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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by scheep@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

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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[-] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 0 points 1 week ago

Borg is an amazing backup utility.

[-] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago

borgmatic is an abstraction layer that makes borg a little easier to work with.

Things like scheduling, repo management, notifications. I like it very much.

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[-] reallyzen@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 week ago

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

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[-] arandomthought@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I agree with so much that has been said here. VLC, Linux as a whole (or GNU/Linux, of course) and many more. Obsidian is sadly not open source but its free and it's absolutely amazing!

What I haven't found yet is a FOSS (or even just "free as in beer") replacement for MS Project. I want to plan out a top level view of what we have to do as a team to reach some goal, assign multiple team members to one "task", allocate a set amount of their time and see at what times we might be over or under capacity. The FOSS planing tools I've seen mostly work in "shifts" or let you assign one task to one person. But we're in R&D and if I plan for 40 hours of "conceptual work" over the span of a month and assign Sarah and Steve to this with 20 hours each I don't want to babysit their shifts. They will do the work when it suits them.

The only one I've seen that could do what I need is ProjectLibre but the FOSS desktop version has been abandoned a while ago and is still very buggy.

Sorry for placing this here but maybe someone knows something...

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[-] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 0 points 1 week ago

Apache?

I think it's still the leader and I certainly prefer it to other alternatives.

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[-] llama@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago

Any programming language other than Java or Dotnet. Apache web server over Microsoft IIS.

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[-] turnip@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 week ago

YouTrack is good for notes, and supports Draw.io as a plugin. They have a free hosted option for personal use as well.

Then Signal obviously.

[-] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org -1 points 1 week ago

Most of them

[-] sith@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 week ago

A more relevant question: What proprietary software is better than its FOSS counterpart?

Because I can't come up with any.

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[-] loomy@lemy.lol -1 points 1 week ago

almost all of them

[-] MTK@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

Honestly, almost all Microsoft products are objectively worse than FOSS alternatives, they are just so big that people are unwilling to escape the Microsoft ecosystem.

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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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