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.
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don’t get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I’m saying.
I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; “Media Monkey” etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.
For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.
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!
how do we even know something is quantum secure, like the tech isnt out yet is it?
Because we already know how quantum encryption works.
It’s like how we proved the Halting Problem was undecideable long before the first computer was ever built.
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
Obs?
Software for recording and live streaming. Stands for Open Broadcasting Software. It is the industry standard at this point.
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.
I recently switch to OnlyOffice for their UI/UX, and it’s been brilliant. LibreOffice is a delight, though.
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.
Blender for video editing. I haven’t even touched its 3D animation features.
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
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.
Vim is a great input method for other text editors like intellij or vscodium. The actual text editor? Nah.
vim unclips your carabiner with a disappointed look
Unrelated but I’ve got the urge to use Vim more now.
Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
Inkscape?
+1 un
VLC >> everything else
I wish VLC updated their UI to include a dark mode. I’ve never had luck with VLC skins
Hands down the clang C++ compiler, no commercial C++ compiler I’ve ever seen or even heard of even comes close enough that a comparison could be meaningful.
From my computing guide https://lemmy.ml/post/511377 :
The following software is shared by both Linux and Windows, which will astound you, because the quality of these is the best in their respective categories. There will be a (*) marking for the better one, and (^) if it is FLOSS.
Category Windows/Linux common Windows only Linux only PDF reader Calibre (* ^ ) SumatraPDF Okular Audio Player Audacious (* ^ ) foobar2000 - Video Player SMPlayer (* ^ )/VLC (* ^ ) MPC-HC - Image Viewer - JPEGView (* ^ )/IrfanView nomacs (* ^ ) File Manager Double Commander Explorer++ (*) Nautilus/Nemo/Dolphin/SpaceFM/Thunar Media Information Tool MediaInfo (* ^ ) - - Torrent Client Deluge (* ^ ) / QBitTorrent uTorrent - Screenshot/Record Tool FlameShot ShareX (* ^ ) Greenshot (*) Image Management XNViewMP (*) - ImageMagick Media Library XNViewMP (*) Shotwell (*) - Video Converter HandBrake (* ^ ) Freemake - Download Manager Xtreme Download Manager (* ^ ) Internet Download Manager - Specialised Downloader JDownloader (* ^ ) - - Compress/Archive Tool PeaZip (* ^ ) 7-Zip (* ^ )/WinRAR - Colour Picking Tool Colorpicker.fr (* ^ ) Instant Eyedropper gPick Search Index Tool - Everything (*) FSearch (* ^ ) Light Photo Editor Pinta (* ^ ) Paint.NET (*) - Advanced Photo Editor Krita (* ^ ) - - Professional Photo Editor GIMP (* ^ ) Adobe Photoshop (*) - Bulk Rename Tool Inviska Rename (* ^ ) Bulk Rename Utility - Bootable ISO Maker balenaEtcher (* ^ )/Ventoy Rufus (*) - FTP Client FileZilla (* ^ ) - - E-Mail Client Thunderbird (* ^ ) - - Office Suite LibreOffice/WPS Office MS Office 2007 (*) - Lightweight Text Editor Gedit (* ^ )/Lite XL - - Advanced IDE/Text Editor Geany (* ^ ) Sublime Text (*) - RSS Reader QuiteRSS (* ^ ) - TinyTinyRSS (* ^ )/Liferea Phone Remote Control KDE Connect (* ^ ) Pushbullet - File Index Creation Tool Filelist Creator (*) Snap2HTML LinuxDir2HTML Data Recovery/Disk Diagnosis R-Studio (* )/Testdisk (* ^ ) - Recuva SMART Disk Monitoring Tool R-Studio (*) CrystalDiskInfo (* ^ ) GSmartControl Disk Partitioning - AOMEI Partition Standard Free (*) GParted (* ^ ) DOS Emulator DOSBox-X (* ^ ) D-Fend Reloaded (*) - As you might have noticed some patterns and anomalies:
- Most of the winners here are FLOSS and cross platform at the same time, consistently.
- I did not mention the best for Linux file managers
- A few of these do not have ^ which means they are not FLOSS
- XNViewMP and Filelist Creator are rarities in that they are not FLOSS, yet are benevolent pieces of adware/spyware-free software available as cross-platform, and also XNView is the winner of 2 types of software, because it is the ultimate tool for anything to do with images. Nothing comes close, and never has.
- SMART HDD/SSD monitoring tool is an issue on Linux, because free tools cannot do external HDDs for some reason, even though on Windows this is possible. (https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux) R-Studio can, but it is extremely expensive and nothing else works from my experience.
- MS Office is the superior tool for office and document work. This is a truth we have to live with.
This is a fantastic list, thanks so much ♥
Grateful, you can read the full linked guide at the start of comment. If you go to the sublemmy/community, you can also see my very famous nonroot smartphone privacy guide. These will help you a lot!
In exchange, I demand cute emojis as donations.
Wait, is 7zip not available on Linux? Then what have I been using??
Most likely 7-Zip via WINE, or p7zip (which is stuck at 16.04 version, current is 23.01). I use 7-Zip and WinRAR via WINE.
I stick to 22.01 for best compatibility, since 23.01 brought a minor change with ARM64 executable compression non-standard with previous 7-Zip versions.
In general I like your list, but you should not recommend uTorrent to anybody for several reasons, they have pulled a lot of bullshit before, they have ads, and they possibly might be giving feds a back door, but I can’t prove that by any means.
My purpose to put it there is that it still is the most recognised torrent client in computing history, and since it does not have a * mark, nobody should pick it over QBitTorrent or Deluge (FOSS and superior). It is only a way for new, less literate computing users (who this guide covers) to recognise what is a torrent client with a familiar name.
Fair enough, but considering the possibilities and the shitty things they’ve verifiably done, knowing that QB is available on both, it just seems like a bad idea to recommend uTorrent.
VLC is obviously the best media player, I can’t think of one I’ve used that comes close ever, either in ease of use(hotkeys) or functionality.
Audacity is such a simple yet comprehensively functional audio editor.
OBS is a very simple video recording software that works so well.
I personally prefer mpv, but that’s still FOSS. Nothing in the proprietary world is comparable to these two.
I used MPV for a while, seemed a little bare bones to me compared to VLC? Maybe that’s just because I was more familiar with VLC and know how to do most things with it already.
I went from winamp to VLC and then tried probably everything and then went back to VLC
I had the same experience when I first tried mpv. Went back to VLC.
I tried mpv again years later due to some annoying bug in VLC, and finally made some efforts to customize the shortcuts to my liking (most were fine, just added a couple extra ones like k for pause) and installed some plugins (like mpv-sub-select and skip-intro). Now I can’t be satisfied with anything else.
It’s kinda like Neovim in that sense. Super customizable and integrates with everything.
