Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It’s open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don’t use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren’t many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you’re looking for.

Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it’ll show the equation.

This reminded me of when Prezi was a thing.

Do you know about Ipe? https://ipe.otfried.org/

One of my professors makes amazing slides with it. Text uses LaTeX but it can do positioning and drawing you could never dream of with LaTeX unless you’re willing to spend 5 hours writing TikZ per slide (if that’s enough), and it’s a graphical editor. No videos though afaik, since it also creates PDF.

@hayk
Look at this:

https://sozi.baierouge.fr/pages/10-about-de.html

I’ve tried this…feels gooooood!

Got one more for you: https://gossip.ink/
I use it via a docker/podman container I’ve made for it: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/vluz/node-umi-gossip-run/general

Might not have everything, but HedgeDoc (a web-based collaborative markdown editor) has a spreadsheet mode where you can create slideshows / presentations using simple markdown. Its free and self-hostable.

Consider https://remarkjs.com/#2.

Probably doesn’t fit your needs, beacuse there’s no UI.

But there’s no UI, because it’s a file format. For me, that’s a huge plus. I edit it in my favorite text editor. For visual changes, I dip a tiny bit into CSS and HTML.

It’s fast to create, and gives a fantastic cross platform presentation experience.

And it’s trivial to serve the slide decks from a website. And the content is automatically available to search engines.

And…my side decks are immortal. They will outlive the language they were written in. Beacuse under the hood, they’re just Markdown.

I am not sure how well they stack up against the competition, as I haven’t really used them, but maybe they can hit the sweet-spot:

KDE has an office suite: Calligra. Windows and macOS support seems to be preliminary, what that means in terms of stability/performance, I don’t know.

As you also mention Figma working decently for you, you could take a look at Penpot.

In regards to your latex situation, maybe klatexformula, could be something for you. It generates images from latex. I’ve been pretty happy with it, in tandem with word processors, before fully jumping to latex. It’s pretty lightweight, their site does mention it needs a minimal version of latex though, which I don’t recall installing when using it, but both texlive, and miktex seem fairly small.

Edit: as others also mention OnlyOffice might also be an option for you.

At this point I’m mostly using MS PowerPoint, but its lack of linux support really drives me mad.

Considering the community we’re in, it’s odd that there’s not a bigger dealbreaker (mostly kidding, all my job software is proprietary and I just have to suck it up). With the dawn of Office online, the OS shouldn’t really an issue anymore, or does the online version lack features you need?

[PowerPoint] comes bundled with the Office Suite, the majority of apps from which I’ve never used.

That’s how they get you. You’re already paying $X for them, might as well use them. Now that you’re used to them, it’s hard to justify switching to a different app with an entirely new workflow that may not even have all the features you want.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts and your experiences with presentation-making software?

Not much, but I have used PowerPoint to make the most basic of presentations. It’s fine.

I’ve used all the other popular LibreOffice alternatives (Writer, Calc, Draw). Based on ny experience with Draw (and the UI of all), I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that in general LO is good at handling data and text, and not so great/easy-to-use with graphics.

As for your requirements, 1+2 are very reasonable, almost given for a presentation software—although the videos may narrow down your pool.

3 is where things get uncommon; wanna know how I know you work in STEM? Actually, given that you’re clearly making presentations often, and can work remotely, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess: professor? Then again, you clearly don’t shy away from learning computer nerdery and trying new software (incl. Linux), so you might be an engineer who just happens to give a lot of presentations instead.

Back on topic: 3 should be more specific. My understanding of LaTeX is that it’s basically a fully-fledged publishing software on its own… or rather, a standard language that publishing softwares can use, similar to how MS Office uses XML behind the scenes everywhere. Your requirement is basically that the software use a specific format for displaying stuff on screen, but the context suggests you just want LaTeX because it supports autoformatting of math equations. Surely most presentation softwares have some way of achieving that without having a full-on LaTeX rendering engine included. I’m guessing you’ve already tried good ol’ Insert>Object>Formula or using LibreOffice’s Math to create what you want before copying it to Impress?

Lastly 4 is a doozy. It seems like such a simple request to the non-devs. The unfortunate truth is that for anything more complex than a “Hello World,” the program requires multiple pathways to access system libraries and hardware resources, and even then taking into consideration limitations and idiosyncrasies of different hardware architectures. It’s not as simple as adding a flag to your compiler. For Mac and Windows that’s not an issue because they’re getting paid to port and they get more money for doing so, there’s financial incentive. For linux devs… Well…

There are two types of Linux devs: the majority, who contribute for fun and donations, do what they do because it helps them achieve their goals and might as well share, or they just genuinely care about giving back to the community. The other type, who there’s less of, are the ones who do it for work. They do it because there’s a niche customer base who use their software professionally and for specific industry applications; that’s where companies like Red Hat come into play. It’s rare that you find offerings for more general types of software, like entire office suites.

In other words, we’re lucky to have LibreOffice (and any web apps, which have the luxury of being OS agnostic). You want another miracle???

I like reveal.js

Sure there isn’t an UI in the common sense. Your UI is your text editor. As a benefit you can edit and run it everywhere and commit it to your git repo easily. I personally like using the text editor for everything and not having lots of separate tools for each task, so (4/5) from me on that UI. Maybe you want to consider something like Reveal-MD and just type it in Markdown. Or Asciidoctor and have one single text file that translates into the slides, a webpage, handouts and everything.

I’d use it for sleek and clean slides. Not for computer science 101 with lots of maths proofs and finite-state machines. I’d use LaTeX, TikZ for that, just stay in that ecosystem and use the beamer package.

There are also tools like Sozi

https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-powerpoint/?license=opensource