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)
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!
I know of AAA developers who prefer Blender over the competition now. It has made far more than is necessarily advertised widely.
Im one of such and I have been moving from maya to blender. Blender has nice procedual stuff but its ux is nowhere near as fast and easy as maya was.
It’s amazing how much time is saved on projects when you don’t have to deal with and maintain Autodesk’s and Adobe’s licensing insanity.
Like 90% of downtime would be because the license server was down because of a security update and IT was trying to troubleshoot with Autodesk or a user forgot their Adobe password… Not because of anything actually breaking.
I used autodesk professionally for like 6 years while I was in a studio.
We pirated it.
I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.
If I remember correctly, Blender began it’s life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.
I do really enjoy using Godot. GDScript is amazing and it’s a lot lighter than Unity (my old 9th gen core i3 laptop was really struggling with Unity, now I have a much newer laptop that can run either, but I like godot’s workflow more)
Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus
Yeah this is one of those rare occasions where the foss app actually looks better and is more polished than the commercial one! The new beta plex mobile looks much better but you can no longer hide the live TV and on demand stuff, the entshittification is real. And the jellyfin video player still shits on the new plex one.
There are still a number of areas where jellyfin lags far behind plex though like offline playback/downloads, ability to skip intros/credits on mobile. And plex overall is slightly better at transcoding, downmixing etc and requires a lot less manual setup in general.
Personally overall I rate them roughly equal when you balance out the pros and cons of each, assuming you already have a plex pass. But there’s absolutely no justification to pay for plex when jellyfin is just as good for free
Thinking about switching to jellyfin, does it support HDR codecs and hardware reencoding?
Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.
VLC
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
Thanks for that. Just knowing those options are ‘good’ is exciting to see.
I still miss freehand.
I’ll have to check out kdenlive vs resolve.
Do you know of good tutorials for these I miss old school manuals.
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
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 😩🙏
Those websites are probably using ffmpeg on the backend anyway
Another one of those tools is image magic. Like ffmpeg but for images
ImageMagick
also FFShare on android as well. you share a video to it from another app, then it spits out a smaller sized file. so instead of trying to sent a 20mb video to someone its more like 3mb and sends a lot quicker (depending on the settings you use)
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.
There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
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?
rar has recovery records. i know it’s a somewhat niche feature, one far more popular in the ‘olden days’ especially in certain uh… ‘venues’… but it’s something i’ve always used when making backups with it.
you can make par2 parity data for 7z using the par2 util.
Libre Office.
Damn straight. I was an open office guy for a while, but word had a slight edge. Now that edge is gone and Libre Office is the clear winner. I will not be going back.
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.
Wino Mail is the closest drop-in replacement I’ve found for the old Windows 10 Mail app. It feels pretty similar.
I already switched to thunderbird but thanks for the mention.
Can you give any details at all
I have not used it personally, but Blender is famously used in high value Hollywood productions.
I have experience with Blender and its counterparts, in a professional setting. Blender sure is powerful and solid on its own, for many things you can make the case that is better than Maya- it’s absolutely better value - however I wouldn’t say it’s better on all fronts. But yes it’s absolutely worthy of a mention here.
it gained big notoriety recently because the Oscar winner Flow was completely made with Blender https://m.filmaffinity.com/en/film989516.html
This film gets cooler and cooler the more I hear about it! Really gotta watch it.
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 don’t know about Luanti. The world size limitation is an issue that’s hard to address, and there’s some ‘denial’ going up within their devs about it. Stating that the current world size is more than enough, ignoring the great amount of people asking for bigger worlds.
The world is unfathomably massive. What is it that people want to do with bigger worlds?
Some people like to travel in Minecraft. There’s something in just picking a direction and moving there for days, exploring. In Minecraft you would never reach the end. In Luanti you’ll hit the end of the world in a few hours.
Also for massive multiplayer purposes. Servers with hundreds of people are impossible in luanti’s size.
And it’s not just me. You go to Luanti’s forum and one of the biggest threads is one asking for infinite worlds, players want it.
They used to say the the world size was embedded deep into the code and that a massive rewrite would be needed for that and that it was not worth it. But someone already made a fork that has this feature and didn’t change that much so… And no, the fork is not a solution due to Luanti “modular” approach that fork is incompatible with any Luanti game so there’s no game really just the base “engine”.
I don’t have high hopes of devs ever addressing that, so I stopped following the project. I hope be proven wrong, but something tells me that it’s a change that will never me made.
I like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.
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.
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.
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.
Alexa and Google home don’t have anywhere near the same capability for automations, they let you do simple things, but not reliably, and they also have more limited integrations, so less options when purchasing things.
Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)
OBS for streaming is amazing.
Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There’re also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don’t have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.
Krita has already been mentioned.
But, I think what strikes me most is that there’s a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn’t have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it’s really fun once you get the hang of it. I don’t do this professionally so there’s no need for me to learn Fusion360.
Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their “industry standard” (which really just means “the most common product that has been around the longest”), but if you’re not bound to that, there’s just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.
“FLOSS”? L as in “libre”?
Yes :)
openscad seems pretty interesting, using code to make 3D models
It’s great when what you are designing is best described as code, but I find it absolutely not worth the hassle otherwise, because even basic things like chamfers/fillets are extremely hard to execute.
hmm I might be biased because I’m a programmer by trade, and even make music with code, so describing things as code is pretty natural to me … but I once I got the hang of it I found it easier than TinkerCAD in some sense, because there I would always get lost in the stack of objects … and FreeCAD … well, I couldn’t even get a basic box designed … 😅
So am I. I’ve been writing software for a living for almost 20 years, so when I wanted to make a slightly more complicated box to 3d print openscad was my first choice too. Then I tried freecad and hated it with passion. Eventually I ended up making it in solidworks - it sucked the least of the tools I’ve tried.
