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.
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.
I used Bitwarden a lot but it pissed me off that I couldn’t add new entries while offline, that accessing attachments requires me to be online as well, and that attachments are not part of the backup.
I switched back to Enpass due to that, which has even a slightly better UX IMHO. It’s not FOSS though, but uses the FOSS sqlcipher library for storage. So if push comes to shove, I can still exfiltrate my data without relying on the vendor.
It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it’s annoying
Try the AutoFill keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-L (or Cmd-Shift-L on Mac). Works well enough for me.
Sucks on Android tho
If you opened it once, so a process exists, it usually will work with it’s autofill. At least on my Samsung it does after opening it once.
It sucks for login like
TwitterX though.
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
Did you know that MS now charges for you to play some codecs with windows media player?
Unless something has changed recently, that’s not exactly true. They charge 99c for the distribution of it through the windows store (or whatever it’s called) but you can install them the traditional way no problem
I think it’s still dumb but it’s a distinction worth making. I think the description even links the website where you can download it
You can even install the free oem istaller in the windows store thats hidden iirc.
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
I adore OBS. I’ve been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they’ve all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
I am by no means a master at OBS, and I wouldn’t know where to point you to learn. Everything I know I’ve learned by either poking around in the software or googling specific questions, i.e. “how to overlay twitch chat in OBS”. As you can probably guess, I used to use it to stream to twitch. Not very suddenly, mind, but I did it. Lol!
OBS is designed for streaming out and recording video, not really for music production. I’m sure there are some FOSS music production softwares worth checking out, though!
Obs?
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
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.
As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
You definitely should, it is lightyears improved
A lightyear is a distance. Not a time.
Isn’t distance more suitable to describe an improvement than time? Don’t find anything wrong with that comment.
“It is better by a mile” vs “It is better by three hours”
Good point. I guess it depends on the interpretation. If you consider that developments take time, be it developments in software, technology, research or whatever, then saying something like “this software is years ahead of its time” sounds appropriate.
That’s how I read the comment. Additionally, given that it’s a common misconception that a lightyear describes a timespan, I felt the urge to be a smartass.
But you typically can’t influence time, while you can influence distance travelled. The faster car will get you further in the same time than a slower car. So IMO distance (travelled) is the better measurement.
To continue dissecting this, since I don’t have anything better to do right now:
What you do in that time depends. If you drive a faster car, sure, you’ll travel a further distance in less time than a slower car. If you use the same car however, the distance is as meaningful as the time for a symbol of progress. Since technological and scientific advancements in general don’t depend on people driving around in cars, but on people investing a lot of time and effort, I would prefer time as a measurement.
Usually, if we think about scientific, technological or cultural progress, we tend to judge based on time and not on distance. For example, consider some indigenous cultures which live their lifes isolated from the rest of the world. They are often compared to primitive “stoneage”-like cultures. We specifically use time as a measure.
However, I am not completely opposed to agreeing with you. I think it depends on what you want to emphasize. A distance can be useful for reflecting some aspects in which, e.g., a software, takes the lead compared to alternatives. Then again, time would be better suited to highlight very innovative features or significant futuristic advancements which may have groundbreaking qualities.
And if someone is already using “lightyears” as a measure, I think that’s already an amount of improvement which deserves a time-based phrasing.
Anyway, I see good points for both and I am no longer interested in this. Take it or leave it. I don’t care anymore.
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
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
there is an ad in the terminal!
you mean the “longer security updates with ubuntu pro” thing?
No. I got that too. I’m talking about:
“ Strictly confined Kubernetes makes edge and IoT secure. Learn how MicroK8s just raised the bar for easy, resilient and secure K8s cluster deployment. https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-kubernetes-at-the-edge”
It might be time to consider using a distro that isn’t ubuntu.
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.
All the Linux file managers I’ve tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.
It’s absurd how long it took windows to have something that worked half as well as tabbed file browsers on linux.
I wonder how many people actually use tabs. I find having a split file browser much more important for moving files.
Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I’m too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much “free”, but rather “unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge”.
- GNOME, for the hate it gets, it comes close to getting everything right. I’d give it a 95/100 score. Windows a 30/100, and MacOS a 35/100. No verdict/comment on KDE as I haven’t used it. I have good reasons for disliking W10/W11 and separate ones for MacOS. As desktop environments, they are both shit for each their own reasons.
- Blender. 3D/Scultping/Drawing/Video Editing. Aside from Linux kernel, the most impressive and well managed FOSS project there is. I grew up with pirated 3dsmax, and what a dream it would be to grow up today with Blender as it is.
- Linux as a OS kernel. One can argue about the desktop market share, but people don’t know better. They think the software that runs on it defines it. But, there is a reason why 100% of top 500 supercomputers in this world run on Linux. I’d also mention the Arch/AUR community. Doesn’t matter if you use Arch or not, arch/aur wiki is a goldmine.
- Godot: 2D game engine. As a 3d game engine, it’s not nearly as good as the non-FOSS competition.
- Firefox: If it wasn’t for Firefox, I don’t know what I would do. I don’t trust chrome one single bit.
- Alacrity terminal: I’m sure there are plenty great FOSS terminal emulators, but the built in ones for MacOS and Windows are garbage.
- Prusa Slicer: I think this one is as good as the commercial counterparts for FDM G-code generation.
- VLC. Mixed feelings about this one, as I think it’s UI is lacking, but since it plays almost everything the UX ends up being great.
- LibreOffice Writer. Perhaps debatable. But the fact that you can trust LibreOffice to respect and adhere to the OpenDocumentFormat, and equally trust Microsoft Word to deliberately not do so in subtle ways, LibreOffice Writer is ultimately the better software IMHO.
Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:
- Gimp. It just isn’t as good, even if you get used to it. Some things, of course, it can do much better (e.g the G’Mic QT filter pack). The lack of non-destructive work flows is the key part that is missing.
- FreeCAD. It’s good, and you can do wonders with it, but oh so rough compared to onshape/Fusion/etc.
- Darktable. Not as good as commercial counterparts like Lightroom.
- Kdenlive. Not as good as Davinci Resolve, or the adobe counterparts.
- LMMS: Not as good as most commercial DAWs.
- Krita: This one is actually not too far away from being best in class. I still suspect photoshop and has an edge
- InkScape: A “best for some vector things but not all”-kinda thing. It’s FOSS nature makes it the defacto vector editing software for certain kind of makers. But as a graphical vector editing suite, adobe’s stuff is just much more solid.
Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don’t care if there is a counterpart
- Tuner: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/ It just does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of these on the play store, with ads or paid. There is no need for it.
- Aegis Authenticator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/ For handling 2FA keys.
- Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.gallery.pro/
- Telegram: Sort of FOSS. Aside from security concerns whereby Signal would win out, it’s still the best UX. Compared to Messenger and Whats’App, not even a contest.
On Android; mpv, KeePassDX, FlorisBoard, AntennaPod, Read You, NewPipe, Jerboa, Unitto Calculator, CloudStream, Aegis, TrailSense, OpenKeychain, K-9 Mail, EDS lite, ViMusic, InnerTune, GrapheneOS Camera, Librera FD …are my favourites.
¿Does florisboard support multiple input languages at once? I might switch within a conversation or even mix words within a single sentence. So far I haven’t found a good open source alternative to SwiftKey in that regard.
Do you mean different characters/local keyboards, or different dictionaries?
different dictionaries but merged into one.
many keyboards handle it like this: if you switch to English keyboard layout, you get English autocomplete, if you switch to chzech layout you get suggestions for chzech words, etc
what I want is to be able to pick any layout and get suggested words from English, Czech and whatever other languages I select.
Hmm, afaik florisboard doesn’t support word suggestions at all right now. You can read up on it a bit on github but to make it short: the main dev is struggling with creating his own performant word suggestion algorithm.
Aww, too bad. I really rely on autocorrection suggestions a lot as it speeds up my typing.
Librera Reader is a PDF // ebook reader for Android. It has a very smooth user experience and useful options. I used to have 5 or so different PDF readers installed and would pick and choose according to the task at hand but now I’m down to just 1.
Is Librera Reader FOSS? Their website provides no info about that.
It’s GNU GPL v3 according to their page on f-Droid.
I’m using MJ PDF. [Play Store] | [GitLab]
does anyone know if there’s a free alternative in Visual Studio to PHPTools? I refuse to believe the only way to debug PHP in visual studio is a paid license extension
not exactly free, but have you tried phpstorm from intellij?
Jellyfin can’t utilize local network storage… How is that a useful tool for a HOME MEDIA SERVER???It looks as though there are methods for utilizing network storage solutions. This has not always been the case with Jellyfin but either way I was dead wrong. My bad folks.
Emby is just straight up better. I know people hold a grudge, but honestly it’s a fair price for a lifetime membership, the development is super polished and the product is way more capable.
We are here to talk about FOSS, not proprietary closed source non-free products
Okay. Then you can skip past my comment.
I’m free to share my opinion, thanks.
Of course you can share your opinion but it’s not relevant in the current context. That’s what’s been criticised.
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!
The time when they essentially went closed source to implement MobileCoin in kind of a covert operation really didn’t do them any favors, though.
