Some FOSS programs, due to being mantained by hobbyists vs a massive megacorporation with millions in funding, don’t have as many features and aren’t as polished as their proprietary counterparts. However, there are some FOSS programs that simply have more functionality and QoL features compared to proprietary offerings.

What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their non-FOSS alternatives? Maybe we can discover useful new programs together :D

I’ll start, I think Joplin is a great note-taking app that works offline + can sync between desktop and mobile really well. Also, working with Markdown is really nice compared with rich text editors that only work with the specific program that supports it. Joplin even has a bunch of plugins to extend functionality!

Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, etc. either don’t have desktop apps, doesn’t work offline, does not support Markdown, or a combination of those three.

What are some other really nice FOSS programs?

edit: woah that’s a whole load of cool FOSS software I have to try out! So far my experiences have been great (ShareX in particular is AWESOME as a screenshot tool, it’s what snip and sketch wishes it could be and mostly replaces OBS for my use case and a whole lot more)

  • arandomthought@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    5 days ago

    I agree with so much that has been said here. VLC, Linux as a whole (or GNU/Linux, of course) and many more. Obsidian is sadly not open source but its free and it’s absolutely amazing!

    What I haven’t found yet is a FOSS (or even just “free as in beer”) replacement for MS Project. I want to plan out a top level view of what we have to do as a team to reach some goal, assign multiple team members to one “task”, allocate a set amount of their time and see at what times we might be over or under capacity. The FOSS planing tools I’ve seen mostly work in “shifts” or let you assign one task to one person. But we’re in R&D and if I plan for 40 hours of “conceptual work” over the span of a month and assign Sarah and Steve to this with 20 hours each I don’t want to babysit their shifts. They will do the work when it suits them.

    The only one I’ve seen that could do what I need is ProjectLibre but the FOSS desktop version has been abandoned a while ago and is still very buggy.

    Sorry for placing this here but maybe someone knows something…

    • Allero@lemmy.today
      4·
      5 days ago

      As an alternative to Obsidian, there is Trilium. Much the same stuff, but actually open-source

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Taiga is an open-source and self-hosted project management tool. Not sure if it has all the functionality you need, but it seems quite good. Never tried it though, since I don’t really do any important projects. Who knows, it could be amazing!

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      yep I like Obsidian. It’s a lot better than what the much bigger companies are doing. I also like Joplin for quicker notes because the vault system in obsidian is really annoying since it’s slow to switch between them and they all have individual settings and plugins (great for customisation, but horrible for getting setup quick)