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)
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
Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus
Syncthing.
Supports LAN Syncing and no limits other then the hardware you host yourself.
I just want to comment that this is one of the most helpful and full of good info posts I’ve seen on Lemmy in a long while.
VLC
Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.
QGIS for geographic/geospatial data. Built on shoulders of FOSS giants, embracing latest highly interoperable standards, it is amazing !
Blender for 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and (simple) video editing.
Several movies were either made (almost) entirely with Blender (Flow, Next Gen), or in parts (e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SpiderMan 2, The Midnight Sky).
It is also used by many (indie) game devs.
Speaking of games: Godot is an awesome 2D/3D game engine, which gained a lot more momentum after the Unity fuck-up. It’s licensed under the MIT license. Among a plethora of smaller indie games it has been used for financially successful and/or popular titles by indie and non-indie devs alike such as Brotato, Cassette Beasts, RPG in a Box, Endoparasitic, Dome Keeper, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, and several more.
Give it a try if you’re into game development!
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.
I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.
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.
Libre Office.
Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!
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.
The Apache Web Server
