Firefox is roughly as good as any other browser, which is to say it does some things better and some things worse, and many things roughly the same.
Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field. It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard.
For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any closed source equivalent tool (though some of them do have specific features that are critical for some users). The only issues with it come from being forced to interoperate with data generated by closed source applications. I don't happen to enjoy using LibreOffice very much, but there's denying its "stellar" quality compared to the alternatives.
[ EDIT: I really can't fail to mention VCV Rack, a libre+gratis virtual modular synthesizer. It wasn't the first such tool, but it is by far the most successful, and by far the best, at least in terms of user experience. It has also created an ecosystem of module developers (more than 2200 modules already), which is both a reason why and an indication of just how stellar a tool it really is ]
Of course, as a software developer, I could name a long list of FLOSS tools that are also stellar, but you and others would likely dismiss them as not of interest to "the general public". In the context of this article, that would probably be fair.
I mean, saying LibreOffice is better than Microsoft Office is like saying eating toothpaste is better than eating soap. You'll never get a Michelin star for serving Colgate, so I'm not sure I'd call LibreOffice "stellar".
But I don't think it's surprising that highly complex UI-driven applications aren't as plentiful in open source, where the sweet spot (from my perspective) has been smaller applications that scratch particular itches. Would an open suite of office tools even get off the ground today, built from scratch without funding from Sun and then Oracle?
Maybe I was just burned too hard by trying to figure out GIMP.
For most users MS Office is a nightmare program to learn and use. It's functionality is incredibly extensive, having accumulated the kitchen sink, stove and refridgerator over its long life. But this doesn't make it actually very usable for people coming to it at this point. LibreOffice, while certainly not matching the functionality of MS Office, is much closer to the subset of what most people need most of the time.
You had me at LibreOffice. It struggles to render a blank page on a mac (something to do with retina resolution which is default since 2012).
I've tried to use it on all supported operating systems, but everywhere it's a slow starting, glitchy mess. Still the best OSS way to interop with Office documents, but not something I would classify as "stellar".
Given that I know dozens of people who use it without such issues on various platforms, and come across similar kinds of show-stopping problems on forums for related software, I personally wouldn't lay this at the feet of LibreOffice. Your mileage may vary.
These are powerful tools, but Blender and LibreOffice are also perfect examples of “clunky” open-source. They’ve never had the kind of polish that makes software great to use.
Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field. It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard.
For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any closed source equivalent tool (though some of them do have specific features that are critical for some users). The only issues with it come from being forced to interoperate with data generated by closed source applications. I don't happen to enjoy using LibreOffice very much, but there's denying its "stellar" quality compared to the alternatives.
[ EDIT: I really can't fail to mention VCV Rack, a libre+gratis virtual modular synthesizer. It wasn't the first such tool, but it is by far the most successful, and by far the best, at least in terms of user experience. It has also created an ecosystem of module developers (more than 2200 modules already), which is both a reason why and an indication of just how stellar a tool it really is ]
Of course, as a software developer, I could name a long list of FLOSS tools that are also stellar, but you and others would likely dismiss them as not of interest to "the general public". In the context of this article, that would probably be fair.