I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
I really don’t miss trying to find codec packs to install. Good riddance.
Did you know that MS now charges for you to play some codecs with windows media player?
Unless something has changed recently, that’s not exactly true. They charge 99c for the distribution of it through the windows store (or whatever it’s called) but you can install them the traditional way no problem
I think it’s still dumb but it’s a distinction worth making. I think the description even links the website where you can download it
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
My argument for self host of something that needs to be ultra secure is, they will do a better job at it than me.
For me the argument is more that there is always a point where I duck up my self hosting infrastructure and at this point I will need passwords to fix it.
I’ve been looking for a good password manager, and I’ve heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden… guess I’ll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!
Pro tip : if you self host use vaultwarden. It’s 100℅ compatible with all bitwarden clients but has many more features and is lighter weight
Bitwarden is to me the simplest and most effective PW manager, just perfect at what it does. I however switched from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only because the latter has a mail aliases generation integrated (with Proton Unlimited)
Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
Also KeePass, I’ve switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP’s.
Keepass can also do TOTPs.
Bitwarden / VaultWarden also does totp
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!
how do we even know something is quantum secure, like the tech isnt out yet is it?
Because we already know how quantum encryption works.
It’s like how we proved the Halting Problem was undecideable long before the first computer was ever built.
This might be helpful: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs
I’m guessing they can say the methods of encryption are “1 way” ie unreversable, and therefore quantum resistant (the way that quantum solves equations).
The time when they essentially went closed source to implement MobileCoin in kind of a covert operation really didn’t do them any favors, though.
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
I adore OBS. I’ve been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they’ve all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
I am by no means a master at OBS, and I wouldn’t know where to point you to learn. Everything I know I’ve learned by either poking around in the software or googling specific questions, i.e. “how to overlay twitch chat in OBS”. As you can probably guess, I used to use it to stream to twitch. Not very suddenly, mind, but I did it. Lol!
OBS is designed for streaming out and recording video, not really for music production. I’m sure there are some FOSS music production softwares worth checking out, though!
Thanks!
Obs?
Software for recording and live streaming. Stands for Open Broadcasting Software. It is the industry standard at this point.
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
Please post on lemmy! I really liked seeing the devs give updates on Reddit.
An open source platform feels completely natural for a project like jellyfin!
I mean we have [email protected]
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
It’s much easier to discuss Jellyfin here for me than on the forum.
Blender for video editing. I haven’t even touched its 3D animation features.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
The UI has most of all gotten more flexible. Previously you had highly efficient but also hard to learn workflows for everything, now you have a UI which also has non-efficient ways to do everything so you don’t have to be good at everything to get shit done, can build your own mix of “yeah I’m doing this every other second, I want this to be fast, I use that twice a day, I can click through menus for that”. Blender has way more functionality than will ever fit onto keybindings so customising the UI to your workflow is a must if you want to be efficient.
Generally the whole thing has been a giant success, however, I do have a criticism: They made left-click select the default. Right-click select has always been superior but it was not what the Maya etc. folks are used to. Have it available, even as a choice on the first startup screen for those people, sure, but don’t make it the default for people just getting into 3d editing.
And, yes, Blender still breaks plenty of UI conventions in plenty of other areas. Saying “For good reason” would be kinda missing the point, very often it had those conventions before Microsoft or whoever came up with worse ones and made those popular.
If you want to only edit video you can use kdenlive. I tried blender several month ago and it still lacks lots of feature and exporting time is higher than kdenlive, even though they both use ffmpeg inside btw kdenlive let me write my own exporting script
Holy shit, I didn’t know that that’s a feature. For the two times a year I need to edit videos I will never have to deal with shitty free versions/test versions of video editing software ever.
Blender does an insane amount of things. 3d modelling, image editing, sculpting, rendering, procedural texturing, procedural modelling, video editing, physics simulations, animation, rigging, mocap. Probably some other things that I’m forgetting too.
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video edit
I’ve heard really good things about Shotcut. I wonder how the two (and Kdenlive as well as commercial competitors) compare. I looked a while ago for some good comparison articles but don’t recall finding any.
Shotcut crashes unexpectedly, on all the machines I’ve tried it on. Not frequently though, & it was so good I used it anyway.
Yikes, sorry to hear that. I only learned about Shotcut here on Lemmy. You can see my exchange with someone who uses it for work on this post.
VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn’t know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft’s store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It’s a real shame it doesn’t have a GNU/Linux version, it’s the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn’t look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn’t cockblock you with paywalls. For me it’s the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it’s because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don’t have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
+1 for Newpipe, my favorite feature is hiding thumbnails so I don’t have to see that stupid fucking “wow” wide-eyes face everyone makes with pointless arrows and circles. Now I just read the video title and my brain hurts less.
That’s actually a good idea and it also saves data, apparently.
For text editing, I love Gnu Emacs. Cannot quite explain how much time I save by not having to reach for a mouse. Emacs pinky sucks though, slightly better with Ctrl and Caps swapped.
If anyone likes Vim, try Doom Emacs.
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Why would it? It’s the same as original except for the removed telemetry and some proprietary module part. I don’t think that could break much
I tried it but need the SSH extension as a daily driver (it’s a MS one apparently). Didn’t work, spent 30 minutes trying the suggestions found online but that didn’t work either so had to get back to doing actual work instead of fiddling with an IDE.
Oh, that sucks. I’m going to edit my comment to mention this problem
It actually does. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I switched back to VSCode after a while
Some extensions simply didn’t install/work properly
Pylance, I believe, doesn’t work due to a Microsoft proprietary language server. But installing Pyright does most of the job. Something like that.
Interesting. I didn’t install much extensions manually because most of then are available from the open store but the onees I needed, like Microsoft’s C/C++ extension, worked fine
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Have you tried flameshot? Its an opensource and cross platform screenshot utility.
I did, as well as Spectacle, which now has the same functionality seg as flameshot and works without issues on wayland, unlike flameshot.
Neither of them comes even close as a replacement for ShareX, just try this thing yourself.
Yeah, you’re totally right. This is a very feature rich and comprehensive piece of software. This could maybe be accomplished with many different linux utils, but would lack to cohesion and polish. Thanks for sharing this, I might use this on the work computer.
Thank you for actually taking the time to try my recommendation out! :)
Agree on all of them!
I’ll take LibreOffice Writer over MS Word anytime. All that ‘I know better than you,’ ‘You wanted to copy the space, too, right? Even though you stopped marking before it,’ can kiss my ass.
I recently switch to OnlyOffice for their UI/UX, and it’s been brilliant. LibreOffice is a delight, though.
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.
You’re absolutely right, and in lots of areas I use FOSS alternatives solely because they are FOSS despite less resources and objectively worse UI/UX. Photography is a hobby of mine, a huge love. There is nothing on Linux that gives even remotely close to the ease and comfort of use for RAW image editing as CaptureOne Pro, a software I paid a pretty penny for some number of years ago. I’ve tried every RAW image editor that’s been recommended, and I dislike them all so much that I actually prefer to move my RAWs to my phone and edit them there.
Despite that, I’m still running Linux. I understand the trade offs that often need to happen to adhere to an ideal, and I largely agree. However, sometimes FOSS comes out on top in all regards, including UI/UX. And those are the apps I’m inviting everyone to share. 😉
You’re right that it mustn’t be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn’t also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of “free as in freedom” either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it’s not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.
And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.
Those are different dimensions that should be considered together. Of course we should still invest efforts into UI/UX, where possible and where it represents the will of the participants in the project… but when answering questions such as “which FLOSS piece is superior” i think we should always find a balance between those, and bring them together…
Another important point to add is that closed software depends on the company making money to exist. If the company goes under then the software goes away. However, what’s even worse is that the company constantly has to change the software to chase trends and attract new users.
You might’ve been the target demographic when you started using the software, but the target will inevitably move on to a different demographic sooner or later. At that point you either have to adjust to the changes or find a new piece of software.
On the other hand, open source software doesn’t need to chase trends, and even if the original project decides to move in a direction existing users don’t like then they’re free to fork it. This is precisely what we saw with Gnome when a bunch of users wanted to keep their existing experience and made forks like Cinnamon.
This is a really underappreciated aspect of open source in my opinion. You can safely invest in learning an open source tool without worrying that it will go away or change in a way you don’t want it to.
Seeing you in this instance is like bumping into your teacher at the supermarket as a kid.
lol
Xournal++ for pdf annotating, note taking
VLC >> everything else
Different tools for different purposes
No different tools. Only VLC!
I have been using MPC as long as I can remember. Never could make the jump to VLC. Currently run MPC-BE.
MPV is better than VLC, but it clearly depend of the utilisation.
for desktop I prefer mpv
One thing that I hate about VLC (hasn’t made me drop it in 15 years but alas) is that you can hit E to go forward one frame but there’s no key (nor capacity to set your own) to go back one frame.
Is it a niche use case? Sure probably. But not having the option to set one myself kills me whenever I frameskip one too far and have to shift-left and mash E again.
From what I recall it has to do with encoding and how the data stored references the following frame but not previous. Still seems like some engineering could be done to solve, so it it’s not as simple as “current Frame–”
i don’t think it’s a niche feature, and totally agree, very annoying. there’s some long technical explanation about like stream buffering but i don’t care, many other players have it. you can rewind but not rewind 1 frame?
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I do get annoyed, setting the hotkeys & seek distances, to something actually useful, every time I install VLC
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That would be more steps than just setting the hotkeys in VLC… I haven’t really had any reason to install MPC in… wow, over a decade? VLC opens everything & works with my remotes, casting, etc.
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I wish VLC updated their UI to include a dark mode. I’ve never had luck with VLC skins
Mpv.io if you are using low end computer to watch high bitrate videos or if you have high end computer you can use various image upscalar algorithm to improve your anime quality, Where VLC lags
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VLC is heavily bloated with features you need a guide to use (may as well use a command line tool if you need to refer to a guide every time). It crashes (or did about 2 years ago) some of our Linux systems. MPV spanks the piss out of it.
Firefox/LibreWolf
FF is the way. I found out you can get Edge on Linux now and threw up in my mouth. ☺️
If you ever feel your job is useless, remember it is someone’s job to maintain Edge for Linux.
I wonder what % of Linux users are using Edge, and what their reasoning is.
Our webapp is exclusively used on locked-down windows machines, with Edge only. Firefox and Chromium are useful for debugging, but testing and signoff is done in Edge. We use Linux machines for development and test suites, so having Edge available on these systems reduced a lot of complexity in our pipeline.
Anything other than that, Firefox every time.
“Every morning while I drink my coffee, I start up Ubuntu, load up Microsoft Edge, have a good laugh, and then close it.”
I use for work. Teams, office, SharePoint.
Teams
shudders
The real question is who uses Powershell for Linux
I’m not gonna lie, I tried it out of sheer curiosity
Wait that’s a thing? Oh, gods. I’m almost tempted, just to see what that’s like, but… no. 😂
All the Linux file managers I’ve tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.
Protip: KDE’s Dolphin is available for Windows.
The Windows integration isn’t perfect, but it’s very useful nonetheless. Multiple tabs and the Ctrl+I filter alone makes it worthwhile.
On a related note: KDE’s Kate text editor is also available on Windows and it works GREAT! So great that KDE eV has published it on the Windows store, making it easy to install
To be fair, the Windows File Explorer has multiple tabs too now, which is a big improvement. I have no idea what the problem is with the Windows Explorer search function though - how does it manage to take so long, no matter what you search for? (Why is Windows so slow to search, slow to delete files, slow to update? You’d think these would be core, priority features.)
I do enjoy using Dolphin on Tumbleweed, though I had to turn off the one-click file opening thing, which was terrible when trying to open context menus with a trackpad. Maybe I’ll try it on Windows.
The best part about windows’ slow ass file search is the fact that windows keeps a file index that third party programs can use to search multiple terrabytes of spinning rust in seconds, and then doesn’t use it
For Kate, any idea why build targets are disappearing for me randomly after a while? This has happened twice for me, oddly nothing else seems to be lost. (on Linux, also it may have been fixed since I last updated but I can’t find any info, though I think I did update it after the first time I had this happen)
What are build targets in the context of Kate? Kate itself is “just” a text editor. Related to a plugin maybe?
Yes, I do believe it is a (default) plugin. It allows compiling code via custom commands, I don’t know about “just” a text editor as I’m pretty sure Kate handles a bunch of other code stuff like indentations and code folding etc.
If you don’t use Kate as a code editor (assuming you use one at all), is there something else lightweight that you’d recommend?
I meant “just a text editor” in the sense that it’s not a full IDE with compilers and build system, versioning, project management etc. But now with plugins Kate does these things too
I use Kate mostly for config files or interpreted code like python, bash etc, and just launch the code from the terminal (or Kate’s built-in terminal 🙂 )
For compiled code I like KDevelop, if that can be considered lightweight. Vscode / vscodium is nice too but not exactly lightweight by many people’s standards (though I haven’t tried it with compiled code)
And if you are on Windows, you can install Double Commander there. Unfortunately links from other programs will still open in Explorer.
Yes, but I’m still waiting for mac style column browse mode in nautilus 😒
Columns became the dealbreaker when I was considering switching from macOS to Linux. I need my columns.
ElementOS’s file browser has them.
Kind of. They look the same, but don’t act the same. Folder don’t show their contents until you double click them. They act like any other file in that way. One click to select. Double click to open. I like the more basic one click functionality for browsing.
I really love nemo. It’s such a nice file explorer.
Blender. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is simply nothing like it in the commercial world. Its feature set is unreal; its like the swiss army knife of 3D modelling programs. I can’t say enough good things about Blender. It has replaced so many secondary programs in my workflow and is slowly dominating to become my entire workflow.
It used to suck to use in the late 2010s and then work was done to overhaul its space-shuttle cockpit interface, and now it actually feels concise and usable. I freaking love blender now. Big time blender fanboy right here.
In many regards using Blender can be a much more pleasant experience than using many of the commercial “standards” such as Maya or 3dsmax. Depends what aspect you’re looking at of course, it’s not perfect and it is lacking in some areas. Krita is amazing for painting, infinitely better than Photoshop.
Why do you compare Krita to Photoshop? They do different things.
Because a lot of people do use Photoshop for painting, and Photoshop does recognize that and implement some painting tools.
why is blender lcking and why is krita better
I tend to disagree. I’m trying to integrate Blender to my work flow and I find very difficult to do so. Simply because 95% of it is accessed through arbitrary button combinations and has no GUI counterpart. This in turn makes the learning curve a cliff, which I really don’t consider a pleasant experience.
Also you can’t track viewport with a camera easily. Something that literally every other 3D app I’ve ever used allows you to do.
