What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?

There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
- Keka is FOSS, supports 7z for both compression and decompression, and is native to macOS.
- 7-zip is foss??? damn, never knew that.
  
  It is FOSS in old-fashioned way
- rar has recovery records. i know it's a somewhat niche feature, one far more popular in the 'olden days' especially in certain uh.. 'venues'.. but it's something i've always used when making backups with it.
  
  you can make par2 parity data for 7z using the par2 util.
  
  Tell me more.
  Edit: I'm sorry I should have specified. I'm curious about the recovery records feature.
- I use 7zip on my Mac every day. Whatchu talking’ ‘bout, Willis?
- I like using peazip since it's open source and includes 7-zip along with it

I have not used it personally, but Blender is famously used in high value Hollywood productions.
- I have experience with Blender and its counterparts, in a professional setting. Blender sure is powerful and solid on its own, for many things you can make the case that is better than Maya- it's absolutely better value - however I wouldn't say it's better on all fronts. But yes it's absolutely worthy of a mention here.
  
  Houdini is also the simulation GOAT (i think its closed source), so while blender is really cool, it maybe doesnt fit this category.
- it gained big notoriety recently because the Oscar winner Flow was completely made with Blender https://m.filmaffinity.com/en/film989516.html
  
  This film gets cooler and cooler the more I hear about it! Really gotta watch it.
  
  Cool movie

Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I've tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.
Folks will argue that it's harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.
- It's also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.
  Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.
  All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that's the way to take away user control. They won't work with the device you want because that vendor didn't pay up to work with that.
  Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.
- I fully agree - home assistant is the way to go, even if it's a little more complicated.
  It's much easier to add / remove / replace hubs as needed. A few years ago I switched my main hub from Alexa to HA. Then, a month or two ago, I decided to move away from Alexa due to the speech to text recognition noticeably degrading, they removed features (I forget what the feature was, it was a while ago), and recent policy changes. Super easy to disconnect and switch to a different assistant like Siri / HomeKit.
- Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)
- Alexa and Google home don't have anywhere near the same capability for automations, they let you do simple things, but not reliably, and they also have more limited integrations, so less options when purchasing things.
- I have home assistant green, I just plugged it in and it set itself up fully, zero intervention needed. In a few minutes, everything was ready and it automatically found and (after confirming) imported all my existing stuff. Flawless.
  UX is very unintuitive though, I’ve had it for a while and can not get used to how things are organized

FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.
- ffmpeg is a GODSEND. saves me going to those "convert to file type" websites when I can do it locally and so much faster 😩🙏
  
  Those websites are probably using ffmpeg on the backend anyway
  
  Another one of those tools is image magic. Like ffmpeg but for images
  
  It's even better when tied to an automation app. I've got FileFlows sitting in my media library, so any time I drop new stuff in, it automatically gets converted to my preferred on disk format.
  I still get some ones I have to touch manually, but most of it gets taken care of without even thinking about it.
  
  also FFShare on android as well. you share a video to it from another app, then it spits out a smaller sized file. so instead of trying to sent a 20mb video to someone its more like 3mb and sends a lot quicker (depending on the settings you use)
- ffmpeg is where my mind went. It's so good I don't even know what the alternative is.
  
  There probably actually isn't an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.
  
  For images (it can process images as well) imagemagick is used.
- all are great :D

LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
- LibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
  The others 100% were always better.
  
  You sound like you know your LibreOffice.
  My experience is they are quite different but I've been able to do the same things for the most part.
  But how the hell do I make a pivot table that looks and functions as nice as the plain old default one in Excel?
- OBS and VLC yeah.
  You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and... yeah, no, unfortunately.
  I don't even think it's necessarily better than MS Office, but I'd (unfortunately) take Google's Office suite over both.
  
  Only Office is a much younger project and is leaps ahead. It's sad really, I used to champion LO since the OOo days. Doesn't make sense these days anymore.
- I feel PowerPoint is much more user friendly and functional than Impress
  
  I really like OnlyOffice, pretty much a carbon copy of the MS Office UI and doesn't screw up on MS-specific files (docx, pptx, etc.)
  Also, I like that OnlyOffice, unlike MS Office, has all the things in one app vs having separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc. You can just tab between your different documents!
- I posted this in another thread yesterday but it's relevant here too:
  I have a small consultancy with several staff and work with documents and spreadsheets all day. We use LibreOffice exclusively.
  Occasionally I encounter similar threads discussing the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and the comments are all the same. So many people saying LibreOffice just "isn't there yet", or that it might be ok for casual use but not for power users.
  But as someone who uses LibreOffice extensively with a broad feature set I've just never encountered something we couldn't do. Sure we might work around some rough edges occasionally, but the feature set is clearly comparable.
  My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.
  That said, IDK if I'd go as far as to say LibreOffice is clearly the "best" because that's subjective. IMO it's certainly comparable and is a shining example of great FOSS. Hopefully LibreOffice enjoys some attention in the current move away from American products.
- OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
  
  https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio
- OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
- i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
- Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
- LibreOffice is also more compatible that Microsoft Word. It helped me and a friend to save his grandpa's old writings that were stored in AppleWorks (.cwk) files.
- Depends on your criteria. As long as your calculations are simple, it doesn’t matter which tool you use.
  For slightly more demanding calculations, Calc just can’t handle it like Excel does. Then again, using spreadsheets for demanding calculations is just asking for trouble.
- also, I've never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out
- MPV blows VLC out of the water when it comes to playback. After using it at work to sift through collectively hundreds of thousands of hours of video, waiting for VLC to do anything feels painful
- I work with Microsoft Office on a daily basis for work, so professional use. I wanted to try LibreOffice privately, tried it and hat to notice that besides the terrible UI, there are many features missing and it’s just way clunkier. So I tried OnlyOffice, which had some features which I missed at LibreOffice, but now I’m missing other features…
  So sadly, there isn’t a real competition for MS Office yet.

Linux is so much better than Windows.
- ... Unless of course you're trying to connect two external monitors through a docking station with a USB-C into the laptop with a closed lid and disabled inbuilt screen.
  Unfortunately, in my experience, Linux routinely fails at this task (tried many different distros) while Windows "just works".
  
  I have opposite experiences! Multiple Linux laptop, with multiple docking stations: a bit of xrandr magic and everything works, forever. (BTW, try setting manually the refresh rate at different values for the two monitors via xrandr, I have solves a similar problem to yours in the past by creating a dedicated display class.)
  On a Mac, it's impossible, I have to plug one cable directly in the computer to make it work, and the quality of the output on 2k monitor is way worse since they disabled sub-pixel rendering or some stuff.
  Windows also works decently on this regard, until it doesn't (my partner's PC stopped recognizing HDMI monitor at some point, and the debugging was frustrating as hell).
  
  Never had that issue on my thinkpad, sorry to hear!
  
  Depends on the hardware I suppose. My Dell dock just works.
- And also better than MacOS!

I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.
- IMO WinRAR was only ever did one useful thing and that was breaking up files into arbitrary sizes for USENET theft
- NanaZip is a modern fork of 7zip, useful if you're on Windows 11

Just from top of my head and from what I have to use at work:
Dolphin vs. Explorer - Dolphin is sooo much better and useful it's not evwn funny
Notepad++ vs. Notepad - day and night, even though Notepad got an overhaul in W11 it's still piece of shit compared to Notepad++
literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
ImageGlass, Nomacs, Gwenview, etc. vs. MS Photos - same as above, windows picture viewer is now worse than ever while open source alternatives get better and better
and plenty others, like Linux vs. Windows, lol
- Notepad++ really is just a better notepad. I will definitely look at Dolphin, it has a Windows version which I might need to try out. I currently use OneCommander. Yeah Windows Media Player isn’t very good. I use PotPlayer, but others like VLC, mpv, etc. all seem great too. Nomacs is awesome.
  Yeah, Linux is probably superior to Windows considering the fact the latter literally spams you with ads and promotions to make a MS account and to buy Office 365. Insane that everyone just puts up with this. I currently use a Windows machine, only reason I’m not installing Linux is because a. it’s one of those 2-in-1 touchscreen foldables, which Linux doesn’t really like too much, and b. I’m not bothered to reinstall all my apps and change all the settings and preferences again. Next computer I get, it’ll be Linux (either Fedora or Mint probably, those two seem good)
  
  If the 2-in-1 is holding you back, it worked for me with Linux Mint, touch and gyro rotation included. Touch works out of the box.
  It did require me setting up iio-sensor-proxy with xrandr for the gyro sensor so it adjusts the screen when spinning the laptop around in tablet mode though. But the guide was pretty straight forward.
  Just an FYI, that linux actually works with it well.
- literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
  FFMPEG is an open source command line tool and software library for audio and video encoding. You’ll find it mentioned in the credits of just about any video playing software ever, but you can also just go use it for free.
- I absolutely support dolphin over explorer. Whenever I have to deal with Windows, having to use this crappy excuse for a file tool feels like pain incarnated.
- I think Linux lacks a good Foss alternative to visual studio, unless you count vscode.
  
  Are the jetbrains ides open source?
  
  I agree, there are very few really good IDEs and the majority of them are closed source. The only open source one I can think of off the top of my head is Kdevelop, and last time I tried it it was not great.
  That being said, I think the reason for that is that most FOSS projects are stuff someone started and maintained because they wanted an alternative with XYZ, and for IDEs a good chunk of people who could build excellent IDEs don't even use one, so they don't even start to work on it. The reason is that vim/emacs are so great it's very hard to beat them, I think a good configured vim/emacs can beat anything the best IDEs can do, and while configuring vim/emacs to get to that level is difficult, it's stile much more easy than building an IDE from scratch. So you're left with a gap where beginners don't have any tools because experts don't need them.
- Imageglass is FOSS? oh heck yeah I love it even more!
- Wondering why you use notepad++ instead of Kate
  
  Because I've been using it for over 20 years?
  
  I'm using Kate now, but from my experience NPP has a lot more features built in for which I actually have to write some scripts to use with Kate. NPP has really strong encoding encoding and schema manipulation features and a robust plugin system.
  If NPP had a native linux build, I'd go back to it in a heartbeat.
  
  I have to live with Windows at work so that's where I use Notpad++. I'm fine with Kate at home.
- I thought dolphin was for playing gamecube games?
- don't you want copilot in your notepad?
  
  Fuck no. Luckily it's not even enabled in my country.
- I wish linux had more game/software support. I know there's wine but still
  
  Have you not tried gaming since proton matured into what it is today? If you're using wine for gaming then you are doing it wrong.
  Pretty much every Windows game that doesn't have anti-cheat works on Linux now.
  
  With steamOS their investment in proton your wish has largely been granted. Native support would be better sure but ill take it
  
  I can play 90% of my games without efforts. 5% are to old, the other 5% are EA Games, need uplay or whatever shitty launcher, have Anti-Cheat - stuff you usually wouldn't want to have on your PC anyway
  
  I wish more game/software had Linux support. I know there's wine but still
  There, FTFY

Blender for 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and (simple) video editing.
Several movies were either made (almost) entirely with Blender (Flow, Next Gen), or in parts (e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SpiderMan 2, The Midnight Sky).
It is also used by many (indie) game devs.
Speaking of games: Godot is an awesome 2D/3D game engine, which gained a lot more momentum after the Unity fuck-up. It's licensed under the MIT license. Among a plethora of smaller indie games it has been used for financially successful and/or popular titles by indie and non-indie devs alike such as Brotato, Cassette Beasts, RPG in a Box, Endoparasitic, Dome Keeper, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, and several more.
Give it a try if you're into game development!

I'm surprised I haven't seen blender here yet, but I really think blender is one of open source's greatest achievements. It feels like a professional software and is also used in the industry.
- It’s basically a industry standard at this point
- obligatory Blender, was looking for it

Actually, there's lots of FOSS software which is at least just as good as proprietary. Most FOSS lacks the support of proprietary though. And I don't mean the "call someone on the other end of the world" support, I mean manuals, tutorials and stuff like that. /Off topic
On topic: Apache, Git, Home Assistant and Jellyfin.
- Unfortunately I think that Plex (proprietary) is still better than Jellyfin, especially regarding smart TVs apps :(
  
  I just recently made the change from Plex to Jellyfin. Plex definitely has the better UX experience, but Jellyfin has better capabilities. The thing that finally got me to switch was Plex refused to play 4k HDR with subtitles, but Jellyfin handled it no problem.

I haven't checked to see if someone's mentioned it yet (it's a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I'm always touting: Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection!
It's a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it's completely free, has no ads, doesn't track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don't. But you should know about it.

These comments are like a treasure trove.
I didn't see anyone mention Kodi as an alternative to smart TVs. It's better in every way than the Apple TV I won from a raffle at work. The best part is that my TV box is just a computer so I can use it to host other services too
- It's better in every way than the Apple TV….
  Hard disagree. Two similar tools but perform radically different functions.
  I’ll agree with you when Kodi can natively launch and stream Netflix/AppleTV/Paramount+/Hulu/etc. (pick any two).
  I ran kodi for years (back when it was XBMC) until I found that plex would sync my playback status between devices as well as other features.
- I've used a PC with Kodi on it for my main tv for over a decade now, think I used it under it's previous name even. I've had few complaints, occasionally there's a video that won't play but works in VLC but that's pretty rare. Sometimes it doesn't pick up new videos properly but that's just expected for some file names.
- Can you get 4k content on any streaming services with kodi?
- I use kodi as a DLNA server for my smart tv
- kodi looks cool
  
  It's been around for like ever. Used to be called XMBC

Syncthing!
I don't even know what to compare it to, I have been using it so long.
- peer to peer syncing!
  
  that is exactly what Syncthing is, my desktop to my server to my laptop to my phone....
- Hard disagree. I've had so many issues with Syncthing deleting files and refusing to connect over LAN that I've never had with Resilio Sync.
  
  Weird, I have 100's of thousands of files synced.
  Been using it for years.
  Linux, windows and Mac in the circuit. Never a problem that wasn't user error.
  
  Synchthing definitely needs some tweaking until it works the way you want it. I've been using it for the psst five years and I'm pretty happy with it today. I have several folders synched between two servers and a handful of devices, including my Android phone. It has completely replaced Dropbox for me.

Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity
The only drawback for some users would be that it's CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)
- yt-dlp is the goat
- https://ytdlnis.com/
- I love yt-dlp!!! Too bad that the Pluto TV downloader has been broken for a long time, I used it in the past to download region locked shows
- The other day I set up a shell script on my phone that I can hook into with Tasker. I share a YouTube link to it and I can rip the audio to my music folder, or the video to my videos folder. Basically, I can turn YouTube videos into podcasts on the fly.

I certainly like GIMP and Inkscape better than Photoshop and Illustrator, though any professional photo editor or graphic artist would probably fight me on that lol
But Krita is the best drawing/painting program of all time and I stand by that.
- Yeah gimp is atrocious in terms of UI/UX
  Nobody with a clue about graphics would ever recommend gimp
  It has always been a piece of sh.. going back 20 years already
  
  People learned on Photoshop, and then they're upset because GIMP does things differently. I guarantee you if somebody had learned on GIMP first, it would be the other way around.
  There's nothing intuitive about Photoshop. If you pick it up with zero knowledge and try to do anything, you can't. You have to take a class to learn how to use it, same as GIMP.
  
  I think you're overstating things a bit, but it's true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.
  I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image's borders was actually dead space, and it won't accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what's happening it's not so bad, but until that point it's the software working how you don't expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.
  And just now in 3.0 I've discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.
  It seems like it's purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don't remember it being like this in the past. What happened?
  
  Or, is it your hesitation to adopt Gimp's UI standards?
- I use lots of FOSS software. I work in a municipal government job where I have to fill a lot of roles that aren't funded as separate positions, so I use GIMP, Inkscape, and QGIS daily because the professional software isn't budgeted. I also use OBS frequently, among others.
  But GIMP is by far the worst FOSS alternative I've come across when compared against its paid competition. I hate Adobe the company, but Photoshop really is the gold standard.
  I use both heavily. Oddly enough I use GIMP at work and Photoshop for my personal use and side gig.
  
  GIMP certainly has a lot of UI problems that seem to have persisted for no other reason than "nobody got around to fixing it"
  Also, it's 2025 and you STILL can't just draw a circle lmfao
  
  Its not FOSS but if you need a work alterative to GIMP I use Photopea a lot. Works as a PWA too.
  I've been using design software for over 25 years; Photoshop has been there for the majority but I've often tried coming back to GIMP here and there, but it's never grabbed me in a useable way.
- Krita was by far the best when I had a Wacom.
  
  It works out of box with my obscure Samsung S-pen touchscreen laptop from 2016, on Debian with no driver preconfig. I am thoroughly impressed
- Krita seems great. Unfortunately I am not of the artistic type so I can’t really comment on its functionality, but I would say my experience moving from Illustrator to Inkscape has been awesome! (I still can’t figure out how to make lines with inkscape though…the making lines button makes stretched out ovals instead…maybe it thinks I’m making a polygon?)
  
  Are you referring to the ends of the lines being rounded? You can change the "cap" type of a stroke path to rounded, square, or sharply pointed using the attribute menu on the right (would provide screenshot but am on mobile, apologies)
  https://inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/strokes.html
- +1 for Inkscape. I have no experience with the commercial competition but I've found Inkscape awesome, and used it for things it was probably never intended for.
- Krita is very, very good indeed. It deserves all the praise it gets.
- I like GIMP but find Inkscape impossible to use
  
  For me, it is the other way round. Probably depends on what you are doing.
  
  I'll admit Inkscape's UI and menus are a disorganized mess. I'm fortunate I learned it while still a high schooler with too much time on her hands

Firefox is the best browser (uBlock). Linux is the best OS for a growing number of things. Android is terrible but still the best mobile OS. Lemmy is the best social media platform.
Honourable mention to Luanti which most people wouldn't say is better than Minecraft yet but it's absolutely getting there.

Linux. For desktops I like it as well, but I can understand some arguments against it. However, for all other cases there is hardly any match. The internet basically runs on it.

Blender has to be the best at being a swiss army tool, the other software require using other software for what they are missing while blender can do it all, its objectively better at being the singular tool for the job if you want to not leave one software

OBS for streaming is amazing.
Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There're also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don't have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.
Krita has already been mentioned.
But, I think what strikes me most is that there's a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn't have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it's really fun once you get the hang of it. I don't do this professionally so there's no need for me to learn Fusion360.
Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their "industry standard" (which really just means "the most common product that has been around the longest"), but if you're not bound to that, there's just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.

Jellyfin.
- Debatable. It is an incredible piece of FOSS, but whether or not it’s better than Plex really depends on your use case. Plex is much better for remote access and the “wife factor”.
  The initial goal of a self-hosted video platform must be encouraging adoption. And you have to follow a “the customer is always right” (the actual meaning, not the bastardized Karen-screaming-at-customer-service version) mentality in regards to this; Even if you have the best Jellyfin server in the world, it’s ultimately worthless if your friends and family refuse to use it. Your service needs to be accessible to the average user, and the unfortunate reality is that the average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is. When trying to encourage adoption, you’re facing a lot of social inertia in regards to people simply going “eh, I know Netflix isn’t perfect, but it already works.” You need to provide a service that is superior to other platforms in some meaningful way. And simply being free isn’t enough value for some people, because individuals will weigh the cost differently depending upon how heavily they factor it into the Cost:Convenience ratio that they’re willing to tolerate.
  And this is where the wife factor comes into play: Is your spouse/partner going to be willing to use it? Does it provide enough convenience that they’ll be willing to ditch the streaming services? Now how about your extended family? And if you’re only ever planning on watching at home on LAN, Jellyfin may be perfect. But Plex’s unified login experience is much easier for the average user to understand. I can walk my mother-in-law through the account creation and login process over the phone, because it’s familiar. If my in-laws can figure out how to make a Netflix or Hulu account, they can figure out how to make a Plex account. You simply sign in, and your available libraries show up. Easy.
  But Jellyfin will never be able to provide a unified login experience, because the entire platform is built to rebel against that; A unified login would require a centralized authentication server like Plex runs, and that’s specifically what Jellyfin is designed against. If I tried to get my MIL to use Jellyfin, her eyes would glaze over as soon as I mentioned updating her router to one that can run Tailscale, or using my custom domain. But with Plex, she simply logs in and has access.
  Luckily, you can run both side-by-side. Personally, I prefer Jellyfin’s UI, so I use it at home. But I don’t let it touch the WAN (for a variety of reasons), and that’s where Plex comes in.
  
  That's a whole lotta words to say you don't know how to set up Jellyfin correctly.
  My whole family loves it, they use it across quite a few different devices, and they enjoy the fact that they can get anything they want using Jellyseer. And since I'm not some paranoid nutter that thinks having my services exposed to the web is going to be the end of my life, they also enjoy the unified account experience that the LDAP server provides them, where they can manage their SSO password and 2FA from an easy-to-use web interface that in turn allows them to access all the other services on the server, and from any device anywhere in the world without needing to do stupid stuff like upgrade their router for Tailscale.
  
  The performance of Jellyfin is so much better in my experience. That and the FOSS benefits won me over quickly, and I have had a lifetime Plex pass for years.
  The downside is that you have to do a little IT work if you want to share with family in an easy (for them) way and use https. For sure, it’s a thing, but for me as a non web dev it was worth it.
  Now I can give family and friends a URL, login, password, and one or more app suggestions depending on their device and type of media. And all of them seem to have snappy performance while not showing my people ads or hitting them up for paid services.
  
  I agree with all of this, but I do have a bit of pushback- The account creation process, with the steps of create, verify, provide username to host, wait for invite, accept invite, pin to sidebar is enough of a barrier that it stops some people. I have a handful of guest accounts already setup and sorted that I toss out to interested people, and if they find it useful only then do I have them jump through the hoops of creating their own account.
  
  average user doesn’t even know what a port number or IP address is
  They don't need to, just give them a url, username and password and let them type each for each field.
  (If you mean because you want them to configure a vpn to access your jellyfin instance, then just expose it to the internet and skip that, which surely you pretty much have to do for your plex instance)
  Cost:Convenience
  Do people really think this or will they think (like everyone i know) that it's free and I can watch what I want.
  
  "Wife Factor"
  You can leave that type of shit out the door and speak like a decent human being

The Linux ecosystem of distros vs other OSs.
- more options is better, there’s so many!

Almost any Foss image editor, PDF viewer or simple app that does one thing without ads or bullshit. Markor, Wireguard, etc. They have nothing else to do but function.
- I love the small minimalist adwatia apps on flathub.
- This is soo real, and applies three fold for smartphone apps. OSS docuemtn scanner and Metronome and Tuner by thetwom are GOATs.
- I like nomacs and sumatrapdf, they’re great!
- Please tell me what you use to edit and sign PDFs
  
  I am also curious. I'm spoiled by having access to Bluebeam at work and I have yet to find any software that comes close to the same ease of functionality for editing PDFs, even for extremely basic things like splitting, merging, and rotating pages.
  
  I use okular to edit PDFs.

Immich might not hold up yet in every aspect to Google photos, but I was and am still blown away by how much better face detection and grouping works. I cannot believe how ridiculously bad that feature is in Google, you just have to pray that it works, and if it messes up, it's extremely annoying to fix. In immich, it works exactly as you'd expect.
- Didn't google's recognition thing accidentally put pictures of black people under the gorilla category?
- It’s def on par with Apple
- Never tried Google’s face detection, but given that their search AI told people to eat rocks daily, I’m not surprised. Yeah, Immich looks great. I need to set that up soon, trying to set my old laptop with docker
  
  I'm also looking forward to trying Immich, but I'm slowed down because I decided I should learn podman and use that instead of docker!
  I do a lot of photo organising myself with file structure and timestamp filenames, but it looks like I can have Immich see my 'proper' library of files, and for the family it's hopefully a helpful tool.
  Does anyone know how well the iPhone app works? I had problems with the next cloud app, which otherwise was great for connecting my general web of tech with an iPhone.

Jellyfin vs Plex
Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

Compiz, Wayfire, and KWin all outshine both Windows and MacOS in quality and render performance.
The amount of visual magic in Compiz and Wayfire especially is both incredibly useful but also hilarious.
3D desktop cube is a great way to handle multiple desktops, but rotating your windows to any angle is just to show off to your friends lol.
- I remember fucking around with Compiz back when it was still called Beryl. It was I think just before Window Vista came out? My computer was too shit for Vista, but had no problem with Beryl - wobbly windows, app previews when you hover the taskbar icon, stackable windows, desktop cube, etc.
  
  Man this is a trip I remember Beryl and when it turned to Compiz. I spent way more time than I care to admit just spinning stuff around and playing with effects than accomplishing anything of meaningful value.
  
  I'm old enough to tell you Compiz was there first, then Beryl came around with many more bells and whistles and then it got folded back into Compiz. My mind was blown when I first saw the desktop cube.
- interesting

Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.

VLC

Im not sure i can say its objectively better, but i like godot much more than unity
- GDScript is way easier than C#, and there’s C# support in Godot so you can choose between either! I also like that Godot us a lot lighter :D
  Previously on my old laptop it took a good half a minute for a MOUSE CLICK to register (I have since gotten a newer laptop that can most definitely handle unity, but I’ve gotten used to godot’s workflow and I don’t want to go back to unity)
  
  They just upgraded their physics library too. Far more performant..
- Godot is objectively better as an engine, you might still prefer Unity for the amount of content you can pay to get, but if you're doing everything yourself Godot is miles ahead of Unity. I always give this example because it's so dumb but perfectly illustrates my point:
  If you're writing a Single player game, you don't care which controller pressed a button, otherwise if for some reason there are multiple controllers connected only one of them will provide input to the game. In Unity the way to deal with this is to make multiple mappings, e.g. Controller 1 button A means jump, Controller 2 button A means jump, etc, etc. Unreal has the same thing, Godot used to be the same, but a quick look at the code base and a couple of lines of code later and boom, Godot now has an Any Controller button A means jump mapping.
  This sort of thing makes Godot objectively better than Unity. There are other things too, but this one takes the cake for me.

Inkscape is really good and I prefer it over Adobe Illustrator. It's a bit worse in some regards but its really stable and does everything very reliably and can be molded into svg production machine.
Kdenlive is the best simple video editor out there. Sure other editors are better but kdenlive really hits that sweet spot of being simple but powerful.
Digikam is the best photo management suite I know off. Everything else seems to be missing one thing or another and Digikam just does everything and does it pretty well.
Ansel (fork of Darktable) is often better than Adobe Lightroom for casual photography as it comes with very strong opinionated defaults. I generall just follow the default pipeline and have amazing shots. Light room could probably get me a bit further but Ansels hits the sweet spot between too basic and too clunky.
Then as a developer foss libraries are basically uncontested to the point where proprietary libraries and programming languages basically do not exist anymore.

all fossify apps in android. I find most android apps for basic tasks heavily overbloated, even the ones directly from google.
Okular for pdf viewing on pc

Libre Office.

The Apache Web Server

REALLY simple, but "Open Sodoku". It's just a Sodoku app without ads. I'm very bad but it's pretty fun

NMAP still has a semi-open-source license. Not sure if anyone else considers in FOSS, but it's a critical tool in network security.
Also, I've never used any commercial video editing software but kdenlive is awesome.

I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.
The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don't know if there's a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.
Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn't as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.
Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience
KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I'm happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There's Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io

Zotero
- helps you keep track of your sources, it was really helpful for my history coursework

Breezy weather for Android. It works exactly the same, and doesn't have any of the privacy bullshit strings attached.

I agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I'll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet, rsync and mpv.
- God tier. I’ve used these both so much over the years.
- Wow wasn’t aware rsync’s FOSS

LibreWolf and other Firefox forks.
- i love that floorp allows you to put the tab bar wherever! I have it on the bottom close to my apps.
  I also respect people who use librewolf, it seems great too. There’s a few annoying bits due to the anti-fingerprinting settings (e.g. defaulting to light mode) but I guess it depends on your preferences on how private you want to be.
  
  I just use the dark reader extension. Not ideal, but I don't really notice any difference.
  
  I switched over to Floorp a month or so ago - it's pretty good. My only gripes are:
  The tabs are really hard to distinguish between the active tab and the inactive tabs
  If you have session stuff in the sidebar, it seems to "forget" about it and I constantly have to sign into stuff.

I'd say Logseq is better than any note-taking alternative that works in the same way. It's a bit different to regular note-taking apps as it acts more as a knowledge database based on tags, than with a regular file-folder structure. Also I prefer Actual Budget to YNAB, as it's starting to have even more features than YNAB and actually supports things like bank syncing for major parts of Europe that even YNAB doesn't. And it's free to host yourself or really cheap to host through PikaPods. But it's hard to say "objectively" because in the end, a lot of it is subjective. If people are used to running one program, it'll be hard to switch to another, even if it's "objectively" better.
The largest issue with FOSS applications is that many contributors don't have any UX/UI knowledge, which is a huge factor in why people choose one program over another. I'd argue GIMP is a mess compared to Photoshop, even if GIMP is able to do many, many things that Photoshop is able to.
- Definitely and sadly not better than Obsidian. Also it can’t sync and it stinks for that
  
  From my limited experience with Obsidian, I still preferred Logseq actually. And the syncing is easily done by just storing the markdown files in a cloud folder. But yeah, it's subjective for sure.
  
  I like Obsidian too. That said, unless I'm handling a huge amount of notes at once, Joplin works much better, esp. for quick notes and to-do lists. Obsidian's vaults are a bit annoying to switch through. I still use Obsidian for like one or two things but most of my notes are now in Joplin (which can sync as well!)
  
  I have multiple different graphs/vaults/whatever synced by simply storing the markdown files in a synced folder and I never had any issues. The new version of logseq is supposed to use a database and syncing, afaik.
- Logseq is the best note taking app for me. And a lot of my programmer/adhd colleagues. I cannot keep order in my notes and logseq does it for me. It's so essential for my workflow that I have a monthly donation to the project set up.
- Ive used gimp for over 18 years. Im so used to it i find photoshop is a mess lol
  
  That's less and opinion than Stockholm syndrome.
  There's a very good argument for Blender, though, but 3D software is so specialized that I guess it depends what you're comparing it to.
  And while we're on creativity software, the same goes for Godot. Arguable, but very dependent on what you're doing.
- interesting, I'll have to try loqseq.
  That might explain why some FOSS apps have terrible UI. There's plenty that have really really good UI as well

https://www.visidata.org/
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child's play in comparison.
- woah that’s cool

Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.

OpenDroneMap. It's a suite that provides photogrammetry, stitching, volumetric analysis, geographic correlation, and 3D model conversion from aerial and non-aerial photos. And that's only the features that I use myself. It defaults to CPU-only rendering, so you don't need a big bad GPU to GSD.
Even ignoring the lack of subscription cost, ODM performs at least as well as other applications I tried such as Pix4D. Professionally, I use it for year-over-year kelp bed monitoring, photosynthetic mass analysis, and home construction analysis, specifically volumetric infill needs. Personally, I use it to generate 3D models of my boat interior, which I convert to STL files for arranging infrastructure in limited spaces.
- cool I didn’t even know that kund if software existed, let alone foss

A lot of non-graphical utilities --- basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.
I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is "developer friendly" --- tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.

Honestly, almost all Microsoft products are objectively worse than FOSS alternatives, they are just so big that people are unwilling to escape the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Microsoft's development tools are first in class IMO, but not much else
  
  Yes, thats the "almost" part
- True. I hate that MS office pushes you to yse onedrive. Also, onedrive’s syncing is horrible.
  It puts all your synced folders into a separate but not really sort of “OneDrive” folder. It doesn’t sync very well from my experience. And I lost a bunch of my data due to OneDrive not backing up properly. Now I use pCloud, which actually syncs things in a sane way (ie not creating two separate folders called “OneDrive” and “OneDrive - [workplace name]”) and also have a way better desktop app (you don’t need to navigate the stupid toolbar menu thing to get to settings, pcloud just has an app with organised menus! surely MS has enough funding to make a good onedrive desktop app? right?)
  
  Microsoft "Why do you need folders when you can just dump everything in the root of the folder!" OneDrive

MuseScore sheet music.
- I'm missing 2 things,
  the ability to play drag notes in the playback (minor)
  And the ability to have a bar be played on the 2nd or 3rd repeat (kinda major)

AntennaPod is a pretty great podcast player, far better than the one Google did (and abandonned)
Newsblur is the only RSS reader that I've found that can apply filters to feeds
I've switched from Discord to Element with some friends for daily text chat and vocal chat (video games) and it's less cluttered than Discord, and the voice even sounds better
SpamBlocker is a better phone/SMS spam filter than the proprietary ones I've tried
Firefox (and forks) has been my browser for more than 20 years, I can't go back to proprietary ones
- I use NetNewsWire (iOS), but I might try out Newsblur. Seems pretty interesting. SpamBlocker looks like a cool alternative to Whoscall. Element is great, the only downside is getting people to adopt it. Firefox (and its forks) are awesome.
  
  The SpamBlocker I was refering to is on Android (f-droid), I'm not sure about iOS
  https://github.com/aj3423/SpamBlocker
  
  I only used Discord with a bunch of friends I play with, no "official game servers" so it was pretty easy
  The hard task will be to have some other non-gaming friends to join, because they use Whatsapp (which me and my gaming friends refuse to touch)
- Matrix/element is good for private group chat but quickly falls apart for any public/semi public scenario where you might need automated moderation :( discord still undefeated there

emacs

i am using Darktable to edit raw photos. i don't know if it's better than Lightroom or Capture One overall, but it is for my use case.

Borg is an amazing backup utility.
- borgmatic is an abstraction layer that makes borg a little easier to work with.
  Things like scheduling, repo management, notifications. I like it very much.
  
  I use Vorta, a GUI frontend, because I'm a filthy casual.

Krita is a fantastic image editor with a customizable UI that’s very powerful but easy to use.
Pixelmator is a waste of $70 when you get more (you can resize the toolbar buttons!) for free with Krita.

ShareX or flameshot for taking screenshots. ShareX needs some tweaks out of the box but once it's tweaked it is so much more convenient when you need to make super quick tweaks/edits like adding steps or highlights or something.
- I agree so much for flameshot. For work I moved to a Mac and we are not allowed to install flameshot (signing issue), and the workflow for taking screenshots (e.g., when writing documentation) is so much worse and slow with the default macOS tooling.
  
  Yes this is my main use case too, documentation. Flameshot and sharex are so quick for it. The osx one blows. So many clicks and drags. I'd rather just click and drag a box instead of spawn a box then move the corners around lol
- Flameshot is so good.
- ShareX is amazing, it just needs a big UX improvement. If you're not technical of nature, the program is kinda too much at once. I can't recommend it easely to my family until it has a simpler interface option.
- woah that looks really cool, I have to try those out. 👀
  edit: WAIT SHAREX HAS OCR????
  
  IT CAN CAPTURE REGIONS OF THE SCREEN? IT HAS ACTUALLY GOOD HOTKEYS??? WOAHHHHH

Any FOSS Linux/Unix shell, bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, whatever, is a million times better than cmd or the early versions of PowerShell. Yeah, I know, PowerShell Core exists now, and it's even open source and cross platform, but it still sucks.
- And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.
  Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn't as good as a lot of other terminals.
  
  For anyone who missed it, the Windows Terminal team is infamous for claiming that it would require PhD level expertise to implement some basic optimizations suggested in a Github thread. Within a few hours, another developer countered that claim by submitting a functioning PR with said improvements implemented.
  Windows Terminal team lead Dustin Howett then went on to double down on the original claim that said optimizations were unfeasable, and publicly attacked the author of the original suggestion thread on Hacker News. He issued an extremely half-assed apology and is still a Micro$haft employee to this day.
  https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-that/

OBS, Portmaster, Trilium, FlightGear
+all the minimalist Adwaita apps on the Flathub. Love 'em.