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)
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 😩🙏
Another one of those tools is image magic. Like ffmpeg but for images
ImageMagick
It’s even better when tied to an automation app. I’ve got FileFlows sitting in my media library, so any time I drop new stuff in, it automatically gets converted to my preferred on disk format.
I still get some ones I have to touch manually, but most of it gets taken care of without even thinking about it.
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.
all are great :D
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.
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Linux is so much better than Windows.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen blender here yet, but I really think blender is one of open source’s greatest achievements. It feels like a professional software and is also used in the industry.
It’s basically a industry standard at this point
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
LibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
The others 100% were always better.
I feel PowerPoint is much more user friendly and functional than Impress
I really like OnlyOffice, pretty much a carbon copy of the MS Office UI and doesn’t screw up on MS-specific files (docx, pptx, etc.)
Also, I like that OnlyOffice, unlike MS Office, has all the things in one app vs having separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc. You can just tab between your different documents!
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
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.
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.
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.
Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity
The only drawback for some users would be that it’s CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)
yt-dlp is the goat
The other day I set up a shell script on my phone that I can hook into with Tasker. I share a YouTube link to it and I can rip the audio to my music folder, or the video to my videos folder. Basically, I can turn YouTube videos into podcasts on the fly.
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.
I remember fucking around with Compiz back when it was still called Beryl. It was I think just before Window Vista came out? My computer was too shit for Vista, but had no problem with Beryl - wobbly windows, app previews when you hover the taskbar icon, stackable windows, desktop cube, etc.
interesting
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
Im not sure i can say its objectively better, but i like godot much more than unity
Godot is objectively better as an engine, you might still prefer Unity for the amount of content you can pay to get, but if you’re doing everything yourself Godot is miles ahead of Unity. I always give this example because it’s so dumb but perfectly illustrates my point:
If you’re writing a Single player game, you don’t care which controller pressed a button, otherwise if for some reason there are multiple controllers connected only one of them will provide input to the game. In Unity the way to deal with this is to make multiple mappings, e.g. Controller 1 button A means jump, Controller 2 button A means jump, etc, etc. Unreal has the same thing, Godot used to be the same, but a quick look at the code base and a couple of lines of code later and boom, Godot now has an Any Controller button A means jump mapping.
This sort of thing makes Godot objectively better than Unity. There are other things too, but this one takes the cake for me.
GDScript is way easier than C#, and there’s C# support in Godot so you can choose between either! I also like that Godot us a lot lighter :D
Previously on my old laptop it took a good half a minute for a MOUSE CLICK to register (I have since gotten a newer laptop that can most definitely handle unity, but I’ve gotten used to godot’s workflow and I don’t want to go back to unity)
They just upgraded their physics library too. Far more performant…
yep, they are catching up with GD 4.0 :D
Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child’s play in comparison.
woah that’s cool
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.
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
REALLY simple, but “Open Sodoku”. It’s just a Sodoku app without ads. I’m very bad but it’s pretty fun
While I’m all for glfree sudoku “Studio Goya” and their series of sudoku apps are more than worth the cost, especially Miracle Sudoku
I know this is a thread about Foss, but they really put some crazy thought into these puzzles.
fun
OpenDroneMap. It’s a suite that provides photogrammetry, stitching, volumetric analysis, geographic correlation, and 3D model conversion from aerial and non-aerial photos. And that’s only the features that I use myself. It defaults to CPU-only rendering, so you don’t need a big bad GPU to GSD.
Even ignoring the lack of subscription cost, ODM performs at least as well as other applications I tried such as Pix4D. Professionally, I use it for year-over-year kelp bed monitoring, photosynthetic mass analysis, and home construction analysis, specifically volumetric infill needs. Personally, I use it to generate 3D models of my boat interior, which I convert to STL files for arranging infrastructure in limited spaces.
cool I didn’t even know that kund if software existed, let alone foss
