this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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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)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

Dnscrypt-proxy has no comparison, IMO. DNS encryption, caching, IP & domain blocking, local DoH. It's so useful.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 14 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It's amazing how much time is saved on projects when you don't have to deal with and maintain Autodesk's and Adobe's licensing insanity.

Like 90% of downtime would be because the license server was down because of a security update and IT was trying to troubleshoot with Autodesk or a user forgot their Adobe password... Not because of anything actually breaking.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.

If I remember correctly, Blender began it's life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago

Molly for signal if that counts

[–] [email protected] 21 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

Damn straight. I was an open office guy for a while, but word had a slight edge. Now that edge is gone and Libre Office is the clear winner. I will not be going back.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

My paint and Krita are great, I use them daily

[–] [email protected] 13 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Holy shit, I haven't thought about this in years! I remember back in 2008 I had a copy of Stepmania on a flash drive and played it on school computers during class.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

A new german democratic republic? Only kidding, that looks pretty interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Over the last few years I've been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It's as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I'm working much faster.

Now, Krita doesn't have all of CSP's niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

Similarly CSP's 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender's. Which is weird because CSP isn't a modeling program - you'd think they'd stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Microsoft Terminal vs the default Command Prompt haha. VS Code vs Visual Studio.

In general software is one of the rare thing where ordinary people can "mass produce" things that compete with commercial offerings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

FOSS software is great :D

I would also suggest VSCodium as basically VSCode without MS’s telemetry. The only actual downside is that a few proprietary extensions don’t work (most notably the MS ones)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm just too lazy to reinstall and copy over my settings to VSCodium.

Supporting open source projects by small teams has been the only good thing MS has ever done. Imagine if MS would even partly open sourced part of windows. Like there are bugs in explorer for 3 decades that just don't get fixed lol. And then there still would be bloat and shitty things, but it still would be better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

VSCodium supports syncing settings the same way VSCode does :D

alternatively, you could probably just copy the settings.json

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