What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?

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• sebi@lemmings.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    for windows, I also like SumatraPDF

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    1000% agree. Running e/os on fairphone and installed fdroid.

    I don’t have 100% parity with my old samsung, but it’s a damn close 98%.

    and I don’t need to be concerned with my data being harvested nearly as much since I’m outside the google garden.

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  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Especially on mobile FOSS often makes a big difference to user experience cleanness, not just privacy/freedom that you’ll be glad for later.

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• Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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

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  • Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It also works as a weather provider for Gadgetbridge!

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    it also has a fun name :D

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  • viking@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Unfortunately they use some random font to display the temperature in the toolbar that is not the system font and can’t be changed. Whatever they are using is larger than the clock font and distorts the appearance.

    Image

    Here it’s side by side with Today Weather.

    The original app (geometric weather) as much better, but they stopped updating it, hence the breezy fork came to be. If only they didn’t mess with the fonts, I would have loved to use it.

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• janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah gimp is atrocious in terms of UI/UX

    Nobody with a clue about graphics would ever recommend gimp

    It has always been a piece of sh… going back 20 years already

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    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      People learned on Photoshop, and then they’re upset because GIMP does things differently. I guarantee you if somebody had learned on GIMP first, it would be the other way around.

      There’s nothing intuitive about Photoshop. If you pick it up with zero knowledge and try to do anything, you can’t. You have to take a class to learn how to use it, same as GIMP.

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    • rodneylives@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

      I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

      And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

      It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

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    • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Or, is it your hesitation to adopt Gimp’s UI standards?

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  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    +1 for Inkscape. I have no experience with the commercial competition but I’ve found Inkscape awesome, and used it for things it was probably never intended for.

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  • VeryVito@lemmy.ml ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Krita is very, very good indeed. It deserves all the praise it gets.

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  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I used lots of FOSS software, and GIMP is by far the worst I’ve come across when compared against its paid competition.

    I hate Adobe the company, but Photoshop really is the gold standard.

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    • janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      GIMP certainly has a lot of UI problems that seem to have persisted for no other reason than “nobody got around to fixing it”

      Also, it’s 2025 and you STILL can’t just draw a circle lmfao

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    • alansuspect@aussie.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Its not FOSS but if you need a work alterative to GIMP I use Photopea a lot. Works as a PWA too.

      I’ve been using design software for over 25 years; Photoshop has been there for the majority but I’ve often tried coming back to GIMP here and there, but it’s never grabbed me in a useable way.

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Krita seems great. Unfortunately I am not of the artistic type so I can’t really comment on its functionality, but I would say my experience moving from Illustrator to Inkscape has been awesome! (I still can’t figure out how to make lines with inkscape though…the making lines button makes stretched out ovals instead…maybe it thinks I’m making a polygon?)

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    • janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Are you referring to the ends of the lines being rounded? You can change the “cap” type of a stroke path to rounded, square, or sharply pointed using the attribute menu on the right (would provide screenshot but am on mobile, apologies)

      inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io/…/strokes.html

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Krita was by far the best when I had a Wacom.

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    • janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It works out of box with my obscure Samsung S-pen touchscreen laptop from 2016, on Debian with no driver preconfig. I am thoroughly impressed

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  • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I like GIMP but find Inkscape impossible to use

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    • Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      For me, it is the other way round. Probably depends on what you are doing.

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    • janus2@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ll admit Inkscape’s UI and menus are a disorganized mess. I’m fortunate I learned it while still a high schooler with too much time on her hands

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• _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Jellyfin.

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  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Debatable. It is an incredible piece of FOSS, but whether or not it’s better than Plex really depends on your use case. Plex is much better for remote access and the “wife factor”.

    The initial goal of a self-hosted video platform must be encouraging adoption. And you have to follow a “the customer is always right” (the actual meaning, not the bastardized Karen-screaming-at-customer-service version) mentality in regards to this; Even if you have the best Jellyfin server in the world, it’s ultimately worthless if your friends and family refuse to use it. Your service needs to be accessible to the average user, and the unfortunate reality is that the average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is. When trying to encourage adoption, you’re facing a lot of social inertia in regards to people simply going “eh, I know Netflix isn’t perfect, but it already works.” You need to provide a service that is superior to other platforms in some meaningful way. And simply being free isn’t enough value for some people, because individuals will weigh the cost differently depending upon how heavily they factor it into the Cost:Convenience ratio that they’re willing to tolerate.

    And this is where the wife factor comes into play: Is your spouse/partner going to be willing to use it? Does it provide enough convenience that they’ll be willing to ditch the streaming services? Now how about your extended family? And if you’re only ever planning on watching at home on LAN, Jellyfin may be perfect. But Plex’s unified login experience is much easier for the average user to understand. I can walk my mother-in-law through the account creation and login process over the phone, because it’s familiar. If she can figure out how to make a Netflix or Hulu account, she can figure out how to make a Plex account. You simply sign in, and your available libraries show up. Easy.

    But Jellyfin will never be able to provide a unified login experience, because the entire platform is built to rebel against that; A unified login would require a centralized authentication server like Plex runs, and that’s specifically what Jellyfin is designed against.

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    • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s a whole lotta words to say you don’t know how to set up Jellyfin correctly.

      My whole family loves it, they use it across quite a few different devices, and they enjoy the fact that they can get anything they want using Jellyseer. And since I’m not some paranoid nutter that thinks having my services exposed to the web is going to be the end of my life, they also enjoy the unified account experience that the LDAP server provides them, where they can manage their SSO password and 2FA from an easy-to-use web interface that in turn allows them to access all the other services on the server, and from any device anywhere in the world without needing to do stupid stuff like upgrade their router for Tailscale.

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    • sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I agree with all of this, but I do have a bit of pushback- The account creation process, with the steps of create, verify, provide username to host, wait for invite, accept invite, pin to sidebar is enough of a barrier that it stops some people. I have a handful of guest accounts already setup and sorted that I toss out to interested people, and if they find it useful only then do I have them jump through the hoops of creating their own account.

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    • witx@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      “Wife Factor”

      You can leave that type of shit out the door and speak like a decent human being

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    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is

      They don’t need to, just give them a url, username and password and let them type each for each field.

      (If you mean because you want them to configure a vpn to access your jellyfin instance, then just expose it to the internet, which surely you pretty much have to do for your plex instance)

      Cost:Convenience

      Do people really think this or will they think (like everyone i know) that it’s free and I can watch what I want.

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    • Zink@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The performance of Jellyfin is so much better in my experience. That and the FOSS benefits won me over quickly, and I have had a lifetime Plex pass for years.

      The downside is that you have to do a little IT work if you want to share with family in an easy (for them) way and use https. For sure, it’s a thing, but for me as a non web dev it was worth it.

      Now I can give family and friends a URL, login, password, and one or more app suggestions depending on their device and type of media. And all of them seem to have snappy performance while not showing my people ads or hitting them up for paid services.

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• hikaru755@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Immich might not be better yet in every aspect than Google photos, but I was 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.

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Didn’t google’s recognition thing accidentally put pictures of black people under the gorilla category?

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    • hikaru755@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Hadn’t heard of that but wouldn’t surprise me

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  • ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s def on par with Apple

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Never tried Google’s face detection, but given that their search AI told people to eat rocks daily, I’m not surprised. Yeah, Immich looks great. I need to set that up soon, trying to set my old laptop with docker

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    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m also looking forward to trying Immich, but I’m slowed down because I decided I should learn podman and use that instead of docker!

      I do a lot of photo organising myself with file structure and timestamp filenames, but it looks like I can have Immich see my ‘proper’ library of files, and for the family it’s hopefully a helpful tool.

      Does anyone know how well the iPhone app works? I had problems with the next cloud app, which otherwise was great for connecting my general web of tech with an iPhone.

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• mlg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I remember fucking around with Compiz back when it was still called Beryl. It was I think just before Window Vista came out? My computer was too shit for Vista, but had no problem with Beryl - wobbly windows, app previews when you hover the taskbar icon, stackable windows, desktop cube, etc.

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    • dryfter@lemm.ee ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Man this is a trip I remember Beryl and when it turned to Compiz. I spent way more time than I care to admit just spinning stuff around and playing with effects than accomplishing anything of meaningful value.

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    interesting

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• eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  emacs

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  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    SuperCollider

    Is that what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna fight?

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  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Vi! Vi! Vi!

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    • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I get the joke, but does it really make sense to even begin comparing Emacs to Vi(m) anymore? It’s almost like comparing a full Linux distro to nano.

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• Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I love the small minimalist adwatia apps on flathub.

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  • ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is soo real, and applies three fold for smartphone apps. OSS docuemtn scanner and Metronome and Tuner by thetwom are GOATs.

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I like nomacs and sumatrapdf, they’re great!

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  • ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Please tell me what you use to edit and sign PDFs

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    • jbd@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I use okular to edit PDFs.

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    • markovs_gun@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I am also curious. I’m spoiled by having access to Bluebeam at work and I have yet to find any software that comes close to the same ease of functionality for editing PDFs, even for extremely basic things like splitting, merging, and rotating pages.

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• TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  REALLY simple, but “Open Sodoku”. It’s just a Sodoku app without ads.

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    fun

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  • jacksilver@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    While I’m all for glfree sudoku “Studio Goya” and their series of sudoku apps are more than worth the cost, especially Miracle Sudoku

    I know this is a thread about Foss, but they really put some crazy thought into these puzzles.

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    • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ll trust you and pick it up.

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• angelmountain@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Linux. For desktops I like it as well, but I can understand some arguments against it. However, for all other cases there is hardly any match. The internet basically runs on it.

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• tja@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  emacs

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  • lost_screwdriver@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You could argue emics & it’s ecosystem, since all the extentions make it really powerful. For me emacs is more like a shell or a terminal. Itself is pretty useless, but there are a lot of tools, that work with it and integrate with one another. Emacs is just somewhat graphical version of a terminal with a shell running on it

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  • Tja@programming.dev ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It just lacks a good text editor!

    Yes, I’m a dad…

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    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      … tja and Tja; are these your alt accounts?

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• absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Syncthing!

  I don’t even know what to compare it to, I have been using it so long.

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  • scheep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    peer to peer syncing!

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    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      that is exactly what Syncthing is, my desktop to my server to my laptop to my phone…

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  • TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hard disagree. I’ve had so many issues with Syncthing deleting files and refusing to connect over LAN that I’ve never had with Resilio Sync.

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    • krdo@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Synchthing definitely needs some tweaking until it works the way you want it. I’ve been using it for the psst five years and I’m pretty happy with it today. I have several folders synched between two servers and a handful of devices, including my Android phone. It has completely replaced Dropbox for me.

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    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Weird, I have 100’s of thousands of files synced.

      Been using it for years.

      Linux, windows and Mac in the circuit. Never a problem that wasn’t user error.

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• LouSlash@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Image

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• RandomVideos@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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

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• nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• arkanoid@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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• llama@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Any programming language other than Java or Dotnet. Apache web server over Microsoft IIS.

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• flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I really like Frameshot for screenshots.

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• Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The Linux ecosystem of distros vs other OSs.

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• JayleneSlide@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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• MTK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Honestly, almost all Microsoft products are objectively worse than FOSS alternatives, they are just so big that people are unwilling to escape the Microsoft ecosystem.

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• Allero@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  OBS, Portmaster, Trilium, FlightGear

  +all the minimalist Adwaita apps on the Flathub. Love 'em.

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• zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Sorry, Joplin is a nightmare. I want something that stores Markdown in flat files, not a database with changing versions where one version of the db doesn’t work in another version.

  I tried to port the database over from another system, but the new version of Joplin wouldn’t read from the old version’s database, and it would corrupt the database when I tried to open it. What a crock of shit. I had to figure out how to dump the data from the tables using sqlite.

  I use nb now instead. It is a bit wonky because it uses NodeJS, but you can view and edit files in a web browser, and it saves each entry as a .md file, which is the sane and rational way to do it. So, if nb ever fucks off, I have all my work in a directory of Markdown files, not some broken-ass sqlite database.

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• MITM0@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Would you be interested in FOSS games ??

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• zqps@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  pdfSAM. OBS. Veracrypt. A bunch of macOS usability tools that I am definitely taking for granted at this point.

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• expr@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  www.visidata.org

  Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child’s play in comparison.

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• acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  LibreWolf and other Firefox forks.

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• tatann@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  AntennaPod is a pretty great podcast player, far better than the one Google did (and abandonned)

  Newsblur is the only RSS reader that I’ve found that can apply filters to feeds

  I’ve switched from Discord to Element with some friends for daily text chat and vocal chat (video games) and it’s less cluttered than Discord, and the voice even sounds better

  SpamBlocker is a better phone/SMS spam filter than the proprietary ones I’ve tried

  Firefox (and forks) has been my browser for more than 20 years, I can’t go back to proprietary ones

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• SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I’ll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet, rsync and mpv.

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