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

1. XBMC forked off into Plex. Plex introduced a far better UI.
2. XBMC became Kodi. Kodi learned from Plex.
3. Jellyfin came along and learned from both of them.

So I don't think you can really criticise Plex too much here. They were perhaps getting complacent and they've definitely been shown up, but they were an important step to where we are now.

Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I'm too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much "free", but rather "unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge".

• GNOME, for the hate it gets, it comes close to getting everything right. I'd give it a 95/100 score. Windows a 30/100, and MacOS a 35/100. No verdict/comment on KDE as I haven't used it. I have good reasons for disliking W10/W11 and separate ones for MacOS. As desktop environments, they are both shit for each their own reasons.
• Blender. 3D/Scultping/Drawing/Video Editing. Aside from Linux kernel, the most impressive and well managed FOSS project there is. I grew up with pirated 3dsmax, and what a dream it would be to grow up today with Blender as it is.
• Linux as a OS kernel. One can argue about the desktop market share, but people don't know better. They think the software that runs on it defines it. But, there is a reason why 100% of top 500 supercomputers in this world run on Linux. I'd also mention the Arch/AUR community. Doesn't matter if you use Arch or not, arch/aur wiki is a goldmine.
• Godot: 2D game engine. As a 3d game engine, it's not nearly as good as the non-FOSS competition.
• Firefox: If it wasn't for Firefox, I don't know what I would do. I don't trust chrome one single bit.
• Alacrity terminal: I'm sure there are plenty great FOSS terminal emulators, but the built in ones for MacOS and Windows are garbage.
• Prusa Slicer: I think this one is as good as the commercial counterparts for FDM G-code generation.
• VLC. Mixed feelings about this one, as I think it's UI is lacking, but since it plays almost everything the UX ends up being great.
• LibreOffice Writer. Perhaps debatable. But the fact that you can trust LibreOffice to respect and adhere to the OpenDocumentFormat, and equally trust Microsoft Word to deliberately not do so in subtle ways, LibreOffice Writer is ultimately the better software IMHO.

Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:

• Gimp. It just isn't as good, even if you get used to it. Some things, of course, it can do much better (e.g the G'Mic QT filter pack). The lack of non-destructive work flows is the key part that is missing.
• FreeCAD. It's good, and you can do wonders with it, but oh so rough compared to onshape/Fusion/etc.
• Darktable. Not as good as commercial counterparts like Lightroom.
• Kdenlive. Not as good as Davinci Resolve, or the adobe counterparts.
• LMMS: Not as good as most commercial DAWs.
• Krita: This one is actually not too far away from being best in class. I still suspect photoshop and has an edge
• InkScape: A "best for some vector things but not all"-kinda thing. It's FOSS nature makes it the defacto vector editing software for certain kind of makers. But as a graphical vector editing suite, adobe's stuff is just much more solid.

Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don't care if there is a counterpart

• Tuner: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/ It just does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of these on the play store, with ads or paid. There is no need for it.
• Aegis Authenticator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/ For handling 2FA keys.
• Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.gallery.pro/
• Telegram: Sort of FOSS. Aside from security concerns whereby Signal would win out, it's still the best UX. Compared to Messenger and Whats'App, not even a contest.

Thanks for the praise! We're not on Lemmy too much, but someone in the Core Team caught site of this and shared it with me. If you're wondering who I am: github

I was setting up a Plex server, but when I noticed I had to pay to be able to play my own content on my phone I immediately switched to jellyfin. Haven't been able to test it yet, but as long as I don't need to pay them to be able to watch my own content on my own devices on my own network, I'll be happy!

gimp

LibreOffice, I'm not sure it's better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.

Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store

Inkscape, I'm not even sure what the proprietary version is?

VLC >> everything else

The thing I find hard to convey is that FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software for many reasons, most of which are non-technical: FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software if it isn't spying on you, if it's governance is collective, if it's not build to make you pay for things that should be free, if it lets you decide where your data goes, etc...

we're often missing the point when we attempt at side-by-side comparison of FLOSS and proprietary software.. It's usually one-dimentional, and playing on our opponent's field: these companies racketing their users based on rent-based exploitative business models will always have more resources than independant developpers to improve "UX/UI"... so I think this must not be the only prism through which reading these things.

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!

Blender for video editing. I haven't even touched its 3D animation features.

GNOME Document Scanner is surprisingly working smoothly out-of-the-box (with Brother printer at least)

Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape

Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid

Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox

Honorable mentions that don't have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS

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