It's pretty easy if you have an e-mail job, but it's hard to avoid American software with stuff like CAD.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Dassault Systemes (CATIA and SolidWorks) is French and Bricsys (BricsCAD) it's Belgian/Swedish. Unfortunately PTC and Autodesk are both American.
Draftsight only has Windows and Mac versions, though.
Siemens (NX etc) is pretty European though.
The objective is not "perfect", but "better than what we have", there's probably no way to get to perfect today within some niches, but there's still chances of improvement
That's what I'm saying.
- 3d composition
- rendering
- particle simulation
- music production ...
Yes, you might be able to do it in European software but even if you might, it always means you waste a lot more time on it. And if your job's competitive, there's no way you have that to spare.
Don't get me wrong,I want things to change and I'm honestly really hopeful, but we're not quite there yet.
The only one i know of is rendering. Blender is open source and from the Netherlands (iirc) and just as powerful as anything else on the market.
Blender is indeed really good, but depending on what you wanna do you're at the mercy of an external renderer, which could either be EU (e.g. V-Ray out of Sofia) or from outside (e.g. Octane is from California).
For personal reference and for the lazy (i think it's complete, did it in a hurry in a break):
- Notion & Google Docs Alternatives: Capacities, Fibery, Tana, Nuclino
- Zoom Alternatives: Whereby, Jitsi Meet, Senfcall, Vowel
- Slack Alternatives: Mattermost, Element (Matrix), Rocket.Chat
- Gmail & Google Calendar Alternatives: Proton Mail, Tutanota, Mailbox.org, Infomaniak
- Notes & Markdown Docs: Anytype, Obsidian, SiYuan
- Task & Project Management: Fibery, Nuclino
I note that a good portion of these are commercial products, frankly I'd trust MUCH more a FOSS product than a commercial one after so damn many over the years have betrayed us all in the search for profit, if you're gonna migrate to something you may as well go for the FOSS ones that are less in danger of enshittification (not a guarantee but far less of a chance since a fork kills all the walls around a walled garden pretty quickly), even if the FOSS product is not as polished.
Tana let's you only create an account if you log in through Google, Apple, Github, Microsoft.
No, thank you.
Thanks. Agree that this push away from us services should be seen as an opportunity to expand foss alternatives as well
pretty sure "Nextcloud GmbH" is located in Germany (assuming the gmbh is real) and within nextcloud it has a replacement for all of those. Though nextcloud is pretty slow and clunky to run, it does work and does replace all of those by itself. (except email, run your own mailcow)
What is FOSS? When i try to look it up, it just shows me some local companys website.
Free Open Source Software. It is software that gives you the freedom to see the source code, make modifications to it, and redistribute your changed version of the software to your friends.
FOSS software is generally developed in the open by a community of volunteers, although we are increasingly seeing FOSS projects take on funding from community donations or corporations that want to support the software's development.
You can read more about it on the Free Software Foundation page: https://www.fsf.org/about/
Thanks ๐ obviously i know about open source, just never heard it called FOSS before
It's a mashup of Free Software and Open Source Software.
FOSS is either "Free and Open Source Software" or a Danish company that makes valves and termostats and stuff like that hehe
EDIT: Wait no, that's Danfoss I was thinking of, but FOSS is still a Danish company except it provides "high-tech analytical solutions", whatever that means. Idk what's the deal with "foss" names and Denmark, it doesn't sound very Danish to me (as a Dane).
I'm Danish, so when i tried searching for it, it only wanted to show me the company lol.
I work on Linux. The Linux Foundation is based in America and has recently demonstrated it abides by american law (by kicking russian maintainers).
Is there an alternative?
Good overview for awareness. Now add peertube.
I mean the largest problem in a business sense has always been cooperating with other businesses.
That microsoft excel file your distributor sent you with builtin macros and code that just won't function correctly in libreoffice calc and so on.
It's already a source of friction when university folks in sweden primarily using the google workplace want to coordinate with businesses in sweden that are mostly using microsoft office.
In construction the most common way to coordinate with subtractors is through microsoft teams/sharepoint online, at least here in sweden.
That seems more like a 90s problem. Who uses Microsoft Office today as a data exchange format?
@taladar
The world is run on excel spreadsheets.
@anamethatisnt
In my experience the world is run on CSV (and closely related like TSV), XML and JSON files when it comes to actual data exchange via files (as opposed to direct API usage where XML and JSON also dominate). Only the small minority of people working for companies still using ad-hoc workflows instead of custom software might send excel files instead.
Sure maybe for API and software type things but I've never seen an actual person email an XML or JSON file to another person.
I have seen XML but XLSX and XML are pretty similar
As I said, companies still using manual processes because they haven't gotten any of their processes turned into custom or off-the-shelf software might do that but that is essentially where most of the industries were in the 90s and now most are on generation 2-3 at least of custom software for their industry or even their company specifically for processes requiring data exchange.
Many industries also created standardized formats based on XML at some point which is largely why they still use XML, e.g. ONIX in the publishing industry. Entire industries of third party handling for data for certain industries have developed since the times when sending Excel files to each other was common.
You would puke if you knew what kind of workflows if have seen.
Just as many still uses Outlook and email as some sort of FTP service and then whine about reaching their 50GB/100GB M365 mailboxes.
that's a good thing, those macros are how office documents transmit more viruses than anything else lmfao
It's all pointless without replacing windows, which is impossible if you work in any sort of manufacturing job. CAD/CAM requires Windows (please don't suggest FreeCAD), industrial automation requires Windows, any specialized devices with software control requires Windows.
Heck, industrial PCs by and large run Windows, which is insane to me.
Siemens is finally moving on to BSD IIRC and (slowly) industrial PC's are going to switch over.
Last new industrial windows based PC, server, as well as HMI I installed was in 2022. But yeah it's slow.
First of all, it's not pointless -- every little bit helps.
Second, CAM requires gcode, and that runs on microcontrollers, not Windows PCs. Gcode can be emitted by all sorts of software, and not all of it requires Windows.
Sure but the vast majority of profession CAM software only runs on windows. Autodesk, SolidWorks, Mastercam, and Siemens NX all only have windows versions.
And I think you'd be shocked at how many industrial machines do run on specialized embedded windows machines and not just little esp32 microcontrollers.
Source: IT manager at a manufacturing company.
First of all, it's not pointless -- every little bit helps.
And I really want to emphasize this. People are having an "all or nothing" attitude about this when that's not even the point.
If we can replace 50, 40, even 30% of the US software we use daily with European alternatives, it's already a massive win for us. The difference then adds up to millions at scale at the end of the fiscal year.