.


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## ShelLuser (Jul 7, 2016)

Well, to be fair I think they'd need much more than their own stack to be considered as a target platform. It's not merely an issue of the environment people develop for, but also the size of the target audience. However, sitting right on top of everything is the expected revenue and possible profits resulting from it. If companies don't expect a profit then the platform is most likely not very interesting for them.

And that last aspect can be threatened by all sorts of things. The very easiest of examples would be any freely available competitors. Adobe Photoshop on an Unix-like platform would be cool, but wouldn't it be fair to say that a majority of users would still chose to use Gimp instead?


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## Phishfry (Jul 7, 2016)

No big deal I just got to thinking about various softwares I bought to run on open source. Fox-it on Linux was my most recent.
Photoshop is a bad example as Adobe was primarily a Mac based experience. The jump to OSX would be natural for that product.

Didn't Unigraphics run on Unix? These type programs are more what I was thinking would be appropriate.

Regarding Gimp with OSX competing for the desktop I don't see Photoshop making any inroads on FreeBSD. I think professional designers who make a living off software would buy it on the best platform for their job.

QT and GTK apps seem to run fine for me. There might be some rough edges on the desktop but if a bigshot company was onboard it surely could help the cause. I see small budding companies sponsoring work but it sure would be nice to have some sugar daddies helping like Autodesk or IBM.

When I compare Xubuntu to Xfce4 on FreeBSD I really can't tell the difference except for networkmanager.
They work the same. Less apps on FreeBSD but less churn.


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## ronaldlees (Jul 7, 2016)

Phishfry said:


> I am old enough to remember when CorelDraw was a great product. More dust in the wind. Shoot i bought the stock and lost. Poor investment.



Ha! You need the stack of floppy disks for that Corel?  Got em!  

Of course I also have floppies for original OS/2 in my museum.  No CPM tho.

It would be nice to be able to edit video on FreeBSD, like you can on Apple systems. I imagine that is tied to what kpa wrote about the graphics stack.


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## roddierod (Jul 8, 2016)

Phishfry said:


> I am old enough to remember when CorelDraw was a great product. More dust in the wind. Shoot i bought the stock and lost. Poor investment.



LOL. I remember that too.  But don't feel bad...I bought stock in SCO!


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## SirDice (Jul 8, 2016)

It's probably been tried hundreds of times by various people but I would love to have Steam properly working, with working SteamOS games. Steam itself seems to work to some extent but most modern SteamOS games require a newer glibc than the one that's provided by emulators/linux_base-c6. This in turn would, as I understood it, require support for a newer Linux kernel. I think I saw somewhere there's work being done in this respect so I'm still hopeful it'll happen one day 

Other things that might be helpful would be some interesting software from the guys from NetApp and EMC. I'm thinking about a centralized management application for storage with focus on ZFS and perhaps HAST.


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## ANOKNUSA (Jul 8, 2016)

ShelLuser said:


> Adobe Photoshop on an Unix-like platform would be cool, but wouldn't it be fair to say that a majority of users would still chose to use Gimp instead?



The GIMP is FOSS, and is perfectly capable of producing anything that Photoshop can. The problem is that the GIMP interface is garbage, and it's almost certainly never going to change. The Photoshop interface isn't exactly intuitive, but it's easy enough to learn with a little guidance, spacious, it's easy to quickly find something the first time you need it, and that thing is in the same spot from then on. Photoshop is easier to learn and use, making it harder for anyone to break old habits. On top of that, the time spent learning a new application is time not spent earning a living, and if the interface for the application is markedly less efficient then the user will be less productive no matter how dedicated they are to learning it. Those things make switching to a non-commercial FOSS alternative less appealing.

From what I've seen, Illustrator vs. Inkscape is a better comparison. Inkscape seems to have a dedicated professional following, probably because (a) the transition is much less difficult than it would be regarding Photoshop vs. GIMP; and (b) development is steady and open. Experienced designers can pick it up rather easily, and they know it's going to be around for some time. It's more worthwhile to spend a couple dozen hours learning a handful of new things than just renting Illustrator from Adobe.


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## Phishfry (Jul 8, 2016)

The Corel royalty free clipart collections were a lifesaver before the web. I did lots of restaurant menu work and they more than paid for themselves. Who has time to draw an anchor when it was right there on disk.
Remember that Corels demise was overpaying for WordPerfect in my opinion. I believe there was a WP version that ran on Unix too.

Adobe Pagemaker was one of the stupidest things that Adobe every canceled. InDesign just never gained the same traction and Quark was on their heels. Was there not a version of Adobe Illustrator on Unix as well. Adobe Framemaker too for early xml.

I agree that Inkscape is a descent vector graphic tool. Part of the problem is the synergies between your bitmap graphics program and vector graphics program. Adobe really had a leg up there(similar toolbars). Adobe Illustrator magic lasso tool is the really one of the best. A real time saver. 

I don't want to sound like a Adobe pimp I am just giving my use case.
I did not buy anything from their Creative Studio line so my tools are dated but work well. I liked to pay for each program separately. I don't need to upgrade a drawing tool or have it register on the internet automagically.

Being a machinist I have used vector paths for export to CAD for artsy projects.


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## silicium (Jul 9, 2016)

I wonder if development and sales of commercial software relies heavily on integration with commercial OS featuring slick desktops and more advanced graphics/video/audio stacks.


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## ronaldlees (Jul 12, 2016)

silicium said:


> I wonder if development and sales of commercial software relies heavily on integration with commercial OS featuring slick desktops and more advanced graphics/video/audio stacks.



There is no doubt about that.   Mega software always grows to the point of embarrassing the hardware.  When the hardware catches up, big software starts the beginning of a new cycle.  The process goes on forever.  That's why I like to use some of the older software suites (from the nineties or even the eighties).  Those old bit rotted collections are not sexy but run like greased lightening!


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## archfan (Jul 17, 2016)

There's only three things I miss:
1. sublime edit 3
2. WPS office
3. I don't remember anymore - but it was something important. Promise!


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## pkubaj (Jul 17, 2016)

SirDice said:


> It's probably been tried hundreds of times by various people but I would love to have Steam properly working, with working SteamOS games. Steam itself seems to work to some extent but most modern SteamOS games require a newer glibc than the one that's provided by emulators/linux_base-c6. This in turn would, as I understood it, require support for a newer Linux kernel. I think I saw somewhere there's work being done in this respect so I'm still hopeful it'll happen one day
> 
> Other things that might be helpful would be some interesting software from the guys from NetApp and EMC. I'm thinking about a centralized management application for storage with focus on ZFS and perhaps HAST.



I'm actually porting CentOS 7 set of packages. You can try https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210926 for starters.


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## kpedersen (Jul 19, 2016)

ronaldlees said:


> Those old bit rotted collections are not sexy but run like greased lightening!



A real eye opener was the fact that Photoshop 4.x running on Windows 3.1 using the win32s subsystem (very slow) using full emulation via DosBox (extremely slow) was still so much quicker than CS4 running on Windows 7.

Modern software these days embarrasses nothing but itself and it's developers...


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## SirDice (Jul 19, 2016)

Back in the day code was optimized. You won't believe the stuff I've seen being crammed into 1K. Nowadays with multi MegaBytes/GigaBytes available on both RAM and storage, code optimization has become a lost art. If code doesn't perform well you simply throw bigger hardware at it.


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## Maxnix (Jul 19, 2016)

SirDice said:


> Back in the day code was optimized. You won't believe the stuff I've seen being crammed into 1K. Nowadays with multi MegaBytes/GigaBytes available on both RAM and storage, code optimization has become a lost art. If code doesn't perform well you simply throw bigger hardware at it.


It's the logic of consumerism. The more I see such wastes, the more The story of Mel* comes in mind...

*I know that such code is all but portable, and portability is important, but IMHO this is still an example of intelligence and creativity.


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## kpa (Jul 19, 2016)

Also you won't believe how much people keep repeating the BS about optimizing compilers and how much better -O6 is over -O2 on GCC. Yet we constantly see the same people writing sort algorithms by hand and get them all wrong ending with O(n^2) or worse algorithms.


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## SirDice (Jul 19, 2016)

Maxnix said:


> The more I see such wastes, the more The story of Mel* comes in mind...


I thoroughly enjoyed reading that. 

I'm a little too young for drum memory but I've certainly seen self-modifying decompression routines being shoved into display memory and executed from there (it was a common thing to do on the venerable C-64). It took me forever to figure out how it worked


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## cyrano (Jul 22, 2016)

Phishfry said:


> I have a penchant for old software that just works. Two of my favorite old programs are Adobe Photoshop 3.01 for Unix



Funny. I stopped using Photoshop after the 3.0.2 release. And I never even knew there has been a Unix port...


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## forquare (Aug 7, 2016)

My list is predominately Mac specific apps:

1Password (can get working under WINE, when I've not broken my config) *
Affinity Designer & Photo
FaceTime
GeekTool (Similar to conky, I think, but simple drag-n-drop)
Pixelmator
Steam * (mainly Kerbal Space Program)
Tweetbot *
A way to nicely sync photos from my iPhone would be nice, though the Nextcloud app seems to be able to do this).

* These are apps that, if available, would mean my next desktop would only run FreeBSD.


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## Oko (Aug 7, 2016)

forquare said:


> My list is predominately Mac specific apps
> A way to nicely sync photos from my iPhone would be nice, though the Nextcloud app seems to be able to do this).


iPhone uses an ugly net/rsync  wrapper to synchronize photos. There are far better ways to do it with advanced file systems like HAMMER and ZFS and retain full history


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## ANOKNUSA (Aug 8, 2016)

forquare, what about LastPass?


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## forquare (Aug 8, 2016)

ANOKNUSA said:


> forquare, what about LastPass?



Perhaps irrational, I'm still not convinced about accessing passwords through the browser and keeping them stored online.

I would likely look at switching to something like KeePass if push came to shove.


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## sizigee (Aug 8, 2016)

SirDice said:


> Back in the day code was optimized. You won't believe the stuff I've seen being crammed into 1K. Nowadays with multi MegaBytes/GigaBytes available on both RAM and storage, code optimization has become a lost art. If code doesn't perform well you simply throw bigger hardware at it.



That is so true.  I'd hate to see what the future would bring...


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## kpedersen (Aug 8, 2016)

I would like to see Borland C++ Builder 5 or 6 on FreeBSD (none of the newer bloatware however). Borland Kylix was close but Linux only I believe.

At least until Lazarus ports the VCL to C++ and has language support in its Visual IDE.

I mean GTK+ Glade is OK but just found the Borland stuff to be more flexible (though perhaps less scalable).


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## Atsuri (Aug 8, 2016)

I wouldn't mind Steam, WPS and/or a commercial IDE for Java and/or C/C++. For the rest I can easily find numerous open-source alternatives that can be compiled from source .


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