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)
FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.
ffmpeg is a GODSEND. saves me going to those “convert to file type” websites when I can do it locally and so much faster 😩🙏
ffmpeg is where my mind went. It’s so good I don’t even know what the alternative is.
There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.
all are great :D
Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I’ve tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.
Folks will argue that it’s harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.
It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.
Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.
All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.
Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.
I have home assistant green, I just plugged it in and it set itself up fully, zero intervention needed. In a few minutes, everything was ready and it automatically found and (after confirming) imported all my existing stuff. Flawless.
UX is very unintuitive though, I’ve had it for a while and can not get used to how things are organized
Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
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.
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
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.
Linux is so much better than Windows.
And also better than MacOS!
I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!
It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.
COOOL
Jellyfin.
Debatable. It is an incredible piece of FOSS, but whether or not it’s better than Plex really depends on your use case. Plex is much better for remote access and the “wife factor”.
The initial goal of a self-hosted video platform must be encouraging adoption. And you have to follow a “the customer is always right” (the actual meaning, not the bastardized Karen-screaming-at-customer-service version) mentality in regards to this; Even if you have the best Jellyfin server in the world, it’s ultimately worthless if your friends and family refuse to use it. Your service needs to be accessible to the average user, and the unfortunate reality is that the average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is. When trying to encourage adoption, you’re facing a lot of social inertia in regards to people simply going “eh, I know Netflix isn’t perfect, but it already works.” You need to provide a service that is superior to other platforms in some meaningful way. And simply being free isn’t enough value for some people, because individuals will weigh the cost differently depending upon how heavily they factor it into the Cost:Convenience ratio that they’re willing to tolerate.
And this is where the wife factor comes into play: Is your spouse/partner going to be willing to use it? Does it provide enough convenience that they’ll be willing to ditch the streaming services? Now how about your extended family? And if you’re only ever planning on watching at home on LAN, Jellyfin may be perfect. But Plex’s unified login experience is much easier for the average user to understand. I can walk my mother-in-law through the account creation and login process over the phone, because it’s familiar. If my in-laws can figure out how to make a Netflix or Hulu account, they can figure out how to make a Plex account. You simply sign in, and your available libraries show up. Easy.
But Jellyfin will never be able to provide a unified login experience, because the entire platform is built to rebel against that; A unified login would require a centralized authentication server like Plex runs, and that’s specifically what Jellyfin is designed against. If I tried to get my MIL to use Jellyfin, her eyes would glaze over as soon as I mentioned updating her router to one that can run Tailscale, or using my custom domain. But with Plex, she simply logs in and has access.
Luckily, you can run both side-by-side. Personally, I prefer Jellyfin’s UI, so I use it at home. But I don’t let it touch the WAN (for a variety of reasons), and that’s where Plex comes in.
That’s a whole lotta words to say you don’t know how to set up Jellyfin correctly.
My whole family loves it, they use it across quite a few different devices, and they enjoy the fact that they can get anything they want using Jellyseer. And since I’m not some paranoid nutter that thinks having my services exposed to the web is going to be the end of my life, they also enjoy the unified account experience that the LDAP server provides them, where they can manage their SSO password and 2FA from an easy-to-use web interface that in turn allows them to access all the other services on the server, and from any device anywhere in the world without needing to do stupid stuff like upgrade their router for Tailscale.
If it’s more difficult to set up, then it may not be better for everyone.
I’d agree with you on the surface, except for the part where virtually every single comment on Lemmy about Jellyfin’s remote access basically boils down to “lol just tell them to use Tailscale. It works fine for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Again, I’m talking about the average user.
And it’s not about being a paranoid nutter. Jellyfin has had multiple exploits in the past. Hell, it had a code execution vulnerability from unsanitized FFmpeg API inputs published just last week.
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
Compiz, Wayfire, and KWin all outshine both Windows and MacOS in quality and render performance.
The amount of visual magic in Compiz and Wayfire especially is both incredibly useful but also hilarious.
3D desktop cube is a great way to handle multiple desktops, but rotating your windows to any angle is just to show off to your friends lol.
interesting
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.
Inkscape and kdenlive have both been awesome. Might need to try ansel, never heard of it before
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Their docs are pretty good: https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/
Otherwise youtube is full of tutorials tho the software gets a lot of updates so often the best new way is on the docs or stackexchange
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 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 like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.
I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.
The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don’t know if there’s a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.
Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn’t as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.
Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience
KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I’m happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There’s Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io
I would say my limited experience with kdenlive has been really good, very easy to use vs something like premiere pro and resolve.
drawio is not open source
Immich might not hold up yet in every aspect to Google photos, but I was and am still blown away by how much better face detection and grouping works. I cannot believe how ridiculously bad that feature is in Google, you just have to pray that it works, and if it messes up, it’s extremely annoying to fix. In immich, it works exactly as you’d expect.
Never tried Google’s face detection, but given that their search AI told people to eat rocks daily, I’m not surprised. Yeah, Immich looks great. I need to set that up soon, trying to set my old laptop with docker
OpenDroneMap. It’s a suite that provides photogrammetry, stitching, volumetric analysis, geographic correlation, and 3D model conversion from aerial and non-aerial photos. And that’s only the features that I use myself. It defaults to CPU-only rendering, so you don’t need a big bad GPU to GSD.
Even ignoring the lack of subscription cost, ODM performs at least as well as other applications I tried such as Pix4D. Professionally, I use it for year-over-year kelp bed monitoring, photosynthetic mass analysis, and home construction analysis, specifically volumetric infill needs. Personally, I use it to generate 3D models of my boat interior, which I convert to STL files for arranging infrastructure in limited spaces.
cool I didn’t even know that kund if software existed, let alone foss
Libre Office.
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.
