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
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.
Tell me more.
Files shared on Usenet (which may violate piracy laws) are usually packed in the rar format
I’m sorry I should have specified. I’m curious about the recovery records feature.
It essentially splits the archive into multiple rar sub-files (*.r00, *.r01, etc.) and then creates several more chunks that contain parity information (par2 files) that go with it. By doing so, if you then lose *.r45 but get *.r00-r99 you can recover the *.r45 file from the parity (par2) data. It’s pretty slick.
Neat, thank you!
you can make par2 parity data for 7z using the par2 util.
Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both commission and decompression, and is native to macOS.
7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
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
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)
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.
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.
For images (it can process images as well) imagemagick is used.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
emacs
Linux is so much better than Windows.
You mean the ease of setup, or the native handling of the world’s most popular applications?
Also dude, I just spent 8 hours trying every last weird hack that I could find on the internet, including editing the registry to try to get a Windows game to work on Windows 10. It would just crash on a fresh install of Windows. Steam on Linux worked flawlessly, riddle me that Batman, Linux was able to do better at Windows than Windows.
what game was it
Helldivers 2, which is otherwise excellent.
oh, I think maybe that is poor game design from the developers, I have heard many PC people experiences crashes/black screens etc, I suspect from poor utilization of system resources. it’s possible the developers managed memory poorly in a windows environemnt
Like the Internet?
… 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”.
Never had that issue on my thinkpad, sorry to hear!
I’m having it on my Framework laptop - I really was hopeful that it would just work with that :(
Linux itself is not the problem here. Which DE is it? Does it use X.org or wayland? If you disable the login manager, do the screens work in TTY right after the boot? If you use X.org, Sometimes X.org drivers needs to be configured, Some OSes come with X.org configs like Arch. So in Arch you usually just have to install the packages you need. If you use Wayland, try X.org.
Did you try windows and Linux on the same machine? Hardware limitation can cause such issues. But if it works with Windows but not with Linux then it’s not that.
Windows may use worse quality output, e.g. different refresh rate, different color profile to fit into the hardware bottleneck. You can also experiment with these.
USB controller kernel driver could also interfere in theory, you can try different kernel versions.
Multiple GPU setups have also many options that you can play with.
I hope it helps.
If you disable… needs to be configured… just have to install the packages
And this is exactly the problem. I suppose there might be a way to fix it, but if Windows can just make it work for me, why can’t Linux do the same? All this “Oh you just need to do X and Y” should be unnecessary bullshit.
Also, it’s not that it doesn’t work at all on Linux, but it works sporadically. For instance, when the system goes to sleep and needs to wake up, the screens sometimes turn on, sometimes they don’t and I need to pull the plug and reconnect. This is never necessary on Windows.
Most of the time a popular distro just works, your special case did not. You should find the root cause, and report it. I’m sure windows is not bug free.
I’ve tried on Ubuntu, what’s more popular than that.
Windows is certainly not bug free and I’m very much a fan of the idea of FOSS - the execution is unfortunately lacking in this aspect.
People call Tiktok brainrot, but I feel like Windows has had the same effect on people.
Oh totally. I just wish Linux had better user experience than it does, cause right now it’s kind of subpar.
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).
Honestly, almost all Microsoft products are objectively worse than FOSS alternatives, they are just so big that people are unwilling to escape the Microsoft ecosystem.
True. I hate that MS office pushes you to yse onedrive. Also, onedrive’s syncing is horrible.
It puts all your synced folders into a separate but not really sort of “OneDrive” folder. It doesn’t sync very well from my experience. And I lost a bunch of my data due to OneDrive not backing up properly. Now I use pCloud, which actually syncs things in a sane way (ie not creating two separate folders called “OneDrive” and “OneDrive - [workplace name]”) and also have a way better desktop app (you don’t need to navigate the stupid toolbar menu thing to get to settings, pcloud just has an app with organised menus! surely MS has enough funding to make a good onedrive desktop app? right?)
Microsoft “Why do you need folders when you can just dump everything in the root of the folder!” OneDrive
with Microsoft’s funding and manpower they can certainly make a better sync app, they simply choose not to. iCloud isn’t much better with only 5GB of free storage and is to iOS as Office 365/OneDrive/an MS account is to Windows. pCloud and IceDrive, despite not being the most profitable company in the present day, both are able to offer 10GB (pCloud annoyingly needs referrals to get up to that, but still)
Microsoft’s development tools are first in class IMO, but not much else
YouTrack is good for notes, and supports Draw.io as a plugin. They have a free hosted option for personal use as well.
Then Signal obviously.
Borg is an amazing backup utility.
borgmatic is an abstraction layer that makes borg a little easier to work with.
Things like scheduling, repo management, notifications. I like it very much.
I use Vorta, a GUI frontend, because I’m a filthy casual.
Pika Backup is pretty nice as well
Betterbird email client.
Linux. For desktops I like it as well, but I can understand some arguments against it. However, for all other cases there is hardly any match. The internet basically runs on it.
I’d say Logseq is better than any note-taking alternative that works in the same way. It’s a bit different to regular note-taking apps as it acts more as a knowledge database based on tags, than with a regular file-folder structure. Also I prefer Actual Budget to YNAB, as it’s starting to have even more features than YNAB and actually supports things like bank syncing for major parts of Europe that even YNAB doesn’t. And it’s free to host yourself or really cheap to host through PikaPods. But it’s hard to say “objectively” because in the end, a lot of it is subjective. If people are used to running one program, it’ll be hard to switch to another, even if it’s “objectively” better.
The largest issue with FOSS applications is that many contributors don’t have any UX/UI knowledge, which is a huge factor in why people choose one program over another. I’d argue GIMP is a mess compared to Photoshop, even if GIMP is able to do many, many things that Photoshop is able to.
Definitely and sadly not better than Obsidian. Also it can’t sync and it stinks for that
I have multiple different graphs/vaults/whatever synced by simply storing the markdown files in a synced folder and I never had any issues. The new version of logseq is supposed to use a database and syncing, afaik.
I like Obsidian too. That said, unless I’m handling a huge amount of notes at once, Joplin works much better, esp. for quick notes and to-do lists. Obsidian’s vaults are a bit annoying to switch through. I still use Obsidian for like one or two things but most of my notes are now in Joplin (which can sync as well!)
Joplin is awesome on iPhone and Linux but I hate that there isn’t any graphs for note links. It’s super easy to setup and sync though!
yeah, sync is really simple to do, and I really like that it’s cross-platform
From my limited experience with Obsidian, I still preferred Logseq actually. And the syncing is easily done by just storing the markdown files in a cloud folder. But yeah, it’s subjective for sure.
interesting, I’ll have to try loqseq.
That might explain why some FOSS apps have terrible UI. There’s plenty that have really really good UI as well
Ive used gimp for over 18 years. Im so used to it i find photoshop is a mess lol
That’s less and opinion than Stockholm syndrome.
There’s a very good argument for Blender, though, but 3D software is so specialized that I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to.
And while we’re on creativity software, the same goes for Godot. Arguable, but very dependent on what you’re doing.
Nah. Its just im used to how to do things in gimp. And am clueless in photoshop
I like godot a lot more than unity. Both are great, but besides being open-source, Godot loads way faster and GDScript is super simple and is built in to the engine vs needing to use a separate IDE. I would say that in terms of 3D graphics, Godot is catching up but not quite there yet compared to the likes of Unity and Unreal.
Logseq is the best note taking app for me. And a lot of my programmer/adhd colleagues. I cannot keep order in my notes and logseq does it for me. It’s so essential for my workflow that I have a monthly donation to the project set up.
LibreWolf and other Firefox forks.
i love that floorp allows you to put the tab bar wherever! I have it on the bottom close to my apps.
I also respect people who use librewolf, it seems great too. There’s a few annoying bits due to the anti-fingerprinting settings (e.g. defaulting to light mode) but I guess it depends on your preferences on how private you want to be.
I switched over to Floorp a month or so ago - it’s pretty good. My only gripes are:
- The tabs are really hard to distinguish between the active tab and the inactive tabs
- If you have session stuff in the sidebar, it seems to “forget” about it and I constantly have to sign into stuff.
for me, the two issues you have are sort of solved by:
- Firefox Colour (never really noticed the first issue since I always have a colourful theme)
- I don’t use the sidebar so never had that issue either. (but maybe the forgetting sessions is some sort of privacy thing? who knows?)
I change the position of the UI to be where er :D
I just use the dark reader extension. Not ideal, but I don’t really notice any difference.
Dark Reader is a godsend. I sent money their way, so many things are just stark white everywhere, I’d be suffering of it wasn’t for that extension.
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?
Excel is probably the one sore spot for LibreOffice, but also Google’s suite and really everyone else. Excel is tough to beat, especially when you consider the additional power of things like Power Query and Excel on web having JavaScript functions.
That said: I truly despite pivot tables and I no longer use them. I use lookups, countif, or other functions to display what I need, otherwise I use Power Query.
Whaaaaaaaat? Pivot tables are a 2 second job to summarise large amounts of transaction data or similar by month or year. Lookups or countifs would take so much longer!
Not to mention that you can drill into the data using them.
Ugh I hate excel. It can’t do the most basic things like search and replace things reliably in all cases. I have moved literally all data analysis besides the absolute basic “count” and “sum” operations to python in spyder. 200x faster, repeatable, won’t freeze up with large datssetd, and has never once failed a basic operation like a search and replace. Not to mention the localization issues and the fact that it will fuck things up completely if you install a new printer because Microsoft decided the printer has priority of your document and spreadsheet layouts over choosing a default.
I had some evaluation board software that whenever the value dipped below -1, would place the comma completely randomly in the floating point number.
Excel almost had a heart attack when I asked it to search and replace ”-1” with “-1,” and it found all of the cases just fine, but decides to ignore the replace and not place a comma at all. If I tried to convert them to a number, it freaked out and placed the decimal place also randomly, different than the input. And of course trying to do in-place operations on a column for export is just painful.
Hell, in notepad++ I could just regex the digit range that was preceded by a ”-1” and get everything replaced using a few brackets.
Not to mention how terrible the graphs work in comparison and how bad they look with the default options 😅. But hey, you can automatically put in a drop shadow or frame it in a useless way.
There are some people who can work very efficiently and do some crazy things in excel (like the excel doom) but unless you have literally been using it daily for many years and actively looking for ways to speed up, then it is just as easy or easier to do things in an actual data processing program like matlab, octave, python, or R (And I am not a coder) and you can literally copy paste a file name for the next full dataset.
Excel is the one thing LibreOffice still falls behind on. It’s really hard to compete with Excel, specifically.
Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
OBS and VLC yeah.
You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and… yeah, no, unfortunately.
I don’t even think it’s better than MS Office, but these days 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, Only Office 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.
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
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.
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.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
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 absolutely the best software in the field.
Any FOSS Linux/Unix shell, bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, whatever, is a million times better than cmd or the early versions of PowerShell. Yeah, I know, PowerShell Core exists now, and it’s even open source and cross platform, but it still sucks.
And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.
Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn’t as good as a lot of other terminals.
For anyone who missed it, the Windows Terminal team is infamous for claiming that it would require PhD level expertise to implement some basic optimizations suggested in a Github thread. Within a few hours, another developer countered that claim by submitting a functioning PR with said improvements implemented.
Windows Terminal team lead Dustin Howett then went on to double down on the original claim that said optimizations were unfeasable, and publicly attacked the author of the original suggestion thread on Hacker News. He issued an extremely half-assed apology and is still a Micro$haft employee to this day.
https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-that/
Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389
And DHowett’s reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.
But this anecdote is a good ‘corp’ versus ‘open source’ anecdote. There’s simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.
Meanwhile, open source someone says “screw it, this is crap, I can fix it”.
