Some FOSS programs, due to being mantained by hobbyists vs a massive megacorporation with millions in funding, don’t have as many features and aren’t as polished as their proprietary counterparts. However, there are some FOSS programs that simply have more functionality and QoL features compared to proprietary offerings.
What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their non-FOSS alternatives? Maybe we can discover useful new programs together :D
I’ll start, I think Joplin is a great note-taking app that works offline + can sync between desktop and mobile really well. Also, working with Markdown is really nice compared with rich text editors that only work with the specific program that supports it. Joplin even has a bunch of plugins to extend functionality!
Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, etc. either don’t have desktop apps, doesn’t work offline, does not support Markdown, or a combination of those three.
What are some other really nice FOSS programs?
edit: woah that’s a whole load of cool FOSS software I have to try out! So far my experiences have been great (ShareX in particular is AWESOME as a screenshot tool, it’s what snip and sketch wishes it could be and mostly replaces OBS for my use case and a whole lot more)
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
The plain mail app in windows used to be quite alright. But then they deprecated it and now there is 10 different outlooks for it.
REALLY simple, but “Open Sodoku”. It’s just a Sodoku app without ads. I’m very bad but it’s pretty fun
While I’m all for glfree sudoku “Studio Goya” and their series of sudoku apps are more than worth the cost, especially Miracle Sudoku
I know this is a thread about Foss, but they really put some crazy thought into these puzzles.
I’ll trust you and pick it up.
I appreciate the trust!
Honestly it’s kinda ruined other sudoku puzzles for me. Some of the harder ones could take me an hourish to complete.
Coming back after a week to share what I thought of it:
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I loved the app itself and all the different ways to input values
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the different game modes are quite creative
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all the extra restrictions added by the different game modes make the puzzles a bit too easy for my taste
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miracle mode is fun until you get a few numbers in, but then it becomes quite straight forward again.
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all of the puzzles (at least as far as I played) follow the same pattern and when you notice it you can skip the whole sudoku part and answer it just by pattern recognition.
Hopefully that means it was worth it!
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FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.
Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity
The only drawback for some users would be that it’s CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)
The OpenStreetMap ecosystem (e.g. Organic Maps as an Android Client) is better than Google Maps.
Tusky is better than any proprietary Twitter client.
F-Droid and Flathub are both better than Google Play.
Thunderbird is better than GMail
Real open Podcasting (e.g. Antennapod) is better than Spotify.
OpenDesk is better than M365.
Signal and Matrix are both better than the chat tools from Meta, Apple, Google.
(It’s about ecosystems/platforms, because most software doesn’t work in isolation)
Firefox is the best browser (uBlock). Linux is the best OS for a growing number of things. Android is terrible but still the best mobile OS. Lemmy is the best social media platform.
Honourable mention to Luanti which most people wouldn’t say is better than Minecraft yet but it’s absolutely getting there.
I like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.
I don’t know about Luanti. The world size limitation is an issue that’s hard to address, and there’s some ‘denial’ going up within their devs about it. Stating that the current world size is more than enough, ignoring the great amount of people asking for bigger worlds.
The world is unfathomably massive. What is it that people want to do with bigger worlds?
Some people like to travel in Minecraft. There’s something in just picking a direction and moving there for days, exploring. In Minecraft you would never reach the end. In Luanti you’ll hit the end of the world in a few hours.
Also for massive multiplayer purposes. Servers with hundreds of people are impossible in luanti’s size.
And it’s not just me. You go to Luanti’s forum and one of the biggest threads is one asking for infinite worlds, players want it.
They used to say the the world size was embedded deep into the code and that a massive rewrite would be needed for that and that it was not worth it. But someone already made a fork that has this feature and didn’t change that much so… And no, the fork is not a solution due to Luanti “modular” approach that fork is incompatible with any Luanti game so there’s no game really just the base “engine”.
I don’t have high hopes of devs ever addressing that, so I stopped following the project. I hope be proven wrong, but something tells me that it’s a change that will never me made.
I agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I’ll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet,
rsyncandmpv.VLC
Inkscape is really good and I prefer it over Adobe Illustrator. It’s a bit worse in some regards but its really stable and does everything very reliably and can be molded into svg production machine.
Kdenlive is the best simple video editor out there. Sure other editors are better but kdenlive really hits that sweet spot of being simple but powerful.
Digikam is the best photo management suite I know off. Everything else seems to be missing one thing or another and Digikam just does everything and does it pretty well.
Ansel (fork of Darktable) is often better than Adobe Lightroom for casual photography as it comes with very strong opinionated defaults. I generall just follow the default pipeline and have amazing shots. Light room could probably get me a bit further but Ansels hits the sweet spot between too basic and too clunky.
Then as a developer foss libraries are basically uncontested to the point where proprietary libraries and programming languages basically do not exist anymore.
I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.
Lichess -> chess.com
But it’s hard to be impartial / objective about modern stuff like that.
Blender for 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and (simple) video editing.
Several movies were either made (almost) entirely with Blender (Flow, Next Gen), or in parts (e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SpiderMan 2, The Midnight Sky).
It is also used by many (indie) game devs.
Speaking of games: Godot is an awesome 2D/3D game engine, which gained a lot more momentum after the Unity fuck-up. It’s licensed under the MIT license. Among a plethora of smaller indie games it has been used for financially successful and/or popular titles by indie and non-indie devs alike such as Brotato, Cassette Beasts, RPG in a Box, Endoparasitic, Dome Keeper, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, and several more.
Give it a try if you’re into game development!
Any FOSS Linux/Unix shell, bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, whatever, is a million times better than cmd or the early versions of PowerShell. Yeah, I know, PowerShell Core exists now, and it’s even open source and cross platform, but it still sucks.
Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus
Yeah this is one of those rare occasions where the foss app actually looks better and is more polished than the commercial one! The new beta plex mobile looks much better but you can no longer hide the live TV and on demand stuff, the entshittification is real. And the jellyfin video player still shits on the new plex one.
There are still a number of areas where jellyfin lags far behind plex though like offline playback/downloads, ability to skip intros/credits on mobile. And plex overall is slightly better at transcoding, downmixing etc and requires a lot less manual setup in general.
Personally overall I rate them roughly equal when you balance out the pros and cons of each, assuming you already have a plex pass. But there’s absolutely no justification to pay for plex when jellyfin is just as good for free
ShareX or flameshot for taking screenshots. ShareX needs some tweaks out of the box but once it’s tweaked it is so much more convenient when you need to make super quick tweaks/edits like adding steps or highlights or something.
woah that looks really cool, I have to try those out. 👀
edit: WAIT SHAREX HAS OCR???
IT CAN CAPTURE REGIONS OF THE SCREEN? IT HAS ACTUALLY GOOD HOTKEYS??? WOAHHHHH
IT SCREENRECORDS TOO??
i guess I don’t need OBS (I’ll keep it around though in case I need to use the camera since I use that sometimes)
What can I say, except you’re welcome 🤗
not to be that guy, but…
*you’re (IT’S NOT THAT HARD IT IS “YOU ARE”)
Well that’s funny because I am that guy. I blame it on my phone’s keyboard. Probably walking and swiping away as usual.
I edited because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.
Shame.
