Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? Godot is rapidly gaining users/mindshare while Unity seems to be collapsing, but Unreal is still the king of game engines for now. Krita is a viable alternative for digital painting.

> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?

KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.

With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.

From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.

KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.

I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative

Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast

QGIS is pretty amazing. And it is helped along by not trying to pull you into a cloud ecosystem that ArcGIS does.

> Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders.

I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche

OBS is on line 2 ....

How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing?

https://www.photopea.com/

>FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.

As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines.

Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.

"It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete" Wow, that is great news. I guess its support for Pixar USD is equal to Maya and Houdini then, so all the big studios can finally switch

Microsoft Office is dying. Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office. Most of our docs are on wikis or email now.

2D motion graphics maybe?

DaVinci Resolve is getting better but still not comparable to After Effects.

Blender already has a lot of pieces in place to tackle this.

Possibly Audacity, given the direction v4 is taking. Great video essay / update here: https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38

MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.

>>It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete

Hadn’t heard that. How many AAA vfx studios have left Maya for Blender?

The comment I've heard is that Office (or was that Word?) doesn't necessarily beat LO, some people are just forced to use it because of file formats

I’m rooting for gimp but they are truly a decade behind photoshop. I don’t know how they can compete. Luckily it does not seem like they are in the market for professionals so the need to match Photoshop isn’t quite as high

> It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

really? I haven't done 3D rendering in a long time, admittedly, but back then Maya and Lightwave were miles ahead of Blender. Rhino3D too. Even 3DSMax was better. Lightwave seems to have sadly fallen off (unfortunately, IMO it was the best at one point, had excellent ray tracing). I didn't really Blender had come such a long way -- that's great.

Since you mention niches: Adobe InDesign has no OSS competition at all, and Illustrator is still much better than Inkscape.