A curated list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and services

Dan@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 135 points –
README.md · master · LinuxCafeFederation / Awesome Alternatives · GitLab
gitlab.com

Originally posted on reddit by u/CipherOps .

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I think it's criminal that Blender isn't even mentioned there.

i mean, i can't think of a proprietary application that does everything that blender does, so there's no need to list blender as an 'alternative' i guess.

i'm not particularly familiar with the 3d modeling space, i've only done basic stuff. feel free to correct me

@conno02 hot take: people saying GIMP is the Alternative to Photoshop without saying its UX it's the most unusable ever. Even Krita or Affinity Photo/Designer have better user interfaces than GIMP.

I find GIMP so difficult to use, but I can't justify the expense of Photoshop for hobbyist use so I'm keeping at it. I wish there was something that at least had a similar UI. So many easy tasks in PS are crazy complicated in GIMP.

I work in Architecture and fully transitioned our firm from using 3dsMax and Vray with Blender just before the pandemic started. Haven't looked back ever since. Blender does a lot of things but for the most part, it's an alternative to any mesh based 3d modeling and sculpting program. E.g. 3dsMax, Maya, C4D, Zbrush, etc.

yeah, after reading the article, its absence is quite odd-- i guess the author thinks its hard to learn, or something.

blender is my first 3d modeling & sculpting program, and it did take me a long time (6 months) to learn. i guess there could be some merit in not including blender, but i haven't tried the other programs, so i wouldn't know

Knowing what I know now, I would say Blender is a lot easier to learn and master than 3dsMax or Maya. Blender does have some quirks that 3dsMax does easier like grouping vs collections but you can just use add-ons to do the same things. I haven't really found anything lacking with Blender that made me want to go back to Max. I'm happy to be rid of that software and just Autodesk in general.

Telegram is on the list. Is it open source?

I never understood the advantages of it, when something like Signal exists.

I have used telegram in the past and while I dont use it due to privacy concerns, it does have some advantages and convenience features to it:

  • the integration with bots allows for quite interesting applications such as interactive elements like voting or other automated behaviors
  • it's really fast as you never download anything as it's all in the cloud
  • because it's all in the cloud you can access your chats from any device, even new, without downloading or backing up your conversations

Hey , so you need to add REAPER to the audio editing list here, even if you feel a need to put an asterisk next to it. Development is extremely open and advanced. Really the only reason it's not foss is because it was built on using elastique which is proprietary. The developer lead dev (Justin Frankel) is a very outspoken advocate for foss and has a plethora of open source software available. And to add to this REAPER is the most advanced, efficient, and full featured option in the entire world of audio software so it should be a real point of pride for the community and I'm sure if you asked any of the devs who develop the other audio programs on the list, they would say the exact same thing.

I think an ios/android peertube app would greatly improve the popularity of decentralized video streaming

You can get NewPipe from F-Droid if you're on Android. It does PeerTube and even Bandcamp streaming. It also allows you to use YouTube ad-free - and there's a version with built-in SponsorBlock for skipping those in-video ads/promos.

For Android have a look at NewPipe. You can add PeerTube instances and watch there. But AFAIK it was removed from the Play Store because it lets you watch YouTube Videos without Ads.

Can someone please explain why GitLab is used when there’s GitHub?

Here's a list of a few possible reasons

  • UI differences
  • Features
  • Not Microsoft
  • Open Core
  • Different CI/CD syntax

It's still git under the hood and shouldn't make a difference in most cases.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft

Gitlab is OSS, and you can host yourself

(Ik most don't and use the public instance) Gitlab has features that GitHub don't have, or are better at somethings even if GitHub have them

  1. Selfhostable gitlab-runner, faster build and deployment
  2. Better permission management for organizations ( per repo, branch, registry etc)
  3. Groups, project repos can be in groups

^ Some reason why my organization use gitlab over GitHub, I personally use Gitea.