What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts?

I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.

It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.

What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?

EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.

Norgur,

Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible

makemake,

I use it too, wouldn’t call it better than audible though. IOS beta app is not great.

Norgur,

I don't use iOS, so your mileage may vary. The android App works fine.

directive0,
@directive0@lemmy.world avatar

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.

atlasraven31,

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

fubo,

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

elouboub,
@elouboub@kbin.social avatar

And KDE looks so much better than windows' DE. It's also more versatile.

Gnome just copied Apple, which I guess somebody had to do in order to have them switch to something that looks familiar.

nutbutter,

Actually, Apple copied GNOME.

massive_bereavement,
@massive_bereavement@kbin.social avatar

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.

bleistift2,

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.

cujo,
@cujo@sh.itjust.works avatar

I recently switch to OnlyOffice for their UI/UX, and it’s been brilliant. LibreOffice is a delight, though.

moreeni,

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.

eestileib,

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.

themz,
@themz@lemmy.world avatar

Ah, sexism is alive and well in tech.

eestileib,

In my case, lesbianism.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

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

portside,

Also KeePass, I’ve switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP’s.

flameguy21,

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

dantheclamman,
@dantheclamman@lemmy.world avatar

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

pineapplelover,

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!

RobotToaster,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

LibreOffice, I’m not sure it’s better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.

Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store

Inkscape, I’m not even sure what the proprietary version is?

Ironfacebuster,

I was setting up a Plex server, but when I noticed I had to pay to be able to play my own content on my phone I immediately switched to jellyfin. Haven’t been able to test it yet, but as long as I don’t need to pay them to be able to watch my own content on my own devices on my own network, I’ll be happy!

anthonylavado,
@anthonylavado@lemmy.ca avatar

No, you don’t have to pay us a dime.

anthonylavado,
@anthonylavado@lemmy.ca avatar

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

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