No Stupid Questions

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

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

VLC

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.

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.

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.

Libre Office.

Blender has to be the best at being a swiss army tool, the other software require using other software for what they are missing while blender can do it all, its objectively better at being the singular tool for the job if you want to not leave one software

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.

The Apache Web Server

Syncthing.

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

These comments are like a treasure trove.

I didn't see anyone mention Kodi as an alternative to smart TVs. It's better in every way than the Apple TV I won from a raffle at work. The best part is that my TV box is just a computer so I can use it to host other services too

I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.

The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don't know if there's a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.

Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn't as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.

Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience

KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I'm happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There's Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io

I certainly like GIMP and Inkscape better than Photoshop and Illustrator, though any professional photo editor or graphic artist would probably fight me on that lol

But Krita is the best drawing/painting program of all time and I stand by that.

Jellyfin.

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

Immich might not hold up yet in every aspect to Google photos, but I was and am still blown away by how much better face detection and grouping works. I cannot believe how ridiculously bad that feature is in Google, you just have to pray that it works, and if it messes up, it's extremely annoying to fix. In immich, it works exactly as you'd expect.

all fossify apps in android. I find most android apps for basic tasks heavily overbloated, even the ones directly from google.

Okular for pdf viewing on pc

Breezy weather for Android. It works exactly the same, and doesn't have any of the privacy bullshit strings attached.

Compiz, Wayfire, and KWin all outshine both Windows and MacOS in quality and render performance.

The amount of visual magic in Compiz and Wayfire especially is both incredibly useful but also hilarious.

3D desktop cube is a great way to handle multiple desktops, but rotating your windows to any angle is just to show off to your friends lol.

Almost any Foss image editor, PDF viewer or simple app that does one thing without ads or bullshit. Markor, Wireguard, etc. They have nothing else to do but function.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm really sorry but Joplin is not and will not ever be "objectively" better than Obsidian. SilverBullet is subjectively better than Obsidian though. Note taking is such a heavily opinionated matter that there's no scope for objectivity there.

Im not sure i can say its objectively better, but i like godot much more than unity

Krita is a fantastic image editor with a customizable UI that’s very powerful but easy to use.

Pixelmator is a waste of $70 when you get more (you can resize the toolbar buttons!) for free with Krita.

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

NMAP still has a semi-open-source license. Not sure if anyone else considers in FOSS, but it's a critical tool in network security.

Also, I've never used any commercial video editing software but kdenlive is awesome.

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)

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.

emacs

emacs

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.

OpenDroneMap. It's a suite that provides photogrammetry, stitching, volumetric analysis, geographic correlation, and 3D model conversion from aerial and non-aerial photos. And that's only the features that I use myself. It defaults to CPU-only rendering, so you don't need a big bad GPU to GSD.

Even ignoring the lack of subscription cost, ODM performs at least as well as other applications I tried such as Pix4D. Professionally, I use it for year-over-year kelp bed monitoring, photosynthetic mass analysis, and home construction analysis, specifically volumetric infill needs. Personally, I use it to generate 3D models of my boat interior, which I convert to STL files for arranging infrastructure in limited spaces.

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

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.

Markor: one of the few Android text editors/notepads that saves text to text files (crazy idea, right?) and works rally well with Syncthing.

Conversations.im for Android is an incredibly well made XMPP/Jabber messenger, and their message polling and real-time message delivery is unmatched AFAIK.

ratbag (and the frontend, piper) is a tool for remapping buttons on mice with a sensible interface. Beats installing proprietary Logitech software.