3d ago

What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?

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)

495 comments

Keepass. ill skip the obvious and just mention the really neat features that other server/cloud based password managers dont or cant have.
on desktop, you dont need any browser extension to fill in passwords since the "autotype" feature in keepassXC handles that. this means your browser has no to access your database at all. any password manager thats connected to your browser in any way is a huge security risk imo.
(i would recommend this extension that changes the window title though)
you can have 2 databases open at the same time (in keepassXC and keepassDX at least), which means you can have important logins in one and everything else in the other one. if you ever get annoyed having to unlock your vault using a really long master password just so you can autofill some crappy forum password then you might get why 2 databases is a good idea!
you can fill in login details for desktop programs. (maybe others do this now but they didnt when i switched to keepass years ago)
Aegis authenticator. its been years since ive used google's authenticator app so maybe its improved now, but it used to be very spartan. it showed you your OTP codes and thats about it.
Aegis lets you add an icon to each entry and the different sized text makes things a lot easier to read. the visual timer is much clearer as well and the text turns red when its close to running out.
you can also backup your codes so if you lose your phone its no big deal. you can unlock the app with your fingerprint. you can tap on a code and then have it add that to the clipboard and then go back to the previous app

KDE Connect was rock solid when I was testing it out with an S24u. The only real issue I had with it was that it was missing RCS (RCS is locked down to only proprietary google messages/iMessage systems) and a seamless way to go from desktop notification to SCRCPY/screen mirroring.

Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

on Notion: aren't the desktop clients just electron apps anyway? The website is really solid from my useage.

Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.

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!

Syncthing.
Supports LAN Syncing and no limits other then the hardware you host yourself.

PCSX2: better resolution than PS2, has save states, and you can use reshade in some games to make them look better.

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

The OpenStreetMap ecosystem (e.g. Organic Maps as an Android Client) is better than Google Maps.
Tusky is better than any proprietary Twitter client.
F-Droid and Flathub are both better than Google Play.
Thunderbird is better than GMail
Real open Podcasting (e.g. Antennapod) is better than Spotify.
OpenDesk is better than M365.
Signal and Matrix are both better than the chat tools from Meta, Apple, Google.
(It's about ecosystems/platforms, because most software doesn't work in isolation)

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.

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.

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.

Lets not forget about games!
Hedgewars is better than most "Worms" games.
Warzone 2100 is more fun than many proprietary RTS games.

Libre Office.

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.

As a proffessional, krita shits on photoshop (f tier) and clip (a tier) when it comes to painting.

QGIS for geographic/geospatial data. Built on shoulders of FOSS giants, embracing latest highly interoperable standards, it is amazing !

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.

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.

The Apache Web Server

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

fre:ac is way, way better than Exact Audio Copy. Audiophiles like to suck the dick of EAC and don't trust any other software to rip CD's. fre:ac literally has all the same features and more. There's a Windows and Mac version as well but they refuse to even acknowledge it. I'm a Linux audiophile btw.

Over the last few years I've been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.
But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It's as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.
Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I'm working much faster.
Now, Krita doesn't have all of CSP's niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.
Similarly CSP's 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender's. Which is weird because CSP isn't a modeling program - you'd think they'd stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

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

I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.
The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don't know if there's a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.
Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn't as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.
Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience
KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I'm happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There's Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io

I'm really sorry but Joplin is not and will not ever be "objectively" better than Obsidian. SilverBullet is subjectively better than Obsidian though. Note taking is such a heavily opinionated matter that there's no scope for objectivity there.

There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
- I like using peazip since it's open source and includes 7-zip along with it
- Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both compression and decompression, and is native to macOS.
- I use 7zip on my Mac every day. Whatchu talking’ ‘bout, Willis?
- 7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
  
  It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
- 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.
  
  Tell me more.
  Edit: I'm sorry I should have specified. I'm curious about the recovery records feature.

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 😩🙏
  
  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)
  
  Those websites are probably using ffmpeg on the backend anyway
  
  Another one of those tools is image magic. Like ffmpeg but for images
  
  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.
  
  For images (it can process images as well) imagemagick is used.
- all are great :D

Microsoft Terminal vs the default Command Prompt haha. VS Code vs Visual Studio.
In general software is one of the rare thing where ordinary people can "mass produce" things that compete with commercial offerings.

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.
  
  Houdini is also the simulation GOAT (i think its closed source), so while blender is really cool, it maybe doesnt fit this category.
- 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.
  
  Cool movie

Pdftk

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
- obligatory Blender, was looking for it

Breezy weather for Android. It works exactly the same, and doesn't have any of the privacy bullshit strings attached.

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.
- 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.
- 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 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
- Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)
- 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.

Linux is so much better than Windows.
- ... Unless of course you're trying to connect two external monitors through a docking station with a USB-C into the laptop with a closed lid and disabled inbuilt screen.
  Unfortunately, in my experience, Linux routinely fails at this task (tried many different distros) while Windows "just works".
  
  I have opposite experiences! Multiple Linux laptop, with multiple docking stations: a bit of xrandr magic and everything works, forever. (BTW, try setting manually the refresh rate at different values for the two monitors via xrandr, I have solves a similar problem to yours in the past by creating a dedicated display class.)
  On a Mac, it's impossible, I have to plug one cable directly in the computer to make it work, and the quality of the output on 2k monitor is way worse since they disabled sub-pixel rendering or some stuff.
  Windows also works decently on this regard, until it doesn't (my partner's PC stopped recognizing HDMI monitor at some point, and the debugging was frustrating as hell).
  
  Depends on the hardware I suppose. My Dell dock just works.
  
  Never had that issue on my thinkpad, sorry to hear!
- And also better than MacOS!

all fossify apps in android. I find most android apps for basic tasks heavily overbloated, even the ones directly from google.
Okular for pdf viewing on pc

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
- I thought dolphin was for playing gamecube games?
  
  It also plays Wii games. 😉
- 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)
  
  If the 2-in-1 is holding you back, it worked for me with Linux Mint, touch and gyro rotation included. Touch works out of the box.
  It did require me setting up iio-sensor-proxy with xrandr for the gyro sensor so it adjusts the screen when spinning the laptop around in tablet mode though. But the guide was pretty straight forward.
  Just an FYI, that linux actually works with it well.
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
  FFMPEG is an open source command line tool and software library for audio and video encoding. You’ll find it mentioned in the credits of just about any video playing software ever, but you can also just go use it for free.
- 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 think Linux lacks a good Foss alternative to visual studio, unless you count vscode.
  
  Are the jetbrains ides open source?
  
  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.
- don't you want copilot in your notepad?
  
  Fuck no. Luckily it's not even enabled in my country.
- Wondering why you use notepad++ instead of Kate
  
  Because I've been using it for over 20 years?
  
  I'm using Kate now, but from my experience NPP has a lot more features built in for which I actually have to write some scripts to use with Kate. NPP has really strong encoding encoding and schema manipulation features and a robust plugin system.
  If NPP had a native linux build, I'd go back to it in a heartbeat.
  
  I have to live with Windows at work so that's where I use Notpad++. I'm fine with Kate at home.
- I wish linux had more game/software support. I know there's wine but still
  
  Have you not tried gaming since proton matured into what it is today? If you're using wine for gaming then you are doing it wrong.
  Pretty much every Windows game that doesn't have anti-cheat works on Linux now.
  
  I can play 90% of my games without efforts. 5% are to old, the other 5% are EA Games, need uplay or whatever shitty launcher, have Anti-Cheat - stuff you usually wouldn't want to have on your PC anyway
  
  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

Molly for signal if that counts

Krita is a fantastic image editor with a customizable UI that’s very powerful but easy to use.
Pixelmator is a waste of $70 when you get more (you can resize the toolbar buttons!) for free with Krita.

I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.
- IMO WinRAR was only ever did one useful thing and that was breaking up files into arbitrary sizes for USENET theft
- NanaZip is a modern fork of 7zip, useful if you're on Windows 11

These comments are like a treasure trove.
I didn't see anyone mention Kodi as an alternative to smart TVs. It's better in every way than the Apple TV I won from a raffle at work. The best part is that my TV box is just a computer so I can use it to host other services too
- It's better in every way than the Apple TV….
  Hard disagree. Two similar tools but perform radically different functions.
  I’ll agree with you when Kodi can natively launch and stream Netflix/AppleTV/Paramount+/Hulu/etc. (pick any two).
  I ran kodi for years (back when it was XBMC) until I found that plex would sync my playback status between devices as well as other features.
- I've used a PC with Kodi on it for my main tv for over a decade now, think I used it under it's previous name even. I've had few complaints, occasionally there's a video that won't play but works in VLC but that's pretty rare. Sometimes it doesn't pick up new videos properly but that's just expected for some file names.
- Can you get 4k content on any streaming services with kodi?
- I use kodi as a DLNA server for my smart tv
- kodi looks cool
  
  It's been around for like ever. Used to be called XMBC

My paint and Krita are great, I use them daily

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?
- It’s def on par with Apple
- 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

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.
  
  You sound like you know your LibreOffice.
  My experience is they are quite different but I've been able to do the same things for the most part.
  But how the hell do I make a pivot table that looks and functions as nice as the plain old default one in Excel?
- OBS and VLC yeah.
  You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and... yeah, no, unfortunately.
  I don't even think it's necessarily better than MS Office, but I'd (unfortunately) take Google's Office suite over both.
  
  Only Office is a much younger project and is leaps ahead. It's sad really, I used to champion LO since the OOo days. Doesn't make sense these days anymore.
- 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!
- MPV blows VLC out of the water when it comes to playback. After using it at work to sift through collectively hundreds of thousands of hours of video, waiting for VLC to do anything feels painful
- I posted this in another thread yesterday but it's relevant here too:
  I have a small consultancy with several staff and work with documents and spreadsheets all day. We use LibreOffice exclusively.
  Occasionally I encounter similar threads discussing the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and the comments are all the same. So many people saying LibreOffice just "isn't there yet", or that it might be ok for casual use but not for power users.
  But as someone who uses LibreOffice extensively with a broad feature set I've just never encountered something we couldn't do. Sure we might work around some rough edges occasionally, but the feature set is clearly comparable.
  My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.
  That said, IDK if I'd go as far as to say LibreOffice is clearly the "best" because that's subjective. IMO it's certainly comparable and is a shining example of great FOSS. Hopefully LibreOffice enjoys some attention in the current move away from American products.
- 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.
- LibreOffice is also more compatible that Microsoft Word. It helped me and a friend to save his grandpa's old writings that were stored in AppleWorks (.cwk) files.
- OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
  
  https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio
- OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
- Depends on your criteria. As long as your calculations are simple, it doesn’t matter which tool you use.
  For slightly more demanding calculations, Calc just can’t handle it like Excel does. Then again, using spreadsheets for demanding calculations is just asking for trouble.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  I'm old enough to tell you Compiz was there first, then Beryl came around with many more bells and whistles and then it got folded back into Compiz. My mind was blown when I first saw the desktop cube.
  
  Man this is a trip I remember Beryl and when it turned to Compiz. I spent way more time than I care to admit just spinning stuff around and playing with effects than accomplishing anything of meaningful value.
- interesting

Jellyfin.
- Debatable. It is an incredible piece of FOSS, but whether or not it’s better than Plex really depends on your use case. Plex is much better for remote access and the “wife factor”.
  The initial goal of a self-hosted video platform must be encouraging adoption. And you have to follow a “the customer is always right” (the actual meaning, not the bastardized Karen-screaming-at-customer-service version) mentality in regards to this; Even if you have the best Jellyfin server in the world, it’s ultimately worthless if your friends and family refuse to use it. Your service needs to be accessible to the average user, and the unfortunate reality is that the average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is. When trying to encourage adoption, you’re facing a lot of social inertia in regards to people simply going “eh, I know Netflix isn’t perfect, but it already works.” You need to provide a service that is superior to other platforms in some meaningful way. And simply being free isn’t enough value for some people, because individuals will weigh the cost differently depending upon how heavily they factor it into the Cost:Convenience ratio that they’re willing to tolerate.
  And this is where the wife factor comes into play: Is your spouse/partner going to be willing to use it? Does it provide enough convenience that they’ll be willing to ditch the streaming services? Now how about your extended family? And if you’re only ever planning on watching at home on LAN, Jellyfin may be perfect. But Plex’s unified login experience is much easier for the average user to understand. I can walk my mother-in-law through the account creation and login process over the phone, because it’s familiar. If my in-laws can figure out how to make a Netflix or Hulu account, they can figure out how to make a Plex account. You simply sign in, and your available libraries show up. Easy.
  But Jellyfin will never be able to provide a unified login experience, because the entire platform is built to rebel against that; A unified login would require a centralized authentication server like Plex runs, and that’s specifically what Jellyfin is designed against. If I tried to get my MIL to use Jellyfin, her eyes would glaze over as soon as I mentioned updating her router to one that can run Tailscale, or using my custom domain. But with Plex, she simply logs in and has access.
  Luckily, you can run both side-by-side. Personally, I prefer Jellyfin’s UI, so I use it at home. But I don’t let it touch the WAN (for a variety of reasons), and that’s where Plex comes in.
  
  I agree with all of this, but I do have a bit of pushback- The account creation process, with the steps of create, verify, provide username to host, wait for invite, accept invite, pin to sidebar is enough of a barrier that it stops some people. I have a handful of guest accounts already setup and sorted that I toss out to interested people, and if they find it useful only then do I have them jump through the hoops of creating their own account.
  
  That's a whole lotta words to say you don't know how to set up Jellyfin correctly.
  My whole family loves it, they use it across quite a few different devices, and they enjoy the fact that they can get anything they want using Jellyseer. And since I'm not some paranoid nutter that thinks having my services exposed to the web is going to be the end of my life, they also enjoy the unified account experience that the LDAP server provides them, where they can manage their SSO password and 2FA from an easy-to-use web interface that in turn allows them to access all the other services on the server, and from any device anywhere in the world without needing to do stupid stuff like upgrade their router for Tailscale.
  
  The performance of Jellyfin is so much better in my experience. That and the FOSS benefits won me over quickly, and I have had a lifetime Plex pass for years.
  The downside is that you have to do a little IT work if you want to share with family in an easy (for them) way and use https. For sure, it’s a thing, but for me as a non web dev it was worth it.
  Now I can give family and friends a URL, login, password, and one or more app suggestions depending on their device and type of media. And all of them seem to have snappy performance while not showing my people ads or hitting them up for paid services.
  
  "Wife Factor"
  You can leave that type of shit out the door and speak like a decent human being
  
  average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is
  They don't need to, just give them a url, username and password and let them type each for each field.
  (If you mean because you want them to configure a vpn to access your jellyfin instance, then just expose it to the internet and skip that, which surely you pretty much have to do for your plex instance)
  Cost:Convenience
  Do people really think this or will they think (like everyone i know) that it's free and I can watch what I want.

emacs

I certainly like GIMP and Inkscape better than Photoshop and Illustrator, though any professional photo editor or graphic artist would probably fight me on that lol
But Krita is the best drawing/painting program of all time and I stand by that.
- +1 for Inkscape. I have no experience with the commercial competition but I've found Inkscape awesome, and used it for things it was probably never intended for.
- Krita is very, very good indeed. It deserves all the praise it gets.
- Yeah gimp is atrocious in terms of UI/UX
  Nobody with a clue about graphics would ever recommend gimp
  It has always been a piece of sh.. going back 20 years already
  
  People learned on Photoshop, and then they're upset because GIMP does things differently. I guarantee you if somebody had learned on GIMP first, it would be the other way around.
  There's nothing intuitive about Photoshop. If you pick it up with zero knowledge and try to do anything, you can't. You have to take a class to learn how to use it, same as GIMP.
  
  I think you're overstating things a bit, but it's true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.
  I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image's borders was actually dead space, and it won't accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what's happening it's not so bad, but until that point it's the software working how you don't expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.
  And just now in 3.0 I've discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.
  It seems like it's purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don't remember it being like this in the past. What happened?
  
  Or, is it your hesitation to adopt Gimp's UI standards?
- I use lots of FOSS software. I work in a municipal government job where I have to fill a lot of roles that aren't funded as separate positions, so I use GIMP, Inkscape, and QGIS daily because the professional software isn't budgeted. I also use OBS frequently, among others.
  But GIMP is by far the worst FOSS alternative I've come across when compared against its paid competition. I hate Adobe the company, but Photoshop really is the gold standard.
  I use both heavily. Oddly enough I use GIMP at work and Photoshop for my personal use and side gig.
  
  GIMP certainly has a lot of UI problems that seem to have persisted for no other reason than "nobody got around to fixing it"
  Also, it's 2025 and you STILL can't just draw a circle lmfao
  
  Its not FOSS but if you need a work alterative to GIMP I use Photopea a lot. Works as a PWA too.
  I've been using design software for over 25 years; Photoshop has been there for the majority but I've often tried coming back to GIMP here and there, but it's never grabbed me in a useable way.
- Krita seems great. Unfortunately I am not of the artistic type so I can’t really comment on its functionality, but I would say my experience moving from Illustrator to Inkscape has been awesome! (I still can’t figure out how to make lines with inkscape though…the making lines button makes stretched out ovals instead…maybe it thinks I’m making a polygon?)
  
  Are you referring to the ends of the lines being rounded? You can change the "cap" type of a stroke path to rounded, square, or sharply pointed using the attribute menu on the right (would provide screenshot but am on mobile, apologies)
  https://inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/strokes.html
- Krita was by far the best when I had a Wacom.
  
  It works out of box with my obscure Samsung S-pen touchscreen laptop from 2016, on Debian with no driver preconfig. I am thoroughly impressed
- I like GIMP but find Inkscape impossible to use
  
  For me, it is the other way round. Probably depends on what you are doing.
  
  I'll admit Inkscape's UI and menus are a disorganized mess. I'm fortunate I learned it while still a high schooler with too much time on her hands

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