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)

  • Tux960@lemmy.world
    362·
    2 days ago

    LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?

    • werbebanner@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 hours ago

      I work with Microsoft Office on a daily basis for work, so professional use. I wanted to try LibreOffice privately, tried it and hat to notice that besides the terrible UI, there are many features missing and it’s just way clunkier. So I tried OnlyOffice, which had some features which I missed at LibreOffice, but now I’m missing other features…

      So sadly, there isn’t a real competition for MS Office yet.

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I posted this in another thread yesterday but it’s relevant here too:

      I have a small consultancy with several staff and work with documents and spreadsheets all day. We use LibreOffice exclusively.

      Occasionally I encounter similar threads discussing the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and the comments are all the same. So many people saying LibreOffice just “isn’t there yet”, or that it might be ok for casual use but not for power users.

      But as someone who uses LibreOffice extensively with a broad feature set I’ve just never encountered something we couldn’t do. Sure we might work around some rough edges occasionally, but the feature set is clearly comparable.

      My strongly held suspicion is that it’s a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.

      That said, IDK if I’d go as far as to say LibreOffice is clearly the “best” because that’s subjective. IMO it’s certainly comparable and is a shining example of great FOSS. Hopefully LibreOffice enjoys some attention in the current move away from American products.