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)

  • ReallyZen@lemmy.ml
    118·
    4 days ago

    Gnome is the best UI there is IMO. Anything else is cluttered, or privacy-invasive, or both.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      13·
      3 days ago

      Eh, I prefer KDE. It’s fairly uncluttered unless you actively mess with it and want it, whole Gnome is pretty ruthlessly “our way is the right way”.

      Once upon a time they only allowed virtual desktops to be in a column. Someone decided that columns weren’t for everyone so obviously make it only be in a row. Despite ages of most implementations supporting a grid layout.

      Window title search. This is fantastic for managing a lot of windows. I wish KDE could get better by using screen reader facilities to let you search window contents as well, but having the facility in show windows view at all is great.

      Their window tiling is less capable even than Microsoft windows.

      Any attempt to customize means extensions, and they seem to break the interfaces the extensions need constantly, and I had to face the reality that every update had me searching for a replacement extension because they broke one that want maintained anymore.

      But either way, the open desktop shells are better than the proprietary ones.