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Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

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[–] 29 points 9 hours ago (6 children)

Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don't think some slop apps are going to change that.

I'm a Microsoft hater but I don't think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?

Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 hours ago

    We still don't have a good alternative for prepress production media. I've seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don't really care if their print media looks like shit

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  • [–] 11 points 9 hours ago* (3 children)

    Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn't want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.

    These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don't work with the file formats required, or they just don't cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they're great, I love them. However, I'm not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.

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  • [+] -6 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    Pirating Adobe and MS products is a practice of Nerds which thought they were hackers, since the existence of alternatives which make useless the piracy of this products.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 hours ago*

    I don't know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago

    I still use my copy of photoshop from time to time.

    Photopea has been my go to alternative for opening actual psd docs for a while.

    Paint.net was my go to for quick stuff back in windows. I've been learning Kirta on linux now.

    But for certain work, the 10 year old copy of photoshop is still better at certain things. Specifically for editing actual photos (go figure).

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago

    30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.

    I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn't even a 1.0 release yet, it's better than the gimp already.

    And it opened all my psds perfectly.

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