"Bill in Co" wrote

| I'd agree Libre Office is not equal, but I would
| say it's equivalent. If you're in a corporate job
|
| Equivalent to me means equal to.
|
A slice of bread might have equivalent nutritional
value to a scoop of pasta, but the two are not equal
and the actual mg of starch or B vitamins won't be
the identical.
Equivalent means essentially the same. "For all practical
purposes". Or as I often see online: "For all intensive
purposes". (The Internet demonstrates that a
surprising number of people are "hearing literate".)

So what I was saying is that for most people who
don't specifically require MS Office in their work,
Libre Office is equivalent. It does all the same things
they might do in MS Office.

I don't have a lot of experience with either. I know
LO doesn't quite handle complex docx tables accurately.
And of course it doesn't handle VBA. Hardcore Word
experts won't be able to live with LO. But most
people don't need all that. I don't need to deal with
people sending me docx with complex tables. I just
need to do contracts, bills, business cards, estimates,
etc and I need to be able to save those as PDF. And
sometimes I need to be able to receive a DOC or DOCX.
LO does all that.

The last time I tried PS was v. 5. It was pretty much
the same thing as PSP. And there's not a lot a graphic
editor needs to do once it handles layers, multiple undo,
etc. So I expect the main difference now with PS is
custom filters. It's the only tool to use for people doing
things like magazine layout. And for graphics pros who
want their peers to think they use PS. Though I only
know one graphics pro. He does architectural renderings
and original "industrial" art. He uses exclusively Corel
Draw on Windows, rather than Adobe on a Mac.

I do some minor original graphics, photo work, and
image editing for websites. I haven't found anything
PSP can't handle. (And Aftershot Pro for RAW images,
though PSP16 handles some of that.) I don't need to
make a fashion model look like she's not anorectic and I
don't need to smoothly remove objects from images
very often.

The point being that these programs are *equivalent*
for most people. Only in certain cases are the high-price
products necessary. Even then it's more for swank than
for functionality. (I know an architect who always buys
the latest MS Office because he doesn't want to be caught
using an older version. He thinks it looks unprofessional.
He's wasting a lot of money, but for his particular
use it's a reasonable investment. He needs to present
himself as a talented, creative winner at the top of his
game in order to get jobs. Being an architect, as with
art in general, is more about swank and reputation
than it is about talent.)

But to an extent I agree with you. GIMP seems to do
most of the same things, but the GUI is such a mess that
I don't consider it to be a contender. Usability counts.

My main purpose in attacking things like PS and
MS Word is to counteract the marketing that trains
people to think they're something special and that their
price is therefore justified. They're not and it isn't.
They just happen to have achieved the status of
being the industry standard.

Yesterday I built two garden gates and today I have
to install them. With a DeWalt portable drill. Why DeWalt?
Because it works very well and costs far less than the
brands that have achieved status as industry standard.
But those other brands sell well because young hotshot
carpenters want to look official and they've read
the marketing, along with the tainted media reviews,
that say Brand X is a must-have for anyone serious
about their work.

| From what I recall, the difference between h.264 (or x264), and say h.263
or
| Xvid, is about comparable to the difference between WMV9 and WMV7
.....
| guessestimate, just from memory, I'd say it was on the order of 25-50%
| (reduction in filesize for comparable appearance).
|

Then I guess the search continues. I'm mostly
on XP, like you, so I haven't tried some of the
options available, like OBS. I think the bytescout
program saved as WMV9 and that didn't seem
different in size from the mp4 from videotool, but
I didn't do a careful comparison. And as I noted,
the bytescout program was slightly spywarish,
trying to call home to Cloudflare at least once.