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)
Heliboard
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.
True. I hate that MS office pushes you to yse onedrive. Also, onedrive’s syncing is horrible.
It puts all your synced folders into a separate but not really sort of “OneDrive” folder. It doesn’t sync very well from my experience. And I lost a bunch of my data due to OneDrive not backing up properly. Now I use pCloud, which actually syncs things in a sane way (ie not creating two separate folders called “OneDrive” and “OneDrive - [workplace name]”) and also have a way better desktop app (you don’t need to navigate the stupid toolbar menu thing to get to settings, pcloud just has an app with organised menus! surely MS has enough funding to make a good onedrive desktop app? right?)
Microsoft “Why do you need folders when you can just dump everything in the root of the folder!” OneDrive
with Microsoft’s funding and manpower they can certainly make a better sync app, they simply choose not to. iCloud isn’t much better with only 5GB of free storage and is to iOS as Office 365/OneDrive/an MS account is to Windows. pCloud and IceDrive, despite not being the most profitable company in the present day, both are able to offer 10GB (pCloud annoyingly needs referrals to get up to that, but still)
Microsoft’s development tools are first in class IMO, but not much else
I agree with so much that has been said here. VLC, Linux as a whole (or GNU/Linux, of course) and many more. Obsidian is sadly not open source but its free and it’s absolutely amazing!
What I haven’t found yet is a FOSS (or even just “free as in beer”) replacement for MS Project. I want to plan out a top level view of what we have to do as a team to reach some goal, assign multiple team members to one “task”, allocate a set amount of their time and see at what times we might be over or under capacity. The FOSS planing tools I’ve seen mostly work in “shifts” or let you assign one task to one person. But we’re in R&D and if I plan for 40 hours of “conceptual work” over the span of a month and assign Sarah and Steve to this with 20 hours each I don’t want to babysit their shifts. They will do the work when it suits them.
The only one I’ve seen that could do what I need is ProjectLibre but the FOSS desktop version has been abandoned a while ago and is still very buggy.
Sorry for placing this here but maybe someone knows something…
Taiga (https://taiga.io/) could be what you’re seeking.
There is logseq. I love it.
As an alternative to Obsidian, there is Trilium. Much the same stuff, but actually open-source
yep I like Obsidian. It’s a lot better than what the much bigger companies are doing. I also like Joplin for quicker notes because the vault system in obsidian is really annoying since it’s slow to switch between them and they all have individual settings and plugins (great for customisation, but horrible for getting setup quick)
Taiga is an open-source and self-hosted project management tool. Not sure if it has all the functionality you need, but it seems quite good. Never tried it though, since I don’t really do any important projects. Who knows, it could be amazing!
Most of them
fair enough.
Joplin over Evernote.
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.
I love the small minimalist adwatia apps on flathub.
Please tell me what you use to edit and sign PDFs
I use okular to edit PDFs.
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.
I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.
NanaZip is a modern fork of 7zip, useful if you’re on Windows 11
IMO WinRAR was only ever did one useful thing and that was breaking up files into arbitrary sizes for USENET theft
I’d say Logseq is better than any note-taking alternative that works in the same way. It’s a bit different to regular note-taking apps as it acts more as a knowledge database based on tags, than with a regular file-folder structure. Also I prefer Actual Budget to YNAB, as it’s starting to have even more features than YNAB and actually supports things like bank syncing for major parts of Europe that even YNAB doesn’t. And it’s free to host yourself or really cheap to host through PikaPods. But it’s hard to say “objectively” because in the end, a lot of it is subjective. If people are used to running one program, it’ll be hard to switch to another, even if it’s “objectively” better.
The largest issue with FOSS applications is that many contributors don’t have any UX/UI knowledge, which is a huge factor in why people choose one program over another. I’d argue GIMP is a mess compared to Photoshop, even if GIMP is able to do many, many things that Photoshop is able to.
Logseq is the best note taking app for me. And a lot of my programmer/adhd colleagues. I cannot keep order in my notes and logseq does it for me. It’s so essential for my workflow that I have a monthly donation to the project set up.
Ive used gimp for over 18 years. Im so used to it i find photoshop is a mess lol
That’s less and opinion than Stockholm syndrome.
There’s a very good argument for Blender, though, but 3D software is so specialized that I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to.
And while we’re on creativity software, the same goes for Godot. Arguable, but very dependent on what you’re doing.
I like godot a lot more than unity. Both are great, but besides being open-source, Godot loads way faster and GDScript is super simple and is built in to the engine vs needing to use a separate IDE. I would say that in terms of 3D graphics, Godot is catching up but not quite there yet compared to the likes of Unity and Unreal.
Nah. Its just im used to how to do things in gimp. And am clueless in photoshop
interesting, I’ll have to try loqseq.
That might explain why some FOSS apps have terrible UI. There’s plenty that have really really good UI as well
Definitely and sadly not better than Obsidian. Also it can’t sync and it stinks for that
From my limited experience with Obsidian, I still preferred Logseq actually. And the syncing is easily done by just storing the markdown files in a cloud folder. But yeah, it’s subjective for sure.
I like Obsidian too. That said, unless I’m handling a huge amount of notes at once, Joplin works much better, esp. for quick notes and to-do lists. Obsidian’s vaults are a bit annoying to switch through. I still use Obsidian for like one or two things but most of my notes are now in Joplin (which can sync as well!)
Joplin is awesome on iPhone and Linux but I hate that there isn’t any graphs for note links. It’s super easy to setup and sync though!
yeah, sync is really simple to do, and I really like that it’s cross-platform
I have multiple different graphs/vaults/whatever synced by simply storing the markdown files in a synced folder and I never had any issues. The new version of logseq is supposed to use a database and syncing, afaik.
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
LibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
The others 100% were always better.
You sound like you know your LibreOffice.
My experience is they are quite different but I’ve been able to do the same things for the most part.
But how the hell do I make a pivot table that looks and functions as nice as the plain old default one in Excel?
Excel is probably the one sore spot for LibreOffice, but also Google’s suite and really everyone else. Excel is tough to beat, especially when you consider the additional power of things like Power Query and Excel on web having JavaScript functions.
That said: I truly despite pivot tables and I no longer use them. I use lookups, countif, or other functions to display what I need, otherwise I use Power Query.
Whaaaaaaaat? Pivot tables are a 2 second job to summarise large amounts of transaction data or similar by month or year. Lookups or countifs would take so much longer!
Not to mention that you can drill into the data using them.
Excel is the one thing LibreOffice still falls behind on. It’s really hard to compete with Excel, specifically.
Ugh I hate excel. It can’t do the most basic things like search and replace things reliably in all cases. I have moved literally all data analysis besides the absolute basic “count” and “sum” operations to python in spyder. 200x faster, repeatable, won’t freeze up with large datssetd, and has never once failed a basic operation like a search and replace. Not to mention the localization issues and the fact that it will fuck things up completely if you install a new printer because Microsoft decided the printer has priority of your document and spreadsheet layouts over choosing a default.
I had some evaluation board software that whenever the value dipped below -1, would place the comma completely randomly in the floating point number.
Excel almost had a heart attack when I asked it to search and replace ”-1” with “-1,” and it found all of the cases just fine, but decides to ignore the replace and not place a comma at all. If I tried to convert them to a number, it freaked out and placed the decimal place also randomly, different than the input. And of course trying to do in-place operations on a column for export is just painful.
Hell, in notepad++ I could just regex the digit range that was preceded by a ”-1” and get everything replaced using a few brackets.
Not to mention how terrible the graphs work in comparison and how bad they look with the default options 😅. But hey, you can automatically put in a drop shadow or frame it in a useless way.
There are some people who can work very efficiently and do some crazy things in excel (like the excel doom) but unless you have literally been using it daily for many years and actively looking for ways to speed up, then it is just as easy or easier to do things in an actual data processing program like matlab, octave, python, or R (And I am not a coder) and you can literally copy paste a file name for the next full dataset.
I feel PowerPoint is much more user friendly and functional than Impress
I really like OnlyOffice, pretty much a carbon copy of the MS Office UI and doesn’t screw up on MS-specific files (docx, pptx, etc.)
Also, I like that OnlyOffice, unlike MS Office, has all the things in one app vs having separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc. You can just tab between your different documents!
OBS and VLC yeah.
You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and… yeah, no, unfortunately.
I don’t even think it’s better than MS Office, but these days I’d (unfortunately) take Google’s Office suite over both.
Only Office is a much younger project and is leaps ahead. It’s sad really, I used to champion LO since the OOo days. Doesn’t make sense these days anymore.
I feel the same. It’s my daily driver for about 6 months now in a professional setting with high demands. I have kept the Microsoft suite (and have not yet transitioned Powerpoint). When I go back to compare I can’t stand all the needy Microsoft interruptions getting in my way.
Sorry, freudian slip. Edited to avoid future confusion.
Nope, you were right and I was agreeing with you, and adding that a much younger project compared to LO is already ahead.
Oh, I’m changing it back, then.
FWIW, Only Office IS much better (hey, at least it doesn’t open xls files with black text on black backgrounds on dark mode!), and I do think its Google-inspired “apps-as-tabs” thing is the future for this stuff. I’m not sure I’d rank it above those, but it’s certainly a much more… competitive, I guess? approach.
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
Depends on your criteria. As long as your calculations are simple, it doesn’t matter which tool you use.
For slightly more demanding calculations, Calc just can’t handle it like Excel does. Then again, using spreadsheets for demanding calculations is just asking for trouble.
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
LibreOffice is also more compatible that Microsoft Word. It helped me and a friend to save his grandpa’s old writings that were stored in AppleWorks (.cwk) files.
Removed by mod
Betterbird email client.
There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
rar has recovery records. i know it’s a somewhat niche feature, one far more popular in the ‘olden days’ especially in certain uh… ‘venues’… but it’s something i’ve always used when making backups with it.
Tell me more.
Files shared on Usenet (which may violate piracy laws) are usually packed in the rar format
I’m sorry I should have specified. I’m curious about the recovery records feature.
It essentially splits the archive into multiple rar sub-files (*.r00, *.r01, etc.) and then creates several more chunks that contain parity information (par2 files) that go with it. By doing so, if you then lose *.r45 but get *.r00-r99 you can recover the *.r45 file from the parity (par2) data. It’s pretty slick.
Neat, thank you!
Removed by mod
Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both commission and decompression, and is native to macOS.
7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
fre:ac is way, way better than Exact Audio Copy. Audiophiles like to suck the dick of EAC and don’t trust any other software to rip CD’s. fre:ac literally has all the same features and more. There’s a Windows and Mac version as well but they refuse to even acknowledge it. I’m a Linux audiophile btw.
PCSX2: better resolution than PS2, has save states, and you can use reshade in some games to make them look better.
ShareX or flameshot for taking screenshots. ShareX needs some tweaks out of the box but once it’s tweaked it is so much more convenient when you need to make super quick tweaks/edits like adding steps or highlights or something.
ShareX is amazing, it just needs a big UX improvement. If you’re not technical of nature, the program is kinda too much at once. I can’t recommend it easely to my family until it has a simpler interface option.
Flameshot is so good.
woah that looks really cool, I have to try those out. 👀
edit: WAIT SHAREX HAS OCR???
IT CAN CAPTURE REGIONS OF THE SCREEN? IT HAS ACTUALLY GOOD HOTKEYS??? WOAHHHHH
IT SCREENRECORDS TOO??
i guess I don’t need OBS (I’ll keep it around though in case I need to use the camera since I use that sometimes)
What can I say, except your welcome 🤗
not to be that guy, but…
*you’re (IT’S NOT THAT HARD IT IS “YOU ARE”)
Well that’s funny because I am that guy. I blame it on my phone’s keyboard. Probably walking and swiping away as usual.
I edited because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.
Shame.
I agree so much for flameshot. For work I moved to a Mac and we are not allowed to install flameshot (signing issue), and the workflow for taking screenshots (e.g., when writing documentation) is so much worse and slow with the default macOS tooling.
Yes this is my main use case too, documentation. Flameshot and sharex are so quick for it. The osx one blows. So many clicks and drags. I’d rather just click and drag a box instead of spawn a box then move the corners around lol
As a proffessional, krita shits on photoshop (f tier) and clip (a tier) when it comes to painting.
