1y ago

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.

21 comments

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.

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

I personally run an older build of emby, the open source software jellyfin was forked from. It's very similar, but I found emby's video transcoding (or explicit not transcoding) to be more reliable

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!

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

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

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

Blender for video editing. I haven't even touched its 3D animation features.
- Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
  It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
  If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.

Inkscape?
- I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won't lie, it's pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.
  
  First time I hear about inkstitch. Looks great!
- How does it compare to Affinity?
  
  inkscape (and gimp) is dog shit ass compared to an actual vector (and photoedit/raster) design program
  im a graphic designer but im also not a huge adobe guy i think affinity products r fire.
  im talking about inkscape and gimp 7-8 years ago but its not nearly as robust or user friendly as an actual design program if you desire to create more than one image trace. image tracing is the only thing inkscape is good for.

gimp
- Awesome for being a free tool, but it pales in comparison to Photoshop.

VLC >> everything else
- VLC is heavily bloated with features you need a guide to use (may as well use a command line tool if you need to refer to a guide every time). It crashes (or did about 2 years ago) some of our Linux systems. MPV spanks the piss out of it.

DWM, Newsboat, MPV, NSXIV
- newsboat and mpv are awesome. How is nsxiv better than sxiv?
  
  I wouldn't know any differences, as I wasn't using Linux back when sxiv stopped being developed.

21 comments