What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts?
I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into "smaller" instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can't remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
Did you know that MS now charges for you to play some codecs with windows media player?
Unless something has changed recently, that's not exactly true. They charge 99c for the distribution of it through the windows store (or whatever it's called) but you can install them the traditional way no problem
I think it's still dumb but it's a distinction worth making. I think the description even links the website where you can download it
You can even install the free oem istaller in the windows store thats hidden iirc.
I really don't miss trying to find codec packs to install. Good riddance.
Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don't get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I'm saying.
Bitwarden password manager. I've used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
My argument for self host of something that needs to be ultra secure is, they will do a better job at it than me.
For me the argument is more that there is always a point where I duck up my self hosting infrastructure and at this point I will need passwords to fix it.
It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it's annoying
Try the AutoFill keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-L (or Cmd-Shift-L on Mac). Works well enough for me.
But that's only auto after a manual button press, that's half the auto! In lastpass when I visited a page, it would just fill it in and log in for me without any input.
Sometimes bit warden doesn't even realise it has a password for the site because it's looking for a specific URL rather than a wildcard match to the domain.
Sucks on Android tho
If you opened it once, so a process exists, it usually will work with it's autofill. At least on my Samsung it does after opening it once.
It sucks for login like
TwitterX though.Works perfectly on mine.
Yeah that could definitely be improved. There’s been talk on GitHub issues about adding support to fill Shadow DOM fields, honestly don’t know if they’ve done it yet but that would be a big help for web apps like HomeAssistant.
I've been looking for a good password manager, and I've heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden... guess I'll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!
Pro tip : if you self host use vaultwarden. It's 100℅ compatible with all bitwarden clients but has many more features and is lighter weight
Also KeePass, I've switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP's.
Keepass can also do TOTPs.
Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
Blender. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is simply nothing like it in the commercial world. Its feature set is unreal; its like the swiss army knife of 3D modelling programs. I can't say enough good things about Blender. It has replaced so many secondary programs in my workflow and is slowly dominating to become my entire workflow.
It used to suck to use in the late 2010s and then work was done to overhaul its space-shuttle cockpit interface, and now it actually feels concise and usable. I freaking love blender now. Big time blender fanboy right here.
As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
You definitely should, it is lightyears improved
It’s like the opposite of GIMP
I used 3dsmax until I started uni and was forced to use Maya. Then trying to learn zbrush and mudbox. And then marmoset, and then early 2000s blender, it was too much for my poor brain to wrap around so many different UIs with so many different workflows.
Then my uni lied to me about how much I'd learn, then about overseas exchange, and then about getting a work placement (they just gave me an email address for a modeller who didn't respond) and left me with no useful skills so I gave up completely.
I have so much wasted useless 15 year old 3d knowledge in my brain.
They had a big push and update a few years back focusing on redoing the UI to make it more friendly to beginners. Although I haven’t personally used it a ton since then.
every few years i make a donut, it gets easier every time. Someday i'll do something creative with it. Donut tutorial guy, if you're out there, gday mate.
Im always amazed at the amount of stuff Blender can do. It's just so nice to be able to have software that lets you learn a useful skill that isnt behind a paywall or crazy license
I like to mess around with architectural CAD as a hobby, with the likes of Revit and Chief Architect, but I ain't about sink enterprise levels of money for something I play with.
There's always the open seas. That said, if you make money with something, pay for it, either via their revenue channels or donations to FOSS projects.
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
And KDE looks so much better than windows' DE. It's also more versatile.
Gnome just copied Apple, which I guess somebody had to do in order to have them switch to something that looks familiar.
Actually, Apple copied GNOME.
Wouldn't surprise me. The AppStore isn't the first thing that Apple copied.
Still relevant 11 years later: Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything?
elementaryOS has tried so hard to fill that niche, and they got so far. I just always run into the weirdest issues when I try and daily drive their distro.
Honestly in the end it probably doesn't even matter
I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
you mean the "longer security updates with ubuntu pro" thing?
No. I got that too. I’m talking about:
“ Strictly confined Kubernetes makes edge and IoT secure. Learn how MicroK8s just raised the bar for easy, resilient and secure K8s cluster deployment. https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-kubernetes-at-the-edge”
It might be time to consider using a distro that isn't ubuntu.
OBS is so good that I don't know why anyone would ever use X-split.
I adore OBS. I've been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they've all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
I am by no means a master at OBS, and I wouldn't know where to point you to learn. Everything I know I've learned by either poking around in the software or googling specific questions, i.e. "how to overlay twitch chat in OBS". As you can probably guess, I used to use it to stream to twitch. Not very suddenly, mind, but I did it. Lol!
OBS is designed for streaming out and recording video, not really for music production. I'm sure there are some FOSS music production softwares worth checking out, though!
God, remember Fraps?
I try not to
That ugly yellow FPS counter gives me such a genuine feeling of nostalgia.
Obs?
Software for recording and live streaming. Stands for Open Broadcasting Software. It is the industry standard at this point.
Signal. Who else is making a post quantum secure e2ee algorithm and making sure the code is open source and not duplicating the keys everywhere? Thank goodness for the kind devs on this project and for other FOSS projects everywhere!
The time when they essentially went closed source to implement MobileCoin in kind of a covert operation really didn't do them any favors, though.
how do we even know something is quantum secure, like the tech isnt out yet is it?
Because we already know how quantum encryption works.
It's like how we proved the Halting Problem was undecideable long before the first computer was ever built.
People have been able to model quantum computers mathematically since the time normal computers were the size of buildings.
And everyone who uses it should give it a thought whether they can afford to support the devs, signal devs will appreciate it!
VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn't know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft's store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It's a real shame it doesn't have a GNU/Linux version, it's the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn't look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn't cockblock you with paywalls. For me it's the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it's because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don't have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
+1 for Newpipe, my favorite feature is hiding thumbnails so I don't have to see that stupid fucking "wow" wide-eyes face everyone makes with pointless arrows and circles. Now I just read the video title and my brain hurts less.
That's actually a good idea and it also saves data, apparently.
Have you tried flameshot? Its an opensource and cross platform screenshot utility.
I did, as well as Spectacle, which now has the same functionality seg as flameshot and works without issues on wayland, unlike flameshot.
Neither of them comes even close as a replacement for ShareX, just try this thing yourself.
Yeah, you're totally right. This is a very feature rich and comprehensive piece of software. This could maybe be accomplished with many different linux utils, but would lack to cohesion and polish. Thanks for sharing this, I might use this on the work computer.
Doesn't VSCodium break quite a lot of extensions even if installed manually?
Why would it? It's the same as original except for the removed telemetry and some proprietary module part. I don't think that could break much
I tried it but need the SSH extension as a daily driver (it's a MS one apparently). Didn't work, spent 30 minutes trying the suggestions found online but that didn't work either so had to get back to doing actual work instead of fiddling with an IDE.
Oh, that sucks. I'm going to edit my comment to mention this problem
It actually does. I can't remember what exactly it was, but I switched back to VSCode after a while
Some extensions simply didn't install/work properly
Pylance, I believe, doesn't work due to a Microsoft proprietary language server. But installing Pyright does most of the job. Something like that.
I thought so too but then I read some complaints about some extensions breaking. I've never used it myself so 🤷♂️
Agree on all of them!
Thanks for the praise! We're not on Lemmy too much, but someone in the Core Team caught site of this and shared it with me. If you're wondering who I am: github
Please post on lemmy! I really liked seeing the devs give updates on Reddit.
An open source platform feels completely natural for a project like jellyfin!
It's much easier to discuss Jellyfin here for me than on the forum.
Blender for video editing. I haven't even touched its 3D animation features.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
The UI has most of all gotten more flexible. Previously you had highly efficient but also hard to learn workflows for everything, now you have a UI which also has non-efficient ways to do everything so you don't have to be good at everything to get shit done, can build your own mix of "yeah I'm doing this every other second, I want this to be fast, I use that twice a day, I can click through menus for that". Blender has way more functionality than will ever fit onto keybindings so customising the UI to your workflow is a must if you want to be efficient.
Generally the whole thing has been a giant success, however, I do have a criticism: They made left-click select the default. Right-click select has always been superior but it was not what the Maya etc. folks are used to. Have it available, even as a choice on the first startup screen for those people, sure, but don't make it the default for people just getting into 3d editing.
And, yes, Blender still breaks plenty of UI conventions in plenty of other areas. Saying "For good reason" would be kinda missing the point, very often it had those conventions before Microsoft or whoever came up with worse ones and made those popular.
Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn't great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
I tried out in the late 2000s, and it was clunky and limited.
I tried it again in 2020, and it is completely different. Super powerful and polished.
Yes. 100%
No clue about video editing though.
Also, why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
I only use it for video editing.
Do you have recommended alternatives? I like it using Blender for video editing because I can automate any arbitrary repetitive task with a Python script.
I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven't used Blender to compare, and I'm not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it's solid.
I've tried exactly once (given that I know blender anyway and no video editor), and ran into audio sync issues at export that didn't happen when playing the timeline from blender. There were some mentions of the issues on forums, but no purported solution worked.
The gist of it is that Blender is not a video editor, but a highly capable 3d kitchen sink containing so many features that, in combination, mean that you can use it to edit videos, outranked in its own area of expertise only by Houdini. There was never a real push to make it particularly good at video editing, and unlike in other areas it didn't happen by accident, either (Blender is e.g. arguably the best 2d vector editor ever since it got grease pencil).
Holy shit, I didn't know that that's a feature. For the two times a year I need to edit videos I will never have to deal with shitty free versions/test versions of video editing software ever.
Blender does an insane amount of things. 3d modelling, image editing, sculpting, rendering, procedural texturing, procedural modelling, video editing, physics simulations, animation, rigging, mocap. Probably some other things that I'm forgetting too.
I’ll take LibreOffice Writer over MS Word anytime. All that ‘I know better than you,’ ‘You wanted to copy the space, too, right? Even though you stopped marking before it,’ can kiss my ass.
I recently switch to OnlyOffice for their UI/UX, and it's been brilliant. LibreOffice is a delight, though.
All the Linux file managers I've tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.
Protip: KDE's Dolphin is available for Windows.
The Windows integration isn't perfect, but it's very useful nonetheless. Multiple tabs and the Ctrl+I filter alone makes it worthwhile.
On a related note: KDE's Kate text editor is also available on Windows and it works GREAT! So great that KDE eV has published it on the Windows store, making it easy to install
To be fair, the Windows File Explorer has multiple tabs too now, which is a big improvement. I have no idea what the problem is with the Windows Explorer search function though - how does it manage to take so long, no matter what you search for? (Why is Windows so slow to search, slow to delete files, slow to update? You'd think these would be core, priority features.)
I do enjoy using Dolphin on Tumbleweed, though I had to turn off the one-click file opening thing, which was terrible when trying to open context menus with a trackpad. Maybe I'll try it on Windows.
The best part about windows’ slow ass file search is the fact that windows keeps a file index that third party programs can use to search multiple terrabytes of spinning rust in seconds, and then doesn’t use it
It's absurd how long it took windows to have something that worked half as well as tabbed file browsers on linux.
I wonder how many people actually use tabs. I find having a split file browser much more important for moving files.
And if you are on Windows, you can install Double Commander there. Unfortunately links from other programs will still open in Explorer.
Yes, but I'm still waiting for mac style column browse mode in nautilus 😒
Windows file manager is also so slow compared to Dolphin. With Dolphin it instantly responds and it takes Windows File manager up to 1 whole second to register and process a click.
Inkscape?
Absolutely love Inkscape. It's one of the first pieces of software I add on any new install.
I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won't lie, it's pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.
Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
Similarly, Calibre for ebooks. I set it up to use my Google Drive (so I can automatically sync between my various computers) and have never looked back.
I use it too, wouldn't call it better than audible though. IOS beta app is not great.
I don't use iOS, so your mileage may vary. The android App works fine.
I haven't even heard of this and I don't use audible, but I know how popular audio books are these days, can you break down the benefits of it?
It looks more consistent, has a simpler UI, has a series-feature that is actually useable and doesn't link to an embedded website for almost everything.
And it can be used as a podcast app as well.
Con is that you need to bring your own audio books. But you can download them from Audible and such with many programs that are just freely out there on GitHub.
Also it can do podcasts, and even ebooks (the ebook support is pretty rough, I don't recommend it yet, but the developer is updating at a crazy pace).
Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape
Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid
Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox
Honorable mentions that don't have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS
I used Zotero for the references for my Bachelor's thesis. I'm happy that I don't need to use it anymore but the software itself is fine.
It's not perfect, but it's just miles ahead of anything else on the market in capability!
+1 for Sumatra. Use that and a thumbnail loader, and it's superior to Calibre for a library of books (ePub, PDF, CBR, CBZ).
I also use Notepad++ and qBittorrent. Looking into Inkscape now. Firefox is the best.
Sumatra PDF is the best. It's become an essential tool for me. Nothing I tried comes close.
I love Zotero so much. It's way better than Mendeley
Inkscape is the goat
I actually came to this thread in hopes of finding a replacement for Thunderbird. I've been using it for 10 years or more now, on various machines, always hoping it would somewhen stop being laggy. No plugins installed, and it frequently freezes for several seconds or even minutes, when I'm idle but also while I'm typing.
VLC >> everything else
One thing that I hate about VLC (hasn't made me drop it in 15 years but alas) is that you can hit E to go forward one frame but there's no key (nor capacity to set your own) to go back one frame.
Is it a niche use case? Sure probably. But not having the option to set one myself kills me whenever I frameskip one too far and have to shift-left and mash E again.
MPV is better than VLC, but it clearly depend of the utilisation.
I have been using MPC as long as I can remember. Never could make the jump to VLC. Currently run MPC-BE.
I wish VLC updated their UI to include a dark mode. I've never had luck with VLC skins
Different tools for different purposes
No different tools. Only VLC!
mpv gang
Mpv.io if you are using low end computer to watch high bitrate videos or if you have high end computer you can use various image upscalar algorithm to improve your anime quality, Where VLC lags
Calibre vs... em something that's not calibre.
I'm honest not sure what I would use instead, but it would be hard to replace.
Uhh... yeah, I'm stumped trying to think of the proprietary alternative to Calibre, too. I don't think there is one in the mainstream? Everywhere I look, the only recommendation is Calibre.
KDE is better than Windows
AudibleAudacity is more audio programme than most people needKdenLive is more video editor than most people need
Kritta is more art programme than most people need
There are edge cases where there are professional programmes that might be better but unless you are a professional you do not need them and even semi-pros would likely be better served by those three
Windows just rips off every plasma feature at this point, even kde devs make fun of it
Did you mean Audacity?
You've got the audiobook to correct him? Unbelievable....
Errr... yes. Good catch
Agreed with everything. As a programmer, I use the IntelliJ suite (mainly PHPStorm, WebStorm, GoLand, RubyMine, PyCharm, and IDEA), which is basically industry standard in most companies (except those fuckers who still use Eclipse or NetBeans).
Firefox/LibreWolf
FF is the way. I found out you can get Edge on Linux now and threw up in my mouth. ☺️
If you ever feel your job is useless, remember it is someone's job to maintain Edge for Linux.
I wonder what % of Linux users are using Edge, and what their reasoning is.
"Every morning while I drink my coffee, I start up Ubuntu, load up Microsoft Edge, have a good laugh, and then close it."
I love this.
Our webapp is exclusively used on locked-down windows machines, with Edge only. Firefox and Chromium are useful for debugging, but testing and signoff is done in Edge. We use Linux machines for development and test suites, so having Edge available on these systems reduced a lot of complexity in our pipeline.
Anything other than that, Firefox every time.
The real question is who uses Powershell for Linux
The thing I find hard to convey is that FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software for many reasons, most of which are non-technical: FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software if it isn't spying on you, if it's governance is collective, if it's not build to make you pay for things that should be free, if it lets you decide where your data goes, etc...
we're often missing the point when we attempt at side-by-side comparison of FLOSS and proprietary software.. It's usually one-dimentional, and playing on our opponent's field: these companies racketing their users based on rent-based exploitative business models will always have more resources than independant developpers to improve "UX/UI"... so I think this must not be the only prism through which reading these things.
You're absolutely right, and in lots of areas I use FOSS alternatives solely because they are FOSS despite less resources and objectively worse UI/UX. Photography is a hobby of mine, a huge love. There is nothing on Linux that gives even remotely close to the ease and comfort of use for RAW image editing as CaptureOne Pro, a software I paid a pretty penny for some number of years ago. I've tried every RAW image editor that's been recommended, and I dislike them all so much that I actually prefer to move my RAWs to my phone and edit them there.
Despite that, I'm still running Linux. I understand the trade offs that often need to happen to adhere to an ideal, and I largely agree. However, sometimes FOSS comes out on top in all regards, including UI/UX. And those are the apps I'm inviting everyone to share. 😉
You're right that it mustn't be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn't also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of "free as in freedom" either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it's not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.
And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.
Those are different dimensions that should be considered together. Of course we should still invest efforts into UI/UX, where possible and where it represents the will of the participants in the project... but when answering questions such as "which FLOSS piece is superior" i think we should always find a balance between those, and bring them together...
VLC is obviously the best media player, I can't think of one I've used that comes close ever, either in ease of use(hotkeys) or functionality.
Audacity is such a simple yet comprehensively functional audio editor.
OBS is a very simple video recording software that works so well.
I personally prefer mpv, but that's still FOSS. Nothing in the proprietary world is comparable to these two.
OBS works well, but it's anything but simple. You basically have to reconfigure it every time you want to record something with a different window size. It's a pain in the ass.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) beats pretty much all streaming services in terms of UI.
I used xbmc back when it was a Mc for xb haha kodi now seems more trouble than it's worth
What's the trouble with Kodi? I love it works great! Very flexible. Nothing even comes close to it in terms of functionality.
I couldn't tell you now, it was a long time ago I fiddled with it. I just moved on to other solutions lol
Yup. I even pay for YouTube TV but if something I want to watch is available over ATSC, I switch to my Kodi tvheadend HTSP client on Chromecast (I have a pcie tuner) because the UI doesn't make me stabby.
I moved and don't have an ATSC setup anymore sadly. I didn't use it much but it was great to catch the news during special events and to PVR a couple of local shows that are worth watching and hard to get elsewhere. Tvheadend is a bit of a pain, but when it works it's great!
The Netflix plugin in Kodi is better than their own interface too 😂
I wished the MPD plugin was better though tbh
Hands down the clang C++ compiler, no commercial C++ compiler I've ever seen or even heard of even comes close enough that a comparison could be meaningful.
I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.
Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.
Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.
The original Turbo C++ was, at the time, truly next level.
Librera Reader is a PDF // ebook reader for Android. It has a very smooth user experience and useful options. I used to have 5 or so different PDF readers installed and would pick and choose according to the task at hand but now I'm down to just 1.
Is Librera Reader FOSS? Their website provides no info about that.
Here's the Github and it's on F-droid so I assume it's open source
Download > Source code and releases on GitHub
It's GPL licensed.
Emacs and vim are both vastly superior to all other text editors.
Which one you like better is a matter of taste.
Vim is a girlfriend with rock hard abs who wants to take you rock climbing and of whom you're secretly a little scared.
Emacs is a big bouncy happy girl who wants to take care of you in every conceivable way, then split a bucket of RAM while binging pirated movies.
Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I'm too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much "free", but rather "unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge".
Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:
Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don't care if there is a counterpart
Vivaldi is not 100% open source
Also i would add qBittorrent to the "great" list, and LibreCAD to the "wish it was better" list
Im old too, my loyalty lying with FOss is that it can't get turned off or enshittified if I can fork it. Especially true with most self-hosting stuff vs cloud services. If I have no alternative to a cloud service, I do without instead.
My god this is wonderful!! Thank you so much! It looks like it's only inferior to an in-line tuner, but a little better than those clip on ones, and far better than all the apps that just play a note for you to tune by ear.
Edit: To be clear to everyone, the reason this app is so good is that it uses the mic to measure your instrument, giving you a visual representation of how far out you are.
Unironically, the terminal.
Kitty
The whole GNU+Linux distro on your desktop computer. Or on your server.
The GNOME desktop environment is way better than the proprietary alternatives in MacOS and Windows
I went back to Windows a few years ago because I needed audio production software but would go back to vanilla Debian in a heartbeat if I needed a PC for anything else.
I switched to I3WM later on with my Debian PC and that was godlike too
In many regards using Blender can be a much more pleasant experience than using many of the commercial "standards" such as Maya or 3dsmax. Depends what aspect you're looking at of course, it's not perfect and it is lacking in some areas. Krita is amazing for painting, infinitely better than Photoshop.
Blender is so widely used in professional 3D work it almost doesn't count for this discussion, it's already well known and widely used.
Xournal++ for pdf annotating, note taking
LibreOffice, I'm not sure it's better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.
Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store
Inkscape, I'm not even sure what the proprietary version is?
Eh, I love FOSS as much as the next guy l, but I still gotta say that LibreOffice (as nice as it is) is still ages behind MS Office, and it's not even close.
The main competitor for Inkscape would be Adobe Illustrator.
Agreed. I too like LibreOffice, but it still has a ways to go. I've shown it to a couple of people and they didn't like it at all. Specifically, they mentioned the cluttered interface and unresponsiveness in some applications like Calc when dealing with massive spreadsheets. And dealing with massive spreadsheets is like half their job.
It's good that LibreOffice exists and it can be a decent replacement for someone writing a simple document every once in a while. I can not take anyone seriously who claims it is anywhere near as good as the MS stuff. Recently I created a presentation in Impress and it was hell on earth. I ran into multiple bugs and handling formatting was just horrid working with the master/template slides (or whatever they are called) was essentially impossible.
Currently working with OnlyOffice which works better by a considerable margin.
With the tabbed interface?
Are you memeing? I hate Adobe as much as the next guy but Inkscape is absolutely horrid compared to Illustrator or even Affinity.
I use libre at home and MS at work, and hands down Libreoffice is terrible in comparison. It's UI is harsh and doesn't do 10% of what microsoft can do. As sad as that is to say.
Back in the early 2000s Open Office was actually better than MS for a brief period, but Libre isn't really on the same level anymore.
I run Plex and jellyfin side by side. Plex usually gives me the most hassle free experience so I use that most of the time.
I prefer the flexibility of creating user accounts myself on jellyfin so that's nice.
But jellyfin after being up for 4~5 days balloons to 6GB of RAM consumption while Plex stays at ~200mb. Really annoying.
There must be something wrong with your Jellyfin install. Mine has been comfortably sat at 1GB RAM after what is currently about 2 weeks uptime. Sometimes I don't restart it for months on end. Never really goes above that. I only ever restart it in cases of extended power failure (I'm lucky enough to experience some power cuts that last 2-3 hours at times)
This is what literally every jellyfin user and forum has told me. So far it's been completely unfixable.
Plex support actually gives me useful responses.
(neo)vim
Linux in general. MacOS if fine, but the app ecosystem is often annoying. And Windows is just a complete dumpster fire these days.
I was setting up a Plex server, but when I noticed I had to pay to be able to play my own content on my phone I immediately switched to jellyfin. Haven't been able to test it yet, but as long as I don't need to pay them to be able to watch my own content on my own devices on my own network, I'll be happy!
No, you don't have to pay us a dime.
I used Plex for years on my phone without paying. The Plex pass stuff is hardware transcoding, credits/intro skipping, and downloading through the plex app.
All of which jellyfin also does, just for free
I could be biased but 2009scape. While originally a Runescape clone of 2009, they've preserved the integrity of the game much better than the official versions
I switched to Jellyfin two years ago and never looked back.
On Android; mpv, KeePassDX, FlorisBoard, AntennaPod, Read You, NewPipe, Jerboa, Unitto Calculator, CloudStream, Aegis, TrailSense, OpenKeychain, K-9 Mail, EDS lite, ViMusic, InnerTune, GrapheneOS Camera, Librera FD ...are my favourites.
To that I'd add Simple Gallery and some of the other "Simple" apps by the same dev, Tibor Kaputa.
Honestly, F-Droid should be your first stop on Android because the open source apps are usually better. Most apps on the play store are basically just adware at this point.
I've really fallen in love with the Aves gallery app. It's finally got me started with organising and tagging my photos.
So I don't think you can really criticise Plex too much here. They were perhaps getting complacent and they've definitely been shown up, but they were an important step to where we are now.
Jellyfin was a fork of Emby, previously Media Browser, a plug in for Windows Media Center.
Kicad beat the crap out of EagleCAD. So much so that autocad just folded and discontinued EagleCAD.
I recently started playing with LibrePCB. Best PCB tool out there which I've used. The project is 5 years old roughly, the documentation is not complete and the library of parts does not compete, but for small projects it's really a delight. It focuses on simplicity, compatibility with versioning, fully open parts library and ease to send to manufacturing with built-in partnerships with PCB manufacturers. I highly recommend having a look: https://librepcb.org/
Edit: They very recently released version 1.0 of LibrePCB, with many exciting changes such as the 3D parts viewer. Read more about it here:
https://librepcb.org/blog/2023-09-24_release_1.0.0/
Thanks for sharing, LibrePCB looks amazing, much simpler than KiCAD.
Last time I used KiCAD (admittedly quite some years ago) it was amazingly powerful but kinda overwhelming to get started
Pandoc. I'm not even sure there is a decent alternative.
Every time someone mentions Pandoc, I like to mention that the author has created a new markup language called djot. Its very nice.
haha no surely not. It can now even convert Typst docs to html.
I would love to use Jellyfin but it (indexing, changing metadata...) is too slow with a few hundred movies and shows on my Synology. Plex is way faster.
not sure why indexing speed is a factor - it doesn't require your attention and Jellyfin only needs to index things once, doesn't it?
Yeah, I kind of understand one wants to hit the ground running after installing but still. Let it do its thing over night and you should be good?
Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I've just given up -- everything says it should work and I've tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex's ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!
Let this be a lesson: never use .NET in new projects.
Yeah I was kinda surprised when I saw that 😞
Agreed. This is my largest and really only gripe after switching from Plex. I moved my server over from Mint to Arch and rescanning my hundreds of shows and movies for the Metadata took over an hour. It still missed plenty of shows too. Had to manually update those and each time it took like 5 minutes per season.
The jellyfin UI has been 1000% more responsive and the CSS customization is clean, but damn is the scanning slow. Still not going to back to plex though the input delay was disgusting for me.
Having Sonarr/Radarr put .nfo files on all my shows/movies sped the scanning speed way up, for the record. You can have JF pick up the metadata from the .nfo and not make like 6 different slow queries to metadata providers. Likewise, if you have JF save metadata to .nfo files, full library re-scans go much more quickly as well.
I think that's mainly a problem in Synology. I'm running it on a small arm media server and it basically takes a minute. (OS on nvme, files on NFS via 1G LAN)
The scanner app on Linux is far better than Windows: auto preview white scanning, auto pdf creation WITH multiple pages.
Hey what about Kodi?
Kodi as a front end to jellyfin works great
100%.
Jellyfin looks like a nice alternative to Plex but I had all kinds of playback issues with it on different platforms. Kodi just works.
The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.
Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it's not FOSS (& won't run on any of my machines anyway).
Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that's some sort of perennial "gotcha!" joke, at this point?)
I've no firsthand knowledge about it, but I've been hearing a lot of good stuff about Godot ever since Unity shit the bed
Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it's a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I'd compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.
I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.
If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn't even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it's like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.
Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal's interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal's workflows make Blender look like Maya.
Pidgin. Consume soo little memory in comparison to other chat applications. Is really fast, just try start and scroll history in a chat conversation. But it looks ugly.
Surprised people are still using it. What protocols do you use?
Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.
Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.
I prefer droidify for the store, I think it's a solid alternative
honestly neo store was really buggy for me and droidify seems to work better
I use Gimp and Krita, ShareX also with the complementary Extension, integrated with FileCoffee, old but gold VLC media player, PicView image viewer/editor (IMO best alternative to IrfanView), ProtonVPN (yes, it's OpenSource), Crow Translate, FreeTube, Portmaster, Cherry Tree editor, apart of some games (The Dark Mod, Armagetron Advanced, Scorched 3D, and some more)
I don't 100% understand LPPL, but I believe it qualifies under open source, but regardless if it's open source or not, LaTeX > Word and I will die on this hill.
Typst >= LaTeX >> Word
Feeder, a RSS reader for Android. It has great UI, is fast at finding and parsing .xml from a link and has a comfortable reading experience. It has basicslly replaced social media for me besides the fediverse. The only thing I wish it had was more customizability. Being able to install Nord theme on it would be great.
Home assistant vs Homeseer.
Home seer will cost you 300-500$.
It's add-ons and extensions are all paid.
Home assistant is literally better in every way possible.
Let's be honest though, the Android app for jellyfin is so so buggy. My partner can't even use it because there are certain orders of starting a video, casting, closing the app, reopening to starting subtitles, recasting, just to get it working
Have you tried Findroid?
I can't wait until 10.9 comes out next year. Intro skipper is the killer missing feature.
I use Shotcut instead of Premiere Pro for work. It's much lighter and simpler.
Plex, running locally, on my server: “You should add a server!”
Plex, running locally, on my server: “Claim 10.0.0.10!”
Plex, running locally, on my server, after claiming my server: “You should add a server!”
Jellyfin would be great if only you could change subtitle colors. With HDR content, having pure white subtitles is eye-scorching.
That has actually been added into the next release, although there is quite a lot of time between major releases.
Pulsar is better than VS Code for JavaScript.
https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar
gimp
Listen, I love GIMP. I would never try to argue that the UI/UX is better than alternatives. There's a reason it's not the defacto tool to use in its industry, and it's not the name.
That said, if you take the time to learn GIMP, it's delightful. I personally like using GIMP more than, say, Photoshop, but I also learned photo manipulation on GIMP, and didn't touch Photoshop until well after. GIMP's UX leaves a lot to be desired for a newcomer to the software.
I play a lot lately with SuperCollider (sound design + algorithmic composition software) and I love it. I don't even think there is a commercial alternative.
Depends on what is counterpart.
@cujo NewPipe
Man, I've been running Plex for about a decade without a ton of issues. I tried jellyfin, and I can't get video to play anywhere that's not the PC that's running it. What am I doing wrong?
You might want to check and see what ports you do or don't have open to your local network. I know I had to open port 1900 on UDP to connect from the clients in the house.
I want jellyfin, but the number of devices I'd have to manually setup around my house, tvs etc, is daunting and terrifying.
Why would you have to manually set them up? Most smart TVs have a Jellyfin channel/app you can install, and failing that there should be some kind of general media server app you can get on them. There's a mobile app for Android (though someone else here says it's pretty trash) and probably for iOS as well. The only device to configure is the server, the app can find a local network server automatically.
I use the Jellyfin app from the store on my Chromeplay, and there's a couple of Jellyfin iOS apps that work great. Once the server is up, you're gold.
GNOME Document Scanner is surprisingly working smoothly out-of-the-box (with Brother printer at least)
does anyone know if there's a free alternative in Visual Studio to PHPTools? I refuse to believe the only way to debug PHP in visual studio is a paid license extension