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.
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.
I use 7zip on my Mac every day. Whatchu talking’ ‘bout, Willis?
I like using peazip since it’s open source and includes 7-zip along with it
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
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.
Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)
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
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
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
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
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 the same. It’s my daily driver for about 6 months now in a professional setting with high demands. I have kept the Microsoft suite (and have not yet transitioned Powerpoint). When I go back to compare I can’t stand all the needy Microsoft interruptions getting in my way.
Sorry, freudian slip. Edited to avoid future confusion.
Nope, you were right and I was agreeing with you, and adding that a much younger project compared to LO is already ahead.
Oh, I’m changing it back, then.
FWIW, OnlyOffice IS much better (hey, at least it doesn’t open xls files with black text on black backgrounds on dark mode!), and I do think its Google-inspired “apps-as-tabs” thing is the future for this stuff. I’m not sure I’d rank it above those, but it’s certainly a much more… competitive, I guess? approach.
Also the fact that it’s self hostable and can also work offline and can also work as a desktop client for remote collaboration and supports several remote backends.
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 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.
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.
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
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.
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.
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.
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
Linux is so much better than Windows.
And also better than MacOS!
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)
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.
Nice to know that linux support the strange 360 degree laptops. I probably still won’t bother backing up all my data and reinstalling everything though. Will definitely try linux if I ever get a new computer, since I would have to install and set up a bunch of things if that happens anyways. I agree that I am a lazy boy but I also have exams coming up soon, so I need to prepare for that vs installing linux
- 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.
I think Linux lacks a good Foss alternative to visual studio, unless you count vscode.
Are the jetbrains ides open source?
They have open source versions that run on Linux. I’d say they’re better than 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)
Imageglass is FOSS? oh heck yeah I love it even more!
don’t you want copilot in your notepad?
Fuck no. Luckily it’s not even enabled in my country.
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 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
I wish more game/software had Linux support. I know there’s wine but still
There, FTFY
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.
Actually, there’s lots of FOSS software which is at least just as good as proprietary. Most FOSS lacks the support of proprietary though. And I don’t mean the “call someone on the other end of the world” support, I mean manuals, tutorials and stuff like that. /Off topic
On topic: Apache, Git, Home Assistant and Jellyfin.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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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?
I really don’t think I’m overstating things, I go back to the early 90s, I started with Harvard graphics and stuff like that… I have used so many damn image editing softwares, and I’ve even made a few of my own.
I’m honestly going to just plant my foot and say gimp is a misbegotten atrocious lump of shit from a UI perspective - a complete embarrassment, and a complete failure from any perspective of usability science
It is absolutely at the bottom of the pack of any piece of software I have ever used, it’s hard to pick up various bunches of shit and decide what lump smells the worst, so I’m not going to say gimp is the worst, but it’s floating at the bottom of the septic tank
I cannot believe that people continue to step up and defend it, it’s garbage.
When was the last time you tried gimp? It improved a lot when they made it a single window instead of the original insane multiwindow model. It’s probably not as well organized as PS but it’s really not as bad as you say IMO.
Last year, it’s shit you’re not going to change my mind
Or, is it your hesitation to adopt Gimp’s UI standards?
Gimp doesn’t have UI standards. That’s part of the problem.
Gimp is what happens when programmers think that they can design things
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
no, when I make a line it makes a weird elipse shape instead of a line. Having no fill makes it go invisible, so I think inkscape thinks I’m making a polygon
Are you using the calligraphy tool? IIRC the calligraphy tool does create filled polygons instead of stroked paths
ah that’s probably why.
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
That’s funny. I have no problem drawing circles in GIMP. What are you getting stuck on?
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
Why shouldn’t it? As long as your system detects the pen and sensitivity (and Linux is excellent at peripheral support) any program should be able to use it properly.
+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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
If it’s more difficult to set up, then it may not be better for everyone.
I’d agree with you on the surface, except for the part where virtually every single comment on Lemmy about Jellyfin’s remote access basically boils down to “lol just tell them to use Tailscale. It works fine for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Again, I’m talking about the average user.
And it’s not about being a paranoid nutter. Jellyfin has had multiple exploits in the past. Hell, it had a code execution vulnerability from unsanitized FFmpeg API inputs published just last week.
If you run it in a rootless container, expose it through a reverse proxy and keep it updated there’s very little risk
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.
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.
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.
“Wife Factor”
You can leave that type of shit out the door and speak like a decent human being
Tell me you stopped reading, without telling me you stopped reading. I had an entire paragraph that expanded upon it, using entirely gender-neutral pronouns.
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.
