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)
There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both compression and decompression, and is native to macOS.
7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
I like using peazip since it’s open source and includes 7-zip along with it
I use 7zip on my Mac every day. Whatchu talking’ ‘bout, Willis?
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.
Yes!!
Love Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection. I’ve enjoyed it for years; these days I use the hardest setting on the 6x6 towers puzzle when I can’t get to sleep: see if I can solve one or two without any intermediate notes (just fixing each actual tower number, and without trying out and going back) before my brain runs out and is ready to sleep.
COOOL
Yes! It’s an absolute must-have on any of my devices, and the only game installed on my phone.
My favorites are Unequal (Adjacent mode) and Slant.
Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.
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
Syncthing.
Supports LAN Syncing and no limits other then the hardware you host yourself.
In love with Syncthing. Does my keepass database across my servers / laptop / phone. Was using Bitwarden for that a while back but decided I’d rather self host and run my own backups, with blackjack and hookers.
Great for hosting roms on my server and pulling over to whatever device needs them.
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.
For images (it can process images as well) imagemagick is used.
all are great :D
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 like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.
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 fully agree - home assistant is the way to go, even if it’s a little more complicated.
It’s much easier to add / remove / replace hubs as needed. A few years ago I switched my main hub from Alexa to HA. Then, a month or two ago, I decided to move away from Alexa due to the speech to text recognition noticeably degrading, they removed features (I forget what the feature was, it was a while ago), and recent policy changes. Super easy to disconnect and switch to a different assistant like Siri / HomeKit.
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
Just from top of my head and from what I have to use at work:
- Dolphin vs. Explorer - Dolphin is sooo much better and useful it’s not evwn funny
- Notepad++ vs. Notepad - day and night, even though Notepad got an overhaul in W11 it’s still piece of shit compared to Notepad++
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
- ImageGlass, Nomacs, Gwenview, etc. vs. MS Photos - same as above, windows picture viewer is now worse than ever while open source alternatives get better and better
- and plenty others, like Linux vs. Windows, lol
Notepad++ really is just a better notepad. I will definitely look at Dolphin, it has a Windows version which I might need to try out. I currently use OneCommander. Yeah Windows Media Player isn’t very good. I use PotPlayer, but others like VLC, mpv, etc. all seem great too. Nomacs is awesome.
Yeah, Linux is probably superior to Windows considering the fact the latter literally spams you with ads and promotions to make a MS account and to buy Office 365. Insane that everyone just puts up with this. I currently use a Windows machine, only reason I’m not installing Linux is because a. it’s one of those 2-in-1 touchscreen foldables, which Linux doesn’t really like too much, and b. I’m not bothered to reinstall all my apps and change all the settings and preferences again. Next computer I get, it’ll be Linux (either Fedora or Mint probably, those two seem good)
I think Linux lacks a good Foss alternative to visual studio, unless you count vscode.
I agree, there are very few really good IDEs and the majority of them are closed source. The only open source one I can think of off the top of my head is Kdevelop, and last time I tried it it was not great.
That being said, I think the reason for that is that most FOSS projects are stuff someone started and maintained because they wanted an alternative with XYZ, and for IDEs a good chunk of people who could build excellent IDEs don’t even use one, so they don’t even start to work on it. The reason is that vim/emacs are so great it’s very hard to beat them, I think a good configured vim/emacs can beat anything the best IDEs can do, and while configuring vim/emacs to get to that level is difficult, it’s stile much more easy than building an IDE from scratch. So you’re left with a gap where beginners don’t have any tools because experts don’t need them.
There is Eclipse … and I guess if you google around you will find quite a few IDEs … but VSCode, IntelliJ and Eclipse are the standards.
I was a vim user for years and I disagree. At a certain point, vim with plugins cannot compare to visual studio or clion
Why? What can Visual studio or Clion do that vim can’t? Lots of what those two can do are easy to setup, but I can’t think of anything that vim can’t do (and can think quite a bunch that those two can’t)
Are the jetbrains ides open source?
I absolutely support dolphin over explorer. Whenever I have to deal with Windows, having to use this crappy excuse for a file tool feels like pain incarnated.
Imageglass is FOSS? oh heck yeah I love it even more!
I wish linux had more game/software support. I know there’s wine but still
With steamOS their investment in proton your wish has largely been granted. Native support would be better sure but ill take it
I wish more game/software had Linux support. I know there’s wine but still
There, FTFY
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.
Blender has to be the best at being a swiss army tool, the other software require using other software for what they are missing while blender can do it all, its objectively better at being the singular tool for the job if you want to not leave one software
At this point Blender just needs to add a CAD, Browser and make it into a OS so you can boot your PC into Blender straight away.
There are some pretty solid CAD plugins for Blender
Last time I’ve tried they were quite meh. I use FreeCAD for now… Even at work even though we have Catia but Catia for all it’s features and functions is often annoying to use because of limited amount of licences available for all PCs… Sometimes I can’t even open .stp file because someone else uses the licence…
Kdenlive is really really good. This isn’t an expert opinon. I don’t do a ton of video editing but it feels both easy to learn (for a layman like me) and powerful enough to do anything I need it to do
Linux is so much better than Windows.
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
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.
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
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
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.
Didn’t google’s recognition thing accidentally put pictures of black people under the gorilla category?
Hadn’t heard of that but wouldn’t surprise me
Seems they did: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866
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
I’m also looking forward to trying Immich, but I’m slowed down because I decided I should learn podman and use that instead of docker!
I do a lot of photo organising myself with file structure and timestamp filenames, but it looks like I can have Immich see my ‘proper’ library of files, and for the family it’s hopefully a helpful tool.
Does anyone know how well the iPhone app works? I had problems with the next cloud app, which otherwise was great for connecting my general web of tech with an iPhone.
