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)
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!
Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus
VLC
Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.
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.
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.
OBS for streaming is amazing.
Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There’re also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don’t have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.
Krita has already been mentioned.
But, I think what strikes me most is that there’s a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn’t have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it’s really fun once you get the hang of it. I don’t do this professionally so there’s no need for me to learn Fusion360.
Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their “industry standard” (which really just means “the most common product that has been around the longest”), but if you’re not bound to that, there’s just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.
Linux is so much better than Windows.
… 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”.
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).
Depends on the hardware I suppose. My Dell dock 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.
And also better than MacOS!
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.
Just from top of my head and from what I have to use at work:
- Dolphin vs. Explorer - Dolphin is sooo much better and useful it’s not evwn funny
- Notepad++ vs. Notepad - day and night, even though Notepad got an overhaul in W11 it’s still piece of shit compared to Notepad++
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
- ImageGlass, Nomacs, Gwenview, etc. vs. MS Photos - same as above, windows picture viewer is now worse than ever while open source alternatives get better and better
- and plenty others, like Linux vs. Windows, lol
Notepad++ really is just a better notepad. I will definitely look at Dolphin, it has a Windows version which I might need to try out. I currently use OneCommander. Yeah Windows Media Player isn’t very good. I use PotPlayer, but others like VLC, mpv, etc. all seem great too. Nomacs is awesome.
Yeah, Linux is probably superior to Windows considering the fact the latter literally spams you with ads and promotions to make a MS account and to buy Office 365. Insane that everyone just puts up with this. I currently use a Windows machine, only reason I’m not installing Linux is because a. it’s one of those 2-in-1 touchscreen foldables, which Linux doesn’t really like too much, and b. I’m not bothered to reinstall all my apps and change all the settings and preferences again. Next computer I get, it’ll be Linux (either Fedora or Mint probably, those two seem good)
If the 2-in-1 is holding you back, it worked for me with Linux Mint, touch and gyro rotation included. Touch works out of the box.
It did require me setting up iio-sensor-proxy with xrandr for the gyro sensor so it adjusts the screen when spinning the laptop around in tablet mode though. But the guide was pretty straight forward.
Just an FYI, that linux actually works with it well.
Nice to know that linux support the strange 360 degree laptops. I probably still won’t bother backing up all my data and reinstalling everything though. Will definitely try linux if I ever get a new computer, since I would have to install and set up a bunch of things if that happens anyways. I agree that I am a lazy boy but I also have exams coming up soon, so I need to prepare for that vs installing linux
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
FFMPEG is an open source command line tool and software library for audio and video encoding. You’ll find it mentioned in the credits of just about any video playing software ever, but you can also just go use it for free.
I absolutely support dolphin over explorer. Whenever I have to deal with Windows, having to use this crappy excuse for a file tool feels like pain incarnated.
I thought dolphin was for playing gamecube games?
Imageglass is FOSS? oh heck yeah I love it even more!
I think Linux lacks a good Foss alternative to visual studio, unless you count vscode.
Are the jetbrains ides open source?
They have open source versions that run on Linux. I’d say they’re better than VSCode.
I agree, there are very few really good IDEs and the majority of them are closed source. The only open source one I can think of off the top of my head is Kdevelop, and last time I tried it it was not great.
That being said, I think the reason for that is that most FOSS projects are stuff someone started and maintained because they wanted an alternative with XYZ, and for IDEs a good chunk of people who could build excellent IDEs don’t even use one, so they don’t even start to work on it. The reason is that vim/emacs are so great it’s very hard to beat them, I think a good configured vim/emacs can beat anything the best IDEs can do, and while configuring vim/emacs to get to that level is difficult, it’s stile much more easy than building an IDE from scratch. So you’re left with a gap where beginners don’t have any tools because experts don’t need them.
There is Eclipse … and I guess if you google around you will find quite a few IDEs … but VSCode, IntelliJ and Eclipse are the standards.
I was a vim user for years and I disagree. At a certain point, vim with plugins cannot compare to visual studio or clion
Why? What can Visual studio or Clion do that vim can’t? Lots of what those two can do are easy to setup, but I can’t think of anything that vim can’t do (and can think quite a bunch that those two can’t)
Wondering why you use notepad++ instead of Kate
Because I’ve been using it for over 20 years?
Fair enough. You were just listing some KDE default apps but not others, and my experience with Kate has been great so was just curious.
I like Kate, although it’s not far away from VSCodium, so might as well just use that for everything.
This is where I’m at. I may use a second note taking app, but I’ve always got vscodium up anyway, so may as well just make 1 more tab (probably in the 2nd window tho)
I’m using Kate now, but from my experience NPP has a lot more features built in for which I actually have to write some scripts to use with Kate. NPP has really strong encoding encoding and schema manipulation features and a robust plugin system.
If NPP had a native linux build, I’d go back to it in a heartbeat.
I have to live with Windows at work so that’s where I use Notpad++. I’m fine with Kate at home.
Why not use something like Nvim on both?
I’m too old to learn vim escape game. I’m glad I can do
:q
:-D
don’t you want copilot in your notepad?
I wish linux had more game/software support. I know there’s wine but still
Have you not tried gaming since proton matured into what it is today? If you’re using wine for gaming then you are doing it wrong.
Pretty much every Windows game that doesn’t have anti-cheat works on Linux now.
I’d prefer to wait until someone releases an OS with a hybrid Linux and ReactOS kernel
I think you’ll be waiting forever for that one. Not even sure why you would want that; I seriously doubt it would even work as a shortcut to reactos becoming a viable and mature OS.
I prefer an operating system that can run the back catalog of Windows NT software out of the box without having to adjust settings or type terminal commands to do so. I also want Linux and Windows programs running in a shared environment and to interact with each other better
Proton doesn’t always work, and what’s worse is it’s not consistent.
What works on one person’s machine, may not work on a different one. But in windows, the game works fine on both.
I’m looking at you, Distant Worlds and Distant Worlds 2.
I’ve never gotten DW to work, and DW2 worked for a while, but hasn’t worked for me in over a year.
Yeah, I’m not sure why we’re being shit on for just wanting software to work properly out of the box
I can play 90% of my games without efforts. 5% are to old, the other 5% are EA Games, need uplay or whatever shitty launcher, have Anti-Cheat - stuff you usually wouldn’t want to have on your PC anyway
With steamOS their investment in proton your wish has largely been granted. Native support would be better sure but ill take it
I wish more game/software had Linux support. I know there’s wine but still
There, FTFY
I’m surprised I haven’t seen blender here yet, but I really think blender is one of open source’s greatest achievements. It feels like a professional software and is also used in the industry.
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
Libre Office.
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.
I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.