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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[–] [email protected] 63 points 6 days ago (5 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's amazing how much time is saved on projects when you don't have to deal with and maintain Autodesk's and Adobe's licensing insanity.

Like 90% of downtime would be because the license server was down because of a security update and IT was trying to troubleshoot with Autodesk or a user forgot their Adobe password... Not because of anything actually breaking.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.

If I remember correctly, Blender began it's life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Jellyfin vs Plex

Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Inkscape and kdenlive have both been awesome. Might need to try ansel, never heard of it before

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Damn straight. I was an open office guy for a while, but word had a slight edge. Now that edge is gone and Libre Office is the clear winner. I will not be going back.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Syncthing.

Supports LAN Syncing and no limits other then the hardware you host yourself.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Over the last few years I've been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It's as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I'm working much faster.

Now, Krita doesn't have all of CSP's niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

Similarly CSP's 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender's. Which is weird because CSP isn't a modeling program - you'd think they'd stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Kdenlive is really really good. This isn't an expert opinon. I don't do a ton of video editing but it feels both easy to learn (for a layman like me) and powerful enough to do anything I need it to do

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

QGIS for geographic/geospatial data. Built on shoulders of FOSS giants, embracing latest highly interoperable standards, it is amazing !

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I just want to comment that this is one of the most helpful and full of good info posts I’ve seen on Lemmy in a long while.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Microsoft Terminal vs the default Command Prompt haha. VS Code vs Visual Studio.

In general software is one of the rare thing where ordinary people can "mass produce" things that compete with commercial offerings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (3 children)

FOSS software is great :D

I would also suggest VSCodium as basically VSCode without MS’s telemetry. The only actual downside is that a few proprietary extensions don’t work (most notably the MS ones)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

KDE Connect was rock solid when I was testing it out with an S24u. The only real issue I had with it was that it was missing RCS (RCS is locked down to only proprietary google messages/iMessage systems) and a seamless way to go from desktop notification to SCRCPY/screen mirroring.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

hell yeah KDE connect is great! I just use it for transferring files and my clipboard…

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Molly for signal if that counts

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Keepass. ill skip the obvious and just mention the really neat features that other server/cloud based password managers dont or cant have.

  • on desktop, you dont need any browser extension to fill in passwords since the "autotype" feature in keepassXC handles that. this means your browser has no to access your database at all. any password manager thats connected to your browser in any way is a huge security risk imo.
    (i would recommend this extension that changes the window title though)

  • you can have 2 databases open at the same time (in keepassXC and keepassDX at least), which means you can have important logins in one and everything else in the other one. if you ever get annoyed having to unlock your vault using a really long master password just so you can autofill some crappy forum password then you might get why 2 databases is a good idea!

  • you can fill in login details for desktop programs. (maybe others do this now but they didnt when i switched to keepass years ago)

Aegis authenticator. its been years since ive used google's authenticator app so maybe its improved now, but it used to be very spartan. it showed you your OTP codes and thats about it.

Aegis lets you add an icon to each entry and the different sized text makes things a lot easier to read. the visual timer is much clearer as well and the text turns red when its close to running out.

you can also backup your codes so if you lose your phone its no big deal. you can unlock the app with your fingerprint. you can tap on a code and then have it add that to the clipboard and then go back to the previous app

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

interesting that keepassXC doesn’t need a browser extension. I might have to try it out, seems pretty cool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

yea it simulates keypresses somehow, like how autohotkey or xdotool does. i should probably throw out a disclaimer before i hype it up too much though :p

it used to work a lot better back when most sites had both the username and password input box on the same page. sites like google have started putting them on different pages now which confuses things. the sequence of keys it sends is {USERNAME}{TAB}{PASSWORD}{ENTER} so it doesnt really have awareness of the actual input box elements the way a browser extension would

the quick fix for this is to just use the separate hotkeys ctrl+1 to autotype the username and then ctrl+2 for the password

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

My paint and Krita are great, I use them daily

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Lets not forget about games!

Hedgewars is better than most "Worms" games.

Warzone 2100 is more fun than many proprietary RTS games.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

As a proffessional, krita shits on photoshop (f tier) and clip (a tier) when it comes to painting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

PCSX2: better resolution than PS2, has save states, and you can use reshade in some games to make them look better.

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