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)

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
    11·
    3 days ago

    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.