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)
Jellyfin.
Syncthing!
I don’t even know what to compare it to, I have been using it so long.
Hard disagree. I’ve had so many issues with Syncthing deleting files and refusing to connect over LAN that I’ve never had with Resilio Sync.
Weird, I have 100’s of thousands of files synced.
Been using it for years.
Linux, windows and Mac in the circuit. Never a problem that wasn’t user error.
Resilio hasn’t been issue-free for my use case, but it hasn’t been destructive like Syncthing has. I thought the Syncthing stuff was just me, but I’ve seen similar accounts from some people online.
peer to peer syncing!
that is exactly what Syncthing is, my desktop to my server to my laptop to my phone…
Zotero
Markor: one of the few Android text editors/notepads that saves text to text files (crazy idea, right?) and works rally well with Syncthing.
Conversations.im for Android is an incredibly well made XMPP/Jabber messenger, and their message polling and real-time message delivery is unmatched AFAIK.
ratbag (and the frontend, piper) is a tool for remapping buttons on mice with a sensible interface. Beats installing proprietary Logitech software.
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 agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I’ll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet,
rsyncandmpv.Wow wasn’t aware
rsync’s FOSSGod tier. I’ve used these both so much over the years.
Heliboard
Actual Budget vs YNAB. Actual can sync data from European banks for free via an integration with goCardless, YNAB pulled this feature a couple years ago as well exponentially increasing pricing. Actual has more powerful reporting and a planned multi currency support
Oh wow, this is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing.
FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.
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.
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)
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.
Those websites are probably using ffmpeg on the backend anyway
Another one of those tools is image magic. Like ffmpeg but for images
ImageMagick
all are great :D
i am using Darktable to edit raw photos. i don’t know if it’s better than Lightroom or Capture One overall, but it is for my use case.
Sorry, Joplin is a nightmare. I want something that stores Markdown in flat files, not a database with changing versions where one version of the db doesn’t work in another version.
I tried to port the database over from another system, but the new version of Joplin wouldn’t read from the old version’s database, and it would corrupt the database when I tried to open it. What a crock of shit. I had to figure out how to dump the data from the tables using sqlite.
I use nb now instead. It is a bit wonky because it uses NodeJS, but you can view and edit files in a web browser, and it saves each entry as a .md file, which is the sane and rational way to do it. So, if nb ever fucks off, I have all my work in a directory of Markdown files, not some broken-ass sqlite database.
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.
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”.
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 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
