What are your favorite non-foss apps?

I know some of you have gone complies FOSS, but I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there's noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical. So what are your favorite non-foss apps?

80 comments

Steam. It is one of the few company's that still has principles
- Because they are not publicly traded, i hope it stays that way
  
  Yeah. Not being legally required to abandon principles in favor of short-term profits for shareholders is tight.
  
  I fear the day Gaben isn't around anymore. Hopefully there is a succession plan for the company to be handed over to someone with similar values.
- Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as "it" by her manager.
- It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.
  I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that's always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token "competitors" that they completely control to exist.
  Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:
  EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)
  Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)
  Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren't steam)
  GOG (storefront only, I'm pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)
  Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don't have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.
  Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I'm not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your "ownership" of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.
  If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn't really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.
  
  GOG does not give out steam keys, you can download all games as 'stand alone installers' and don't need a launcher. You forgot the humble store (which now also comes with a launcher).
  
  Generally agree, but your point about GOG is wrong. Not only can you install games from their platform, its also (to my knowledge) the only storefront where you can get games completely DRM-Free, since you dont need GOG Galaxy to download or install their games

I think you've got a bit of a misconception about FOSS software - you're allowed to make money selling it, you just also have to provide the source code to any customers! A fair few FOSS apps have free versions on F-Droid but paid versions on the Play store, for example.
- Like what?
  
  Simple Mobile Tools (Simple Contacts etc.) cost money for the full version on Play but you can get it for free on F-Droid or GitHub!
  
  For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They're FOSS but they charge money for support.
  
  My fave is Anki, free on Android and 25 USD on i0S for the exact same product.
  
  Showly (IMDB alternative).
  
  D-Sub

Steam.
A linux client that works, and actually gets fixes, improvements, and features, that is a lot.
Davinci Resolve
Really good video editor, and also, has Linux client.

I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.
Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn't have a problem with that.

Spotify is the only subscription I ever pay, even though I'm an avid pirate and I don't have any qualms about pirating music, I love the Spotify algorithm so much, it introduces me to new music all the time which is something I love
- Paying for it helps me pirate even more efficiently. I often leave 20+ hour playlists on ripping the music I want whilst off doing other things.
  I have compared the 320 mp3s I get from it with 320's that I have bought using spek and they were literally identical and whilst having a flac is nice having money to pay my bills is nicer and the difference in sound quality really isn't that noticeable without a proper system to play them through.
  
  Well, then you could just use xManager to get pirated Spotify premium. It just doesn't let you download stuff but if you pirate them separately anyways, then this should work for you. Or are you literally directly ripping the music from Spotify??

I guess foobar2000 is non-foss as it's free but not open source.
- Strawberry is a good drop-in replacement for foobar2000.
  
  I'll second Strawberry. I loved foobar and was worried about losing it when I migrated to linux, but I found Strawberry and it looks and functions just the way I liked foobar.
  
  Isn't Strawberry a fork of Clementine? I was using Clementine for years before I realized it had been abandoned, and unfortunately Strawberry doesn't have any podcast support. Iirc they don't have any intention of supporting podcasts either so for me at least it doesn't truly fill the void.
  
  There's also DeaDBeeF, which has more UI customization available as far as I can tell.

Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support
- I would be really interested in more information about this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention to look into!
  
  Bitwig Studio is more expensive but also has full Linux support and is made by former Ableton devs

Obsidian. Silver Bullet is a FOSS alternative, but I’m not sure if they do toggles or something that works like it. And I really like my toggle-like functionality. I happily use callouts to simulate toggles in Obsidian.
- Joplin is another FOSS alternative to Obsidian. I've been using it for years; it let's you encrypt your notes in place so they can't be read without the client having the password to access them.
  
  Obsidian stores everything as regular markdown files so even if it disappears out of existence one day the files will still be usable. I personally use cryptomator to encrypt my sensitive obsidian vault. And use syncthing to sync the other vault between devices.

Steam and Discord. They are the only non-foss apps that I use basically every single day. I'm trying to wean myself off Discord specifically, but I have so many communities on there that aren't on FOSS alternatives, and the FOSS alternatives like Matrix chat and such just don't cut it for me yet.
Plus literally all my friends I game with and chat with are on Discord and almost none of them are even slightly interested in migrating anywhere else.

Scrivener is still the absolute best word processor for ginormous writing projects. There are FOSS projects that do some parts of it right, but fall far behind in the others. It's particularly frustrating because my usual FOSS approach would be to use other tools that make up for the inadequacies, but Scrivener pretty much nails the "what to include and what to leave out" equation. It's a great combo of a word processor, project management tool and a research/notes tool, all rolled into one.
- I don't have much experience with Scrivener, but it came up when I was looking for writing software, and clearly it's very popular.
  The reasons I ended up rejecting it were, mainly, lack of Android and Chromebook/Linux support and lacking sync capabilities (looks like there's Dropbox and iTunes sync support now). The pricetag seems reasonable, though.
  After a lot of searching, I ended up with Obsidian, and love it to bits. It syncs flawlessly from my Mac desktop to my Android phone and my Chromebook, it has a superb plugin development community, and seems to be able to do almost everything Scrivener does, but for free.
  
  @renardroux @foss Do you know if it can output in Shun mamuscript format with a plugin?

I’m happy with Affinity Photo as a cheaper, non-subscription Photoshop clone.
Never managed with GIMP :(
- Maybe try Krita if you want a FOSS image editor. It's good enough for my needs at least.

Obsidian for my journaling and note-taking needs, The Storygraph for tracking my reading.

Davinci Resolve is mind bogglingly good video editing software and the free (beer) version is all 90% of people need.

Wanting to make money from your app doesn't prevent you from making it foss, therefore I have no favourite proprietary apps

Sublime Text!
- Sublime Merge for me.

Renoise is an excellent tracker-based DAW with Linux support (you still have to find Linux-compatible VSTs though). It changed the way I write music.
EDIT: I know there are FOSS trackers like MilkyTracker. If you want an alternative, I can recommend it, even though it doesn't offer the same amount of features as Renoise (e.g. VST or effect support).

Unreal. It's one of the best game engines out there. It's extremely powerful and 5% of your profits over 1 million dollars is essentially giving it away.

People have mentioned most of the good ones (Scrivener, Resolve, Steam, Discord), but I must grudgingly nod to OneNote.
There are competitors in the note-taking space, yes, but none of them get handwriting down like OneNote has for 15+ years, now.

Autodesk Fusion 360. There's just not really a free competitor imo when it comes to CAD/CAM software, it's all Fusion or Solidworks.

I'm going to take "favourite" at face value, i.e. that I actually like, not just that I am forced to use because the alternative doesn't exist (e.g. my bank's app or the post-office's app) or isn't viable (PDF editors on Android).
Libby, the lending library app. I could avoid it and stick to physical media and piracy, but it's a well-designed app with a decent catalogue and given that it's a library and not me purchasing DRMed files, I found the ethical proposition there tolerable.

JetBrains Rider

Garmin GPS appliance. I refuse to use Google anything, and the other options do not work on GrapheneOS when interfacing with my car. So I bit the bullet and got a Garmin

On Android, Google Maps, Google Docs et al., Snapchat and the various plant identication apps.

Workflowy and Teuxdeux are two web apps where I spend an embarrassingly large amount of my time online. I wish there were FOSS alternatives because I would happily contribute features and fixes to the issues I bump into in my daily usage.

I have an iPhone. While VLC is good, foobar2000 Mobile is really the only free music player that works the way I want.
iTunes no-longer runs under Wine, so the official Music app is not an option.
EDIT: Clarified that I meant the Apple Music app, not the streaming service.
- If you can get past how questionable the developers are, Cider is an option for using Apple Music on Linux.
  
  I meant the app, not the streaming service, but thanks!
  (All of my music is on CD and in Ogg Opus format)

I really love PowerPoint. I feel like the automatic snapping features and general polish allow me to make very pretty slides
with a high level of control, and it feels way better to use than e.g. web-based alternatives. Admittedly, I haven't tried a foss alternative in years.

Sesame Shortcuts. I know there are launcher with similar tools included, but I also use Nova Launcher and paid for it. I've been thinking to migrate to alternatives, but I haven't done it yet.
Microsoft To Do. The alternatives are incomplete, ugly or don't have the same capabilities. I'd gladly pay for any FOSS and Privacy respectful To Do app, but I guess setting up sync servers may be hard. I'll give a try for tasks.org again in some days.
I'm glad I don't get to say Notion anymore, Anytype.io is missing some features, but I can manage to live without them and Notion was getting worse with time.
- Have you tried Obsidian? It’s not FOSS either unfortunately, but the sync service is astoundingly good and E2EE. Also, plenty of community plugins :)
  
  Yeah, I use it for course notes and so, but it's kind of expensive for where I live, so I use it in pair with pCloud and a backup in other cloud.
  Btw, if you say it for the to do apps, I've tried, but it just doesn't work for me as a to do hehe

@AHYN018 Letterboxd and TheStoryGraph that I maintain as diaries of what i am watching and reading.
- Are they ethical though? (Serious question as I'm uninformed)
  Both are directly tracking what you watch/read so I would worry that they might sell this data to others.

Topaz photo software and Mendeley Desktop

Czech maps from Seznam, I talked with marketing boss (don't know his exact position but it is high) and he told me that they don't make money from it.
If any one is interested mapy.cz it is must have app for travel in Czech.