this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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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)

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[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

Where it really shines is in that it works on a lot of lower end hardware, specially if you use proxies

[–] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 5 hours ago

Jellyfin vs Plex

Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours ago

Syncthing.

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

[–] Tiger@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 2 points 2 hours ago

There was another post in ask Lemmy about free stuff and people gave lots of good info there as well.

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 22 points 7 hours ago
[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 21 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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

[–] rmic@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] Zacryon@lemmy.wtf 56 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

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!

[–] nightlily@leminal.space 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

I know of AAA developers who prefer Blender over the competition now. It has made far more than is necessarily advertised widely.

[–] lefaucet@slrpnk.net 5 points 12 hours ago

It's amazing how much time is saved on projects when you don't have to deal with and maintain Autodesk's and Adobe's licensing insanity.

Like 90% of downtime would be because the license server was down because of a security update and IT was trying to troubleshoot with Autodesk or a user forgot their Adobe password... Not because of anything actually breaking.

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[–] spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 16 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.

[–] Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

The plain mail app in windows used to be quite alright. But then they deprecated it and now there is 10 different outlooks for it.

[–] paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 hours ago

Wino Mail is the closest drop-in replacement I've found for the old Windows 10 Mail app. It feels pretty similar.

[–] stinky@redlemmy.com 1 points 8 hours ago

Can you give any details at all

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 14 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 20 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 36 minutes ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] atempuser23@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for that. Just knowing those options are ‘good’ is exciting to see.

I still miss freehand.

I’ll have to check out kdenlive vs resolve.

Do you know of good tutorials for these I miss old school manuals.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 2 points 34 minutes ago

Their docs are pretty good: https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/

Otherwise youtube is full of tutorials tho the software gets a lot of updates so often the best new way is on the docs or stackexchange

[–] SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 5 points 12 hours ago

Damn straight. I was an open office guy for a while, but word had a slight edge. Now that edge is gone and Libre Office is the clear winner. I will not be going back.

[–] danciestlobster@lemm.ee 13 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

Clone Hero vs Guitar Hero

I don't really need to explain do I?

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[–] vala@lemmy.world 34 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 11 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 17 hours ago (2 children)
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[–] thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 7 points 14 hours ago
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