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)

  • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    i love that floorp allows you to put the tab bar wherever! I have it on the bottom close to my apps.

    I also respect people who use librewolf, it seems great too. There’s a few annoying bits due to the anti-fingerprinting settings (e.g. defaulting to light mode) but I guess it depends on your preferences on how private you want to be.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        2·
        7 days ago

        Dark Reader is a godsend. I sent money their way, so many things are just stark white everywhere, I’d be suffering of it wasn’t for that extension.

      • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        I like “dark background light text” by “Mikhail”. It’s simple and effective

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      6 days ago

      I switched over to Floorp a month or so ago - it’s pretty good. My only gripes are:

      1. The tabs are really hard to distinguish between the active tab and the inactive tabs
      2. If you have session stuff in the sidebar, it seems to “forget” about it and I constantly have to sign into stuff.
      • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        for me, the two issues you have are sort of solved by:

        1. Firefox Colour (never really noticed the first issue since I always have a colourful theme)
        2. I don’t use the sidebar so never had that issue either. (but maybe the forgetting sessions is some sort of privacy thing? who knows?)

        I change the position of the UI to be where er :D