What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?
What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?
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)
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.
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!
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
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 are basically do not exist anymore.
Dnscrypt-proxy has no comparison, IMO. DNS encryption, caching, IP & domain blocking, local DoH. It's so useful.
Pdftk
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.
Molly for signal if that counts
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Just from top of my head and from what I have to use at work:
- Dolphin vs. Explorer - Dolphin is sooo much better and useful it's not evwn funny
- Notepad++ vs. Notepad - day and night, even though Notepad got an overhaul in W11 it's still piece of shit compared to Notepad++
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
- ImageGlass, Nomacs, Gwenview, etc. vs. MS Photos - same as above, windows picture viewer is now worse than ever while open source alternatives get better and better
- and plenty others, like Linux vs. Windows, lol
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.
Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I've tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.
Folks will argue that it's harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.
OBS, Portmaster, Trilium, FlightGear
+all the minimalist Adwaita apps on the Flathub. Love 'em.
Heliboard
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.
Actually, there's lots of FOSS software which is at least just as good as proprietary. Most FOSS lacks the support of proprietary though. And I don't mean the "call someone on the other end of the world" support, I mean manuals, tutorials and stuff like that. /Off topic
On topic: Apache, Git, Home Assistant and Jellyfin.
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.
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
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child's play in comparison.
Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity
The only drawback for some users would be that it's CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)
Lichess -> chess.com
But it's hard to be impartial / objective about modern stuff like that.
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.
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...
NAPS2. PDF scanning. Supports every platform. Dead simple for scanning and aggregsting multiple pages into a single pdf with ocr. Also can save as images.
There's a type of applications where I'd dump HomeAssistant, Pi-Hole and maybe TrueNAS and a few others where the FOSS option is the clear leader... if you're a power user trying to do things the proprietary equivalents won't even acknowledge as an option, but they're not something you'd give a normie.
I just don't think "objectively better" is a good way to look at it for a lot of this.
Betterbird email client.