Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

mayflower@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 428 points –
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Obsidian for note taking, Bitwig studio for audio recording and processing.

Obsidian is amazing. It also feels open-source lol; I thought it was at first.

Maybe because the plugins are, and the notes you make with it are plain markdown files.

It absolutely feels like FOSS. But it's actually not. Closed source, but free for personal use.

Did you check logseq? It's on flathub

I am using logseq at work, as I don't have a license there. I prefer Obsidian over all alternatives I've tried so far. Major points are:

  • Plugins, which obsidian offers a lot
  • File structure, obsidian stores all notes in a directory tree of markdown files. You can sync this with any service you like: GIT, Syncthing, manually, whatever you like.
  • I don't really get the journaling format of logseq, why does every note have to be a point in a hierarchy?

I really like the obsidian file structure. It makes me feel more secure because even though Obsidian isn't FOSS, all my files are backed up and in my control. Sure, my various plugin nick-nacks and doo-dads would stop working if I had to migrate everything away from Obsidian, but the meat of the content would still be there

Logseq has genuinely made me a less stupid person. It's confusing to learn, but the ceiling for articulating and organising your thoughts and knowledge base is insanely high. Other apps kind of feel like I'm fighting the limitations of my tools in order to organise a mental library of where to find information.

logseq definitely coming along. I tried their donation only sync and it seems to mostly work.

That said nothing has beaten Standardnotes for me. Standardnotes can be found on flathub, fdroid etc. The only drawback is to get the important features you need to either selfhost or buy the plan. The free service is very barebones

isn’t obsidian open source?

Nope it's not. It's free, but you can only look at part of the source code and can't look at the proprietary parts. Logseq is completely FOSS though

damn, that’s kind of a bummer since i love it so much. logseq looks exciting, how does it compare to obsidian feature-wise?

Tbh, it's a different philosophy for taking notes. There is overlap in features, but also a lot of differences.

In obsidian, everything is file based, you manage the folder system, and you primarily link files together.

In logseq, it's more based around blocks which are indented portions of the content. You can still make files and link to the file itself rather than a block, but a lot of your notes will be on your journal pages and link to other blocks/days/content/tags, etc. I prefer logseq to obsidian, but it's a very different file setup type than normal since you normally don't worry about individual files and keeping track of them, you can just link to the content later. You can still make separate files though, and they work well. The focus is just on blocks rather than files

Both have note linking and embedding (logseqs is better imo), graph view, searching, plugins, themes, etc. I'd say they're on par in terms of features, it's just whichever notes system you prefer and work better with tbh

It is closed source. I haven seen any partial source code anywhere either. Licensing is very generous: free forever for personal use, you only need to get a license at 50$ per year if you are a commercial user. There is also a 2 week trial for commercial users.

Of course, besides legality, there is nothing stopping you from using obsidian for commercial things, they don't do any checking for that stuff.

Bitwig is outstanding. I so wish there was an open source DAW that came close in stability and workflow. Zrythm crashes constantly, and the workflow in Ardour is obtuse. I can't quite figure out how to do anything in LMMS and the other options just look so dated I'm not even tempted to try them.

I've heard that many swear by reaper. I once started it and couldn't figure out the UI at all, and the UI design just felt ancient. Didn't give it another chance after that.

I love Bitwig. Linux support too!

!bitwig@lemmy.studio is dead but I'm hoping to change that soon!

I'm checking the community out. Bitwig has a great look and feel, and they support native Linux with many audio systems. It's something worth my bucks.

The rule no tux no bux applies in reverse.

I did rent to own via Splice so I get two years of updates for the price of one (just spread out).