VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.

Bitwarden password manager. I've used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.

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.

My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.

OBS is so good that I don't know why anyone would ever use X-split.

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.

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.

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.

All the Linux file managers I've tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.

Inkscape?

Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible

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

Firefox/LibreWolf

VLC >> everything else

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.

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

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.

From my computing guide https://lemmy.ml/post/511377 :

The following software is shared by both Linux and Windows, which will astound you, because the quality of these is the best in their respective categories. There will be a (*) marking for the better one, and (^) if it is FLOSS.

As you might have noticed some patterns and anomalies:

• Most of the winners here are FLOSS and cross platform at the same time, consistently.
• I did not mention the best for Linux file managers
• A few of these do not have ^ which means they are not FLOSS
• XNViewMP and Filelist Creator are rarities in that they are not FLOSS, yet are benevolent pieces of adware/spyware-free software available as cross-platform, and also XNView is the winner of 2 types of software, because it is the ultimate tool for anything to do with images. Nothing comes close, and never has.
• SMART HDD/SSD monitoring tool is an issue on Linux, because free tools cannot do external HDDs for some reason, even though on Windows this is possible. (https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux) R-Studio can, but it is extremely expensive and nothing else works from my experience.
• MS Office is the superior tool for office and document work. This is a truth we have to live with.

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.

Kodi (formerly XBMC) beats pretty much all streaming services in terms of UI.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unironically, the terminal.

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