1y ago

What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts?

I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.

It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.

What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?

EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into "smaller" instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can't remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.

639 comments

VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
- Did you know that MS now charges for you to play some codecs with windows media player?
  
  Unless something has changed recently, that's not exactly true. They charge 99c for the distribution of it through the windows store (or whatever it's called) but you can install them the traditional way no problem
  I think it's still dumb but it's a distinction worth making. I think the description even links the website where you can download it
  
  I read that news. It was an out of season April Fools' joke, right?
- I really don't miss trying to find codec packs to install. Good riddance.
- Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don't get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I'm saying.
  
  I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; "Media Monkey" etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.
  For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.

Bitwarden password manager. I've used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
- Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
  
  My argument for self host of something that needs to be ultra secure is, they will do a better job at it than me.
- It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
  BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it's annoying
  
  Try the AutoFill keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-L (or Cmd-Shift-L on Mac). Works well enough for me.
  
  Yeah that could definitely be improved. There’s been talk on GitHub issues about adding support to fill Shadow DOM fields, honestly don’t know if they’ve done it yet but that would be a big help for web apps like HomeAssistant.
- I've been looking for a good password manager, and I've heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden... guess I'll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!
  
  Pro tip : if you self host use vaultwarden. It's 100℅ compatible with all bitwarden clients but has many more features and is lighter weight
- Also KeePass, I've switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP's.
  
  Keepass can also do TOTPs.
- Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
  
  Yeah, I just went with Bitwarden's own cloud because it was so affordable, accessible, and easy.
  And their integrations are really solid too.
- Bitwarden is to me the simplest and most effective PW manager, just perfect at what it does. I however switched from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only because the latter has a mail aliases generation integrated (with Proton Unlimited)
  
  You can setup anonaddy or duckduckgo with bitwarden to generate alias emails automatically. The best setup we get for free.
- I used Bitwarden a lot but it pissed me off that I couldn't add new entries while offline, that accessing attachments requires me to be online as well, and that attachments are not part of the backup.
  I switched back to Enpass due to that, which has even a slightly better UX IMHO. It's not FOSS though, but uses the FOSS sqlcipher library for storage. So if push comes to shove, I can still exfiltrate my data without relying on the vendor.

Blender. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is simply nothing like it in the commercial world. Its feature set is unreal; its like the swiss army knife of 3D modelling programs. I can't say enough good things about Blender. It has replaced so many secondary programs in my workflow and is slowly dominating to become my entire workflow.
It used to suck to use in the late 2010s and then work was done to overhaul its space-shuttle cockpit interface, and now it actually feels concise and usable. I freaking love blender now. Big time blender fanboy right here.
- As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
  
  You definitely should, it is lightyears improved
  
  I used 3dsmax until I started uni and was forced to use Maya. Then trying to learn zbrush and mudbox. And then marmoset, and then early 2000s blender, it was too much for my poor brain to wrap around so many different UIs with so many different workflows.
  Then my uni lied to me about how much I'd learn, then about overseas exchange, and then about getting a work placement (they just gave me an email address for a modeller who didn't respond) and left me with no useful skills so I gave up completely.
  I have so much wasted useless 15 year old 3d knowledge in my brain.
  
  They had a big push and update a few years back focusing on redoing the UI to make it more friendly to beginners. Although I haven’t personally used it a ton since then.
- every few years i make a donut, it gets easier every time. Someday i'll do something creative with it. Donut tutorial guy, if you're out there, gday mate.
  
  Make a bagel next time. I believe in you.
  
  every few years i make a donut, it gets easier every time
  Deep
- Im always amazed at the amount of stuff Blender can do. It's just so nice to be able to have software that lets you learn a useful skill that isnt behind a paywall or crazy license
  
  I like to mess around with architectural CAD as a hobby, with the likes of Revit and Chief Architect, but I ain't about sink enterprise levels of money for something I play with.
  There's always the open seas. That said, if you make money with something, pay for it, either via their revenue channels or donations to FOSS projects.
- i tried to explore it in the 10s but it seemed designed to be complicated and hard to learn. every obvious starting step required like 5 non obvious clicks

My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
- And KDE looks so much better than windows' DE. It's also more versatile.
  Gnome just copied Apple, which I guess somebody had to do in order to have them switch to something that looks familiar.
  
  Actually, Apple copied GNOME.
  
  elementaryOS has tried so hard to fill that niche, and they got so far. I just always run into the weirdest issues when I try and daily drive their distro.
- I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
  
  there is an ad in the terminal!
  you mean the "longer security updates with ubuntu pro" thing?
  
  It might be time to consider using a distro that isn't ubuntu.

OBS is so good that I don't know why anyone would ever use X-split.
- I adore OBS. I've been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they've all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
  
  Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
- God, remember Fraps?
  
  I try not to
  
  That ugly yellow FPS counter gives me such a genuine feeling of nostalgia.
- Obs?
  
  Software for recording and live streaming. Stands for Open Broadcasting Software. It is the industry standard at this point.
- OBS is lifechanging, i watch TV through it so i can cut out the garbage graphics that are often onscreen during live sports and actually focus on the game and appreciate the beauty of the camerawork
  
  I'm pretty sure that the masking features of OBS (potentially even VLC) could be paired with a camera aimed at the display, to crop interlopers out of a projected image, so that they don't get painted\blinded with projected light. Very niche utility, but I'm not aware of any hardware-only solutions for it, & its potentially show\life-saving

Signal. Who else is making a post quantum secure e2ee algorithm and making sure the code is open source and not duplicating the keys everywhere? Thank goodness for the kind devs on this project and for other FOSS projects everywhere!

VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn't know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft's store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It's a real shame it doesn't have a GNU/Linux version, it's the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn't look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn't cockblock you with paywalls. For me it's the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it's because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don't have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
- +1 for Newpipe, my favorite feature is hiding thumbnails so I don't have to see that stupid fucking "wow" wide-eyes face everyone makes with pointless arrows and circles. Now I just read the video title and my brain hurts less.
  
  That's actually a good idea and it also saves data, apparently.
- Have you tried flameshot? Its an opensource and cross platform screenshot utility.
  
  I did, as well as Spectacle, which now has the same functionality seg as flameshot and works without issues on wayland, unlike flameshot.
  Neither of them comes even close as a replacement for ShareX, just try this thing yourself.
- Agree on all of them!
- These are a lot of great recommendations I'll have to look at! Especially VSCodium. I'm using VS Code right now for my SvelteKit projects, so if I can add the Svelte and Tailwind CSS plugins... that's really all I need.
  I want so badly to hop ship from VS Code, I'm doing a trial of JetBrains WebStorm right now. Another piece of proprietary software...
- For text editing, I love Gnu Emacs. Cannot quite explain how much time I save by not having to reach for a mouse. Emacs pinky sucks though, slightly better with Ctrl and Caps swapped.
  If anyone likes Vim, try Doom Emacs.

Thanks for the praise! We're not on Lemmy too much, but someone in the Core Team caught site of this and shared it with me. If you're wondering who I am: github

Blender for video editing. I haven't even touched its 3D animation features.
- Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
  It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
  If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
- Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn't great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
- Holy shit, I didn't know that that's a feature. For the two times a year I need to edit videos I will never have to deal with shitty free versions/test versions of video editing software ever.
  
  Blender does an insane amount of things. 3d modelling, image editing, sculpting, rendering, procedural texturing, procedural modelling, video editing, physics simulations, animation, rigging, mocap. Probably some other things that I'm forgetting too.
- video edit
  I've heard really good things about Shotcut. I wonder how the two (and Kdenlive as well as commercial competitors) compare. I looked a while ago for some good comparison articles but don't recall finding any.
- If you want to only edit video you can use kdenlive. I tried blender several month ago and it still lacks lots of feature and exporting time is higher than kdenlive, even though they both use ffmpeg inside btw kdenlive let me write my own exporting script

I’ll take LibreOffice Writer over MS Word anytime. All that ‘I know better than you,’ ‘You wanted to copy the space, too, right? Even though you stopped marking before it,’ can kiss my ass.
- I recently switch to OnlyOffice for their UI/UX, and it's been brilliant. LibreOffice is a delight, though.

All the Linux file managers I've tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.
- Protip: KDE's Dolphin is available for Windows.
  The Windows integration isn't perfect, but it's very useful nonetheless. Multiple tabs and the Ctrl+I filter alone makes it worthwhile.
  On a related note: KDE's Kate text editor is also available on Windows and it works GREAT! So great that KDE eV has published it on the Windows store, making it easy to install
  
  To be fair, the Windows File Explorer has multiple tabs too now, which is a big improvement. I have no idea what the problem is with the Windows Explorer search function though - how does it manage to take so long, no matter what you search for? (Why is Windows so slow to search, slow to delete files, slow to update? You'd think these would be core, priority features.)
  I do enjoy using Dolphin on Tumbleweed, though I had to turn off the one-click file opening thing, which was terrible when trying to open context menus with a trackpad. Maybe I'll try it on Windows.
  
  For Kate, any idea why build targets are disappearing for me randomly after a while? This has happened twice for me, oddly nothing else seems to be lost. (on Linux, also it may have been fixed since I last updated but I can't find any info, though I think I did update it after the first time I had this happen)
- It's absurd how long it took windows to have something that worked half as well as tabbed file browsers on linux.
  
  I wonder how many people actually use tabs. I find having a split file browser much more important for moving files.
- Yes, but I'm still waiting for mac style column browse mode in nautilus 😒
  
  I'm pretty sure gnome used to have that around 1.0 or something.
  
  I got my first Mac when the m1 came out. Id never used them before. The file manager columns just doesn't make sense to my brain.
  
  Columns became the dealbreaker when I was considering switching from macOS to Linux. I need my columns.
- And if you are on Windows, you can install Double Commander there. Unfortunately links from other programs will still open in Explorer.
- Windows file manager is also so slow compared to Dolphin. With Dolphin it instantly responds and it takes Windows File manager up to 1 whole second to register and process a click.
- I really love nemo. It's such a nice file explorer.

Inkscape?
- Absolutely love Inkscape. It's one of the first pieces of software I add on any new install.
- I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won't lie, it's pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.
  
  First time I hear about inkstitch. Looks great!
- +1 un
- How does it compare to Affinity?
  
  inkscape (and gimp) is dog shit ass compared to an actual vector (and photoedit/raster) design program
  im a graphic designer but im also not a huge adobe guy i think affinity products r fire.
  im talking about inkscape and gimp 7-8 years ago but its not nearly as robust or user friendly as an actual design program if you desire to create more than one image trace. image tracing is the only thing inkscape is good for.
- Unfortunately it's not so good on Windows, performance is sluggish.

Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape
Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid
Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox
Honorable mentions that don't have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS
- I used Zotero for the references for my Bachelor's thesis. I'm happy that I don't need to use it anymore but the software itself is fine.
  
  It's not perfect, but it's just miles ahead of anything else on the market in capability!
- +1 for Sumatra. Use that and a thumbnail loader, and it's superior to Calibre for a library of books (ePub, PDF, CBR, CBZ).
  I also use Notepad++ and qBittorrent. Looking into Inkscape now. Firefox is the best.
  
  Sumatra PDF is the best. It's become an essential tool for me. Nothing I tried comes close.
- I love Zotero so much. It's way better than Mendeley
  
  Agreed. I made the switch after Mendeley pushed their online manager with only a new limited desktop client, which was awful. Couldn't believe I hadn't gone with Zotero in the first place. Originally only used for my thesis, now I use for work and personal interests as well.
- Inkscape is the goat
- Thunderbird
  I actually came to this thread in hopes of finding a replacement for Thunderbird. I've been using it for 10 years or more now, on various machines, always hoping it would somewhen stop being laggy. No plugins installed, and it frequently freezes for several seconds or even minutes, when I'm idle but also while I'm typing.
  
  Hm.. I've never seen it do that to me (on Windows with multi GB mail storage).
  Though I think there is a setting to auto compress the mail storage every so often if it will save more than X, though I can't remember the details on top of my head. If that setting is too low (e.g. if it will save more than 1mb) then it might be running very often for minimal gain.
  Perhaps rummage around in there and see if it helps.
- QGIS isn't that bad really. Some parts are more intuitive than ArcPro.
  
  I didn't say it was bad. Just that the UX isn't great.
- Swap f-droid for droid-ify for a more modern UI.
  
  Yep, I did! I also use its shizuku integration to install in the background, which is awesome
- I absolutely love Espanso. So much faster than TextExpander and I like that it's config is plain text files.
  You're insane though if you think Inkscape is better than Illustrator. I'm not an Adobe fanboy by any means, but it is a really good (if bloated) product.
  
  Inkscape just gets out of my way. I was using it for a quite particular application of drawing CNC mill plans though, and through that, I got into using it for other graphics stuff!

Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
- Similarly, Calibre for ebooks. I set it up to use my Google Drive (so I can automatically sync between my various computers) and have never looked back.
- I use it too, wouldn't call it better than audible though. IOS beta app is not great.
  
  I don't use iOS, so your mileage may vary. The android App works fine.
- I haven't even heard of this and I don't use audible, but I know how popular audio books are these days, can you break down the benefits of it?
  
  It looks more consistent, has a simpler UI, has a series-feature that is actually useable and doesn't link to an embedded website for almost everything.
  And it can be used as a podcast app as well.
  Con is that you need to bring your own audio books. But you can download them from Audible and such with many programs that are just freely out there on GitHub.
- I love this one. I still download the books locally and use a local app to listen, but its a wonderful manager.
- Honestly, no. It's objectively worse. It's not bad, but by far not as good.
  
  Interesting. I hate Audible because it redirects you to the stupid embedded website for almost everything and tends to get effed up when listening with multiple devices.

Calibre vs... em something that's not calibre.
I'm honest not sure what I would use instead, but it would be hard to replace.
- Uhh... yeah, I'm stumped trying to think of the proprietary alternative to Calibre, too. I don't think there is one in the mainstream? Everywhere I look, the only recommendation is Calibre.
- Honestly I hated Calibre. The worst part was how it just couldn't render some books properly, and there was no way to zoom many of them, even via CSS. Readability is #1 priority, but Calibre was absolutely broken for a lot of that.
  I ended up using software that could made thumbnails from PDF, CBR, CBZ, and ePUB, then I used Sumatra for all of it.
  
  It never occurred to me, that people would use calibre to read books. I only use it to move books between devices (kindle →PC ⟷ smartphone) and to strip DRM. The stripping of DRM is actually my primary motivator to use calibre.
  
  Readability is #1 priority
  That’s arguable. Calibre is a database manager, not a reader. It has a reader, sure. But it’s an afterthought when compared to the rest of the program. The program is primarily aimed at people who have a reader and want to be able to manage their library. It’s days ahead of literally any other program when it comes to things like metadata management or managing multiple devices.
  It’s sort of like saying that Notepad++ is bad at making Word documents. Like sure, it may be able to edit Word docs, but that isn’t what it’s primarily designed for.
  
  Reader is very much a tertiary function of Calibre. It's an ebook manager and converter first, an editor second.

VLC >> everything else

Firefox/LibreWolf
- FF is the way. I found out you can get Edge on Linux now and threw up in my mouth. ☺️
  
  If you ever feel your job is useless, remember it is someone's job to maintain Edge for Linux.

KDE is better than Windows
~~Audible~~ Audacity is more audio programme than most people need
KdenLive is more video editor than most people need
Kritta is more art programme than most people need
There are edge cases where there are professional programmes that might be better but unless you are a professional you do not need them and even semi-pros would likely be better served by those three
- Windows just rips off every plasma feature at this point, even kde devs make fun of it
  
  luckily windows users, and the rest of people that go outside, can laugh at y'all for finding this niche content funny.
  then we can laugh at you having a superiority complex because of the way you navigate the internet. ever done a one arm pullup or anything else that's somewhat of a physical challenge? its like crack to train.
- Audible is more audio programme than most people need
  Did you mean Audacity?
  
  You've got the audiobook to correct him? Unbelievable....
  
  Errr... yes. Good catch
- Agreed with everything. As a programmer, I use the IntelliJ suite (mainly PHPStorm, WebStorm, GoLand, RubyMine, PyCharm, and IDEA), which is basically industry standard in most companies (except those fuckers who still use Eclipse or NetBeans).
  
  Well, those aren't FOSS, but I agree that they're really good at what they do.
  
  They are used a lot but I don't think they could be called industry standard. Tons of people run vim, emacs and such aswell the occasional vendor provided IDE. Probably like 60% of software engineers run IntelliJ.

The thing I find hard to convey is that FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software for many reasons, most of which are non-technical: FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software if it isn't spying on you, if it's governance is collective, if it's not build to make you pay for things that should be free, if it lets you decide where your data goes, etc...
we're often missing the point when we attempt at side-by-side comparison of FLOSS and proprietary software.. It's usually one-dimentional, and playing on our opponent's field: these companies racketing their users based on rent-based exploitative business models will always have more resources than independant developpers to improve "UX/UI"... so I think this must not be the only prism through which reading these things.

VLC is obviously the best media player, I can't think of one I've used that comes close ever, either in ease of use(hotkeys) or functionality.
Audacity is such a simple yet comprehensively functional audio editor.
OBS is a very simple video recording software that works so well.
- I personally prefer mpv, but that's still FOSS. Nothing in the proprietary world is comparable to these two.
  
  I used MPV for a while, seemed a little bare bones to me compared to VLC? Maybe that's just because I was more familiar with VLC and know how to do most things with it already.
  I went from winamp to VLC and then tried probably everything and then went back to VLC
- VLC gave me trouble last year so I ended up using Haruna. The only thing I miss is downloading subtitles, but I can use VLC for that, everything else I think Haruna is near perfection.
- I think PotPlayer is a lot better than VLC— although it's a little weird out-of-the-box, so you have to change a few of its many, many customizable settings.
  
  I can't really think of a customizable option I've wanted that VLC doesn't have, what do you mean by better?

Kodi (formerly XBMC) beats pretty much all streaming services in terms of UI.
- I used xbmc back when it was a Mc for xb haha kodi now seems more trouble than it's worth
  
  What's the trouble with Kodi? I love it works great! Very flexible. Nothing even comes close to it in terms of functionality.
- Yup. I even pay for YouTube TV but if something I want to watch is available over ATSC, I switch to my Kodi tvheadend HTSP client on Chromecast (I have a pcie tuner) because the UI doesn't make me stabby.
  
  I moved and don't have an ATSC setup anymore sadly. I didn't use it much but it was great to catch the news during special events and to PVR a couple of local shows that are worth watching and hard to get elsewhere. Tvheadend is a bit of a pain, but when it works it's great!
  The Netflix plugin in Kodi is better than their own interface too 😂
  I wished the MPD plugin was better though tbh
- Personally, I prefer Stremio (also FOSS)
  
  Seems to rely on some externally hosted service, thanks but I'm good.
- I really want to like Kodi, but somehow I've always struggled with its UI. I can't seem to logically find the options I'm looking for (in the first place I look.)

Librera Reader is a PDF // ebook reader for Android. It has a very smooth user experience and useful options. I used to have 5 or so different PDF readers installed and would pick and choose according to the task at hand but now I'm down to just 1.

Hands down the clang C++ compiler, no commercial C++ compiler I've ever seen or even heard of even comes close enough that a comparison could be meaningful.
- I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.
  Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.
  Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.
  
  The original Turbo C++ was, at the time, truly next level.
- I used to exclusively use clang but IMO gcc is just as good if not better. Both are pretty bulky but sometimes the LLVM toolchain can feel like bloat. Most of the time GCC is preinstalled on my linux distro so I don't even need to install it I just git clone my projects and run my Makefiles. The only reason I ever use clang now is on my chromebook because gcc isn't available through Termux.

Emacs and vim are both vastly superior to all other text editors.
Which one you like better is a matter of taste.
Vim is a girlfriend with rock hard abs who wants to take you rock climbing and of whom you're secretly a little scared.
Emacs is a big bouncy happy girl who wants to take care of you in every conceivable way, then split a bucket of RAM while binging pirated movies.
- Ah, sexism is alive and well in tech.
  
  In my case, lesbianism.
- Unrelated but I've got the urge to use Vim more now.
- Nano is kind of fat but she's an absolute freak in the sheets and is waiting for me to come home so her friend can come over and we can all get naked, and well quietly laugh with each others' genitals in our mouths about the Byzantine hoops everyone else's girlfriends make them jump through to get the moist wet.
  
  📸🤨
  
  Lol, I was more thinking Nano is a hufflepuff who's just really easy to be around. Who needs rock climbing when you can just lie in on Sunday mornings scrolling your phone and showing each other memes.
  
  you know these are public rite
- Vim is a great input method for other text editors like intellij or vscodium. The actual text editor? Nah.
  
  vim unclips your carabiner with a disappointed look

Unironically, the terminal.

The whole GNU+Linux distro on your desktop computer. Or on your server.

Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I'm too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much "free", but rather "unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge".
GNOME, for the hate it gets, it comes close to getting everything right. I'd give it a 95/100 score. Windows a 30/100, and MacOS a 35/100. No verdict/comment on KDE as I haven't used it. I have good reasons for disliking W10/W11 and separate ones for MacOS. As desktop environments, they are both shit for each their own reasons.
Blender. 3D/Scultping/Drawing/Video Editing. Aside from Linux kernel, the most impressive and well managed FOSS project there is. I grew up with pirated 3dsmax, and what a dream it would be to grow up today with Blender as it is.
Linux as a OS kernel. One can argue about the desktop market share, but people don't know better. They think the software that runs on it defines it. But, there is a reason why 100% of top 500 supercomputers in this world run on Linux. I'd also mention the Arch/AUR community. Doesn't matter if you use Arch or not, arch/aur wiki is a goldmine.
Godot: 2D game engine. As a 3d game engine, it's not nearly as good as the non-FOSS competition.
Firefox: If it wasn't for Firefox, I don't know what I would do. I don't trust chrome one single bit.
Alacrity terminal: I'm sure there are plenty great FOSS terminal emulators, but the built in ones for MacOS and Windows are garbage.
Prusa Slicer: I think this one is as good as the commercial counterparts for FDM G-code generation.
VLC. Mixed feelings about this one, as I think it's UI is lacking, but since it plays almost everything the UX ends up being great.
LibreOffice Writer. Perhaps debatable. But the fact that you can trust LibreOffice to respect and adhere to the OpenDocumentFormat, and equally trust Microsoft Word to deliberately not do so in subtle ways, LibreOffice Writer is ultimately the better software IMHO.
Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:
Gimp. It just isn't as good, even if you get used to it. Some things, of course, it can do much better (e.g the G'Mic QT filter pack). The lack of non-destructive work flows is the key part that is missing.
FreeCAD. It's good, and you can do wonders with it, but oh so rough compared to onshape/Fusion/etc.
Darktable. Not as good as commercial counterparts like Lightroom.
Kdenlive. Not as good as Davinci Resolve, or the adobe counterparts.
LMMS: Not as good as most commercial DAWs.
Krita: This one is actually not too far away from being best in class. I still suspect photoshop and has an edge
InkScape: A "best for some vector things but not all"-kinda thing. It's FOSS nature makes it the defacto vector editing software for certain kind of makers. But as a graphical vector editing suite, adobe's stuff is just much more solid.
Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don't care if there is a counterpart
Tuner: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/ It just does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of these on the play store, with ads or paid. There is no need for it.
Aegis Authenticator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/ For handling 2FA keys.
Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.gallery.pro/
Telegram: Sort of FOSS. Aside from security concerns whereby Signal would win out, it's still the best UX. Compared to Messenger and Whats'App, not even a contest.

In many regards using Blender can be a much more pleasant experience than using many of the commercial "standards" such as Maya or 3dsmax. Depends what aspect you're looking at of course, it's not perfect and it is lacking in some areas. Krita is amazing for painting, infinitely better than Photoshop.

Xournal++ for pdf annotating, note taking

LibreOffice, I'm not sure it's better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.
Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store
Inkscape, I'm not even sure what the proprietary version is?

I run Plex and jellyfin side by side. Plex usually gives me the most hassle free experience so I use that most of the time.
I prefer the flexibility of creating user accounts myself on jellyfin so that's nice.
But jellyfin after being up for 4~5 days balloons to 6GB of RAM consumption while Plex stays at ~200mb. Really annoying.

(neo)vim

I was setting up a Plex server, but when I noticed I had to pay to be able to play my own content on my phone I immediately switched to jellyfin. Haven't been able to test it yet, but as long as I don't need to pay them to be able to watch my own content on my own devices on my own network, I'll be happy!

Linux in general. MacOS if fine, but the app ecosystem is often annoying. And Windows is just a complete dumpster fire these days.

On Android; mpv, KeePassDX, FlorisBoard, AntennaPod, Read You, NewPipe, Jerboa, Unitto Calculator, CloudStream, Aegis, TrailSense, OpenKeychain, K-9 Mail, EDS lite, ViMusic, InnerTune, GrapheneOS Camera, Librera FD ...are my favourites.
- To that I'd add Simple Gallery and some of the other "Simple" apps by the same dev, Tibor Kaputa.
  Honestly, F-Droid should be your first stop on Android because the open source apps are usually better. Most apps on the play store are basically just adware at this point.
- I've really fallen in love with the Aves gallery app. It's finally got me started with organising and tagging my photos.
- ¿Does florisboard support multiple input languages at once? I might switch within a conversation or even mix words within a single sentence. So far I haven't found a good open source alternative to SwiftKey in that regard.
  
  Do you mean different characters/local keyboards, or different dictionaries?
- I use most things here but I hated FlorisBoard so much. To each their own, but I’m sticking with Gboard.
  
  Sorry for the unwarranted input but like you I tried FlorisBoard and it was awful and to me seems like a dead project. Since then I went with a fork of OpenBoard and it even has gesture typing similar to that of Gboard! If that's important to you of course

Kicad beat the crap out of EagleCAD. So much so that autocad just folded and discontinued EagleCAD.
- I recently started playing with LibrePCB. Best PCB tool out there which I've used. The project is 5 years old roughly, the documentation is not complete and the library of parts does not compete, but for small projects it's really a delight. It focuses on simplicity, compatibility with versioning, fully open parts library and ease to send to manufacturing with built-in partnerships with PCB manufacturers. I highly recommend having a look: https://librepcb.org/
  Edit: They very recently released version 1.0 of LibrePCB, with many exciting changes such as the 3D parts viewer. Read more about it here:
  https://librepcb.org/blog/2023-09-24_release_1.0.0/
  
  Thanks for sharing, LibrePCB looks amazing, much simpler than KiCAD.
  Last time I used KiCAD (admittedly quite some years ago) it was amazingly powerful but kinda overwhelming to get started

I could be biased but 2009scape. While originally a Runescape clone of 2009, they've preserved the integrity of the game much better than the official versions
- 2009Scape definitely a different vibe than the official game, but I still thoroughly enjoy modern RuneScape. There are the typical “RuneScape 3 is just EZScape” complaints that are valid… But as an adult with very little free time, the old school grind just isn’t appealing anymore.
  I love being able to idle grind most skills, because it means I can just have it running on my second monitor while I go about my day. It doesn’t take up all of my attention like it used to, and that’s not a bad thing. Lots of people idolize the old school grind because it’s nostalgic. But as someone who only gets a few hours a week (if I’m lucky) to play, it just doesn’t work for me anymore.

I switched to Jellyfin two years ago and never looked back.

XBMC forked off into Plex. Plex introduced a far better UI.
XBMC became Kodi. Kodi learned from Plex.
Jellyfin came along and learned from both of them.
So I don't think you can really criticise Plex too much here. They were perhaps getting complacent and they've definitely been shown up, but they were an important step to where we are now.

Pandoc. I'm not even sure there is a decent alternative.
- Every time someone mentions Pandoc, I like to mention that the author has created a new markup language called djot. Its very nice.
- haha no surely not. It can now even convert Typst docs to html.
  
  It supports Typst now? But it is basically a programming language

I would love to use Jellyfin but it (indexing, changing metadata...) is too slow with a few hundred movies and shows on my Synology. Plex is way faster.
- not sure why indexing speed is a factor - it doesn't require your attention and Jellyfin only needs to index things once, doesn't it?
  
  Yeah, I kind of understand one wants to hit the ground running after installing but still. Let it do its thing over night and you should be good?
- Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I've just given up -- everything says it should work and I've tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex's ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!
  
  Let this be a lesson: never use .NET in new projects.
- Agreed. This is my largest and really only gripe after switching from Plex. I moved my server over from Mint to Arch and rescanning my hundreds of shows and movies for the Metadata took over an hour. It still missed plenty of shows too. Had to manually update those and each time it took like 5 minutes per season.
  The jellyfin UI has been 1000% more responsive and the CSS customization is clean, but damn is the scanning slow. Still not going to back to plex though the input delay was disgusting for me.
  
  Having Sonarr/Radarr put .nfo files on all my shows/movies sped the scanning speed way up, for the record. You can have JF pick up the metadata from the .nfo and not make like 6 different slow queries to metadata providers. Likewise, if you have JF save metadata to .nfo files, full library re-scans go much more quickly as well.
- I think that's mainly a problem in Synology. I'm running it on a small arm media server and it basically takes a minute. (OS on nvme, files on NFS via 1G LAN)
- Runs nicely for me on a Pi 4B
- I just let it index mine overnight, everything was ready to go next day. Adding new media to the server isn't really a problem, IMO.
  It's worth it for the UI responsiveness alone, disregarding the fact that Plex just... stopped working one day for no discernable reason. No errors in any logs, my Plex server was running fine. No changes to the network, everything hosted the exact same, all my clients were logged in, running the same way, etc. Just... stopped seeing each other one day. Couldn't access my server from any device in the home.
  
  If your Plex server was hosted on Hetzner and only stopped working very recently, this is probably what happened.
- Yeh, Plex is still great, jellyfin sucks ass
  
  That's a strong opinion. Why do you think Jellyfin sucks ass? It's been nothing but delightful for me.

The scanner app on Linux is far better than Windows: auto preview white scanning, auto pdf creation WITH multiple pages.

Godbolt. Thank whatever cosmic great fortune sent goldbolt.

The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.
Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it's not FOSS (& won't run on any of my machines anyway).
Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that's some sort of perennial "gotcha!" joke, at this point?)

Hey what about Kodi?

Pidgin. Consume soo little memory in comparison to other chat applications. Is really fast, just try start and scroll history in a chat conversation. But it looks ugly.

Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.
Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.

I use Gimp and Krita, ShareX also with the complementary Extension, integrated with FileCoffee, old but gold VLC media player, PicView image viewer/editor (IMO best alternative to IrfanView), ProtonVPN (yes, it's OpenSource), Crow Translate, FreeTube, Portmaster, Cherry Tree editor, apart of some games (The Dark Mod, Armagetron Advanced, Scorched 3D, and some more)

I don't 100% understand LPPL, but I believe it qualifies under open source, but regardless if it's open source or not, LaTeX > Word and I will die on this hill.
- Typst >= LaTeX >> Word
  
  Oooh! I've been waiting for someone to try to replace LaTeX.
  
  ...elaborate?

Feeder, a RSS reader for Android. It has great UI, is fast at finding and parsing .xml from a link and has a comfortable reading experience. It has basicslly replaced social media for me besides the fediverse. The only thing I wish it had was more customizability. Being able to install Nord theme on it would be great.

Home assistant vs Homeseer.
Home seer will cost you 300-500$.
It's add-ons and extensions are all paid.
Home assistant is literally better in every way possible.

Let's be honest though, the Android app for jellyfin is so so buggy. My partner can't even use it because there are certain orders of starting a video, casting, closing the app, reopening to starting subtitles, recasting, just to get it working
- Have you tried Findroid?
  
  Never heard of it before. Thanks for mentioning it.
  
  Says no Chromecast support. I'm also not sure why someone would develop a 3rd party app for jellyfin android when jellyfin is open source and they could just contribute to the main repo. Gives a weird feeling that makes me think it's either not going to be supported for long because it's an underplanned side-project or is doing something dodgy
- Can you point me to the repository? I'm an android developer and looking to give back. Maybe I can fix a bug or two.
  
  https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-android
  Not so hard to find, is it?
- Honestly, never touched the Android app. We use it exclusively on our TVs. I can see why that would be a breaking point for some people though!

Plex, running locally, on my server: “You should add a server!”
Plex, running locally, on my server: “Claim 10.0.0.10!”
Plex, running locally, on my server, after claiming my server: “You should add a server!”

I can't wait until 10.9 comes out next year. Intro skipper is the killer missing feature.

I use Shotcut instead of Premiere Pro for work. It's much lighter and simpler.

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