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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
all are great :D
There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both compression and decompression, and is native to macOS.
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.
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!
I like using peazip since it’s open source and includes 7-zip along with it
I use 7zip on my Mac every day. Whatchu talking’ ‘bout, Willis?
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
Cool movie
This film gets cooler and cooler the more I hear about it! Really gotta watch it.
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.
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.
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
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.
Lichess -> chess.com
But it’s hard to be impartial / objective about modern stuff like that.
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
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
OBS, Portmaster, Trilium, FlightGear
+all the minimalist Adwaita apps on the Flathub. Love 'em.
The Linux ecosystem of distros vs other OSs.
more options is better, there’s so many!
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 just use the dark reader extension. Not ideal, but I don’t really notice any difference.
I like “dark background light text” by “Mikhail”. It’s simple and effective
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.
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
emacs
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!
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
AntennaPod is a pretty great podcast player, far better than the one Google did (and abandonned)
Newsblur is the only RSS reader that I’ve found that can apply filters to feeds
I’ve switched from Discord to Element with some friends for daily text chat and vocal chat (video games) and it’s less cluttered than Discord, and the voice even sounds better
SpamBlocker is a better phone/SMS spam filter than the proprietary ones I’ve tried
Firefox (and forks) has been my browser for more than 20 years, I can’t go back to proprietary ones
