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)

  • Zacryon@lemmy.wtf
    28·
    22 days ago

    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!

    • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • lefaucet@slrpnk.net
      1·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • nightlily@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      22 days ago

      I know of AAA developers who prefer Blender over the competition now. It has made far more than is necessarily advertised widely.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    181·
    22 days ago

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

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    21 days ago

    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.

    • atempuser23@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      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.

  • vala@lemmy.world
    11·
    22 days ago

    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.

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      I like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      22 days ago

      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.

      • vala@lemmy.world
        1·
        22 days ago

        The world is unfathomably massive. What is it that people want to do with bigger worlds?

        • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          22 days ago

          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.

  • Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee
    10·
    23 days ago

    There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO

    Just wish there was a MacOS version

    • Bappity@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      23 days ago

      ffmpeg is a GODSEND. saves me going to those “convert to file type” websites when I can do it locally and so much faster 😩🙏

  • afk_strats@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    23 days ago

    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.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      1·
      23 days ago

      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.

    • jaxxed@lemmy.ml
      1·
      22 days ago

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

    • iarigby@lemmy.world
      1·
      22 days ago

      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

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • Mothra@mander.xyz
      2·
      23 days ago

      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.

    • A Phlaming Phoenix@lemm.ee
      2·
      22 days ago

      Honestly, just about anything in the web application hosting vein. httpd, nginx, redis/memcached, varnish, etc. You could make an argument that MS-SQL outperforms Postgres sometimes, but in my book, the cost of entry isn’t worth it and I’ve only ever used Postgres since I left an explicitly Microsoft shop many years ago.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        I think that in the database space MS-SQL was never the best option at any level or at least not for long.

        Oracle could be said to still be the best amongst databases for high performance and very large datasets, but in my experience in the smaller and mid-sized databases space things like Postegres and even No-SQL databases surprassed MS-SQL already back in the late 90s, early 00s.

  • rodneylives@lemmy.world
    6·
    22 days ago

    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.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      1·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • Gobbel2000@programming.dev
      1·
      22 days ago

      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.

  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
    6·
    22 days ago

    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.