this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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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)

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[–] konalt@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have not used it personally, but Blender is famously used in high value Hollywood productions.

[–] omxxi@feddit.org 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

it gained big notoriety recently because the Oscar winner Flow was completely made with Blender https://m.filmaffinity.com/en/film989516.html

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 points 8 months ago

This film gets cooler and cooler the more I hear about it! Really gotta watch it.

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO

Just wish there was a MacOS version

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both compression and decompression, and is native to macOS.

[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Jellyfin vs Plex

Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

[–] miridius@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago

Yeah this is one of those rare occasions where the foss app actually looks better and is more polished than the commercial one! The new beta plex mobile looks much better but you can no longer hide the live TV and on demand stuff, the entshittification is real. And the jellyfin video player still shits on the new plex one.

There are still a number of areas where jellyfin lags far behind plex though like offline playback/downloads, ability to skip intros/credits on mobile. And plex overall is slightly better at transcoding, downmixing etc and requires a lot less manual setup in general.

Personally overall I rate them roughly equal when you balance out the pros and cons of each, assuming you already have a plex pass. But there's absolutely no justification to pay for plex when jellyfin is just as good for free

[–] spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.

[–] Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

The plain mail app in windows used to be quite alright. But then they deprecated it and now there is 10 different outlooks for it.

[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 1 points 7 months ago
[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months 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.

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Lichess -> chess.com

But it's hard to be impartial / objective about modern stuff like that.

[–] hexmasteen@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

The OpenStreetMap ecosystem (e.g. Organic Maps as an Android Client) is better than Google Maps.

Tusky is better than any proprietary Twitter client.

F-Droid and Flathub are both better than Google Play.

Thunderbird is better than GMail

Real open Podcasting (e.g. Antennapod) is better than Spotify.

OpenDesk is better than M365.

Signal and Matrix are both better than the chat tools from Meta, Apple, Google.

(It's about ecosystems/platforms, because most software doesn't work in isolation)

[–] _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago
[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 8 months ago

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, rsync and mpv.

[–] vala@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months 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 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Zacryon@lemmy.wtf 1 points 7 months 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!

[–] expr@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

https://www.visidata.org/

Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child's play in comparison.

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months 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.

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

REALLY simple, but "Open Sodoku". It's just a Sodoku app without ads. I'm very bad but it's pretty fun

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

While I'm all for glfree sudoku "Studio Goya" and their series of sudoku apps are more than worth the cost, especially Miracle Sudoku

I know this is a thread about Foss, but they really put some crazy thought into these puzzles.

[–] Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'll trust you and pick it up.

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[–] twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Linux is so much better than Windows.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 points 8 months ago

... 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".

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You mean the ease of setup, or the native handling of the world's most popular applications?

[–] twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Helldivers 2, which is otherwise excellent.

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 1 points 5 months ago

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

[–] twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Like the Internet?

[–] Tux960@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ShareX or flameshot for taking screenshots. ShareX needs some tweaks out of the box but once it's tweaked it is so much more convenient when you need to make super quick tweaks/edits like adding steps or highlights or something.

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

woah that looks really cool, I have to try those out. 👀

edit: WAIT SHAREX HAS OCR????

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

IT CAN CAPTURE REGIONS OF THE SCREEN? IT HAS ACTUALLY GOOD HOTKEYS??? WOAHHHHH

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

IT SCREENRECORDS TOO??

i guess I don’t need OBS (I’ll keep it around though in case I need to use the camera since I use that sometimes)

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

What can I say, except you're welcome 🤗

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

not to be that guy, but…

*you’re (IT’S NOT THAT HARD IT IS “YOU ARE”)

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 months ago

Well that's funny because I am that guy. I blame it on my phone's keyboard. Probably walking and swiping away as usual.

I edited because I couldn't live with myself otherwise.

Shame.

[–] LouSlash@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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)

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