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.
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.
It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it’s annoying
Try the AutoFill keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-L (or Cmd-Shift-L on Mac). Works well enough for me.
But that’s only auto after a manual button press, that’s half the auto! In lastpass when I visited a page, it would just fill it in and log in for me without any input.
Sometimes bit warden doesn’t even realise it has a password for the site because it’s looking for a specific URL rather than a wildcard match to the domain.
Sucks on Android tho
If you opened it once, so a process exists, it usually will work with it’s autofill. At least on my Samsung it does after opening it once.
It sucks for login like
TwitterX though.Works perfectly on mine.
Yeah that could definitely be improved. There’s been talk on GitHub issues about adding support to fill Shadow DOM fields, honestly don’t know if they’ve done it yet but that would be a big help for web apps like HomeAssistant.
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
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
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.
Yeah, I just went with Bitwarden’s own cloud because it was so affordable, accessible, and easy.
And their integrations are really solid too.
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)
You can setup anonaddy or duckduckgo with bitwarden to generate alias emails automatically. The best setup we get for free.
I used Bitwarden a lot but it pissed me off that I couldn’t add new entries while offline, that accessing attachments requires me to be online as well, and that attachments are not part of the backup.
I switched back to Enpass due to that, which has even a slightly better UX IMHO. It’s not FOSS though, but uses the FOSS sqlcipher library for storage. So if push comes to shove, I can still exfiltrate my data without relying on the vendor.
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.
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
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!
God, remember Fraps?
I try not to
That ugly yellow FPS counter gives me such a genuine feeling of nostalgia.
Obs?
Software for recording and live streaming. Stands for Open Broadcasting Software. It is the industry standard at this point.
OBS is lifechanging, i watch TV through it so i can cut out the garbage graphics that are often onscreen during live sports and actually focus on the game and appreciate the beauty of the camerawork
I’m pretty sure that the masking features of OBS (potentially even VLC) could be paired with a camera aimed at the display, to crop interlopers out of a projected image, so that they don’t get painted\blinded with projected light. Very niche utility, but I’m not aware of any hardware-only solutions for it, & its potentially show\life-saving
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!
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.
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! :)
Doesn’t VSCodium break quite a lot of extensions even if installed manually?
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
I thought so too but then I read some complaints about some extensions breaking. I’ve never used it myself so 🤷♂️
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
Agree on all of them!
These are a lot of great recommendations I’ll have to look at! Especially VSCodium. I’m using VS Code right now for my SvelteKit projects, so if I can add the Svelte and Tailwind CSS plugins… that’s really all I need.
I want so badly to hop ship from VS Code, I’m doing a trial of JetBrains WebStorm right now. Another piece of proprietary software…
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.
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
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.
Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn’t great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
I tried out in the late 2000s, and it was clunky and limited.
I tried it again in 2020, and it is completely different. Super powerful and polished.
Yes. 100%
No clue about video editing though.
Also, why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
I only use it for video editing.
why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
Do you have recommended alternatives? I like it using Blender for video editing because I can automate any arbitrary repetitive task with a Python script.
I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.
I second Kdenlive.
Not too familiar with it, but what I do know is that it is an incredible video editor.
I’ve tried exactly once (given that I know blender anyway and no video editor), and ran into audio sync issues at export that didn’t happen when playing the timeline from blender. There were some mentions of the issues on forums, but no purported solution worked.
The gist of it is that Blender is not a video editor, but a highly capable 3d kitchen sink containing so many features that, in combination, mean that you can use it to edit videos, outranked in its own area of expertise only by Houdini. There was never a real push to make it particularly good at video editing, and unlike in other areas it didn’t happen by accident, either (Blender is e.g. arguably the best 2d vector editor ever since it got grease pencil).
Yes! the video sequencer has received dramatic improvements over the past years. It now shuffles or overwrites timeline content when you move a strip over another (based on a user setting), it transform-snaps to strip bounds and other elements, it auto-generates proxies so you never have to touch anything, it plays in realtime… for a full overview of improvements see the release notes : https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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
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.
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)
It’s absurd how long it took windows to have something that worked half as well as tabbed file browsers on linux.
I wonder how many people actually use tabs. I find having a split file browser much more important for moving files.
Yes, but I’m still waiting for mac style column browse mode in nautilus 😒
I’m pretty sure gnome used to have that around 1.0 or something.
I don’t recall, but it hasn’t had it in over 15 years that’s for sure.
They probably didn’t like that some users enjoyed using it.
I got my first Mac when the m1 came out. Id never used them before. The file manager columns just doesn’t make sense to my brain.
I was a mac head from the early nineties to the mid two thousands. Column mode is the only thing I truly miss.
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.
Don’t forget to go vote on the issue!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/27
Also check out:
And if you are on Windows, you can install Double Commander there. Unfortunately links from other programs will still open in Explorer.
Windows file manager is also so slow compared to Dolphin. With Dolphin it instantly responds and it takes Windows File manager up to 1 whole second to register and process a click.
I really love nemo. It’s such a nice file explorer.
Inkscape?
Absolutely love Inkscape. It’s one of the first pieces of software I add on any new install.
I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won’t lie, it’s pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.
+1 un
How does it compare to Affinity?
inkscape (and gimp) is dog shit ass compared to an actual vector (and photoedit/raster) design program
im a graphic designer but im also not a huge adobe guy i think affinity products r fire.
im talking about inkscape and gimp 7-8 years ago but its not nearly as robust or user friendly as an actual design program if you desire to create more than one image trace. image tracing is the only thing inkscape is good for.
Unfortunately it’s not so good on Windows, performance is sluggish.
Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
KDE is better than Windows
AudibleAudacity is more audio programme than most people needKdenLive is more video editor than most people need
Kritta is more art programme than most people need
There are edge cases where there are professional programmes that might be better but unless you are a professional you do not need them and even semi-pros would likely be better served by those three
Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape
Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid
Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox
Honorable mentions that don’t have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS
I used Zotero for the references for my Bachelor’s thesis. I’m happy that I don’t need to use it anymore but the software itself is fine.
It’s not perfect, but it’s just miles ahead of anything else on the market in capability!
+1 for Sumatra. Use that and a thumbnail loader, and it’s superior to Calibre for a library of books (ePub, PDF, CBR, CBZ).
I also use Notepad++ and qBittorrent. Looking into Inkscape now. Firefox is the best.
Sumatra PDF is the best. It’s become an essential tool for me. Nothing I tried comes close.
+1 for Sumatra. I just wish it had some minimal pdf editing like moving and inserting pages like Apple’s MacOS Preview.
Inkscape is the goat
Thunderbird
I actually came to this thread in hopes of finding a replacement for Thunderbird. I’ve been using it for 10 years or more now, on various machines, always hoping it would somewhen stop being laggy. No plugins installed, and it frequently freezes for several seconds or even minutes, when I’m idle but also while I’m typing.
Hm… I’ve never seen it do that to me (on Windows with multi GB mail storage).
Though I think there is a setting to auto compress the mail storage every so often if it will save more than X, though I can’t remember the details on top of my head. If that setting is too low (e.g. if it will save more than 1mb) then it might be running very often for minimal gain.
Perhaps rummage around in there and see if it helps.
I appreciated the advice! Found the setting, which was indeed low. Raised it to 200 MB and to require manual confirmation. Today I was asked if I want to compress. The sad part is, the freezes continued in between. So this was not the cause, but thank you still.
Sorry that didn’t work. Maybe also try this:
Privacy & Security --> Security --> Scam Detection
Turn off the “Tell me if the message I’m reading is a suspected email Scam”
Thanks again, though just for the record, that didn’t help either. It’s alright, I’m used to the Thunderbird lags. Let’s stop here :)
QGIS isn’t that bad really. Some parts are more intuitive than ArcPro.
I didn’t say it was bad. Just that the UX isn’t great.
Swap f-droid for droid-ify for a more modern UI.
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Yep, I did! I also use its shizuku integration to install in the background, which is awesome
I absolutely love Espanso. So much faster than TextExpander and I like that it’s config is plain text files.
You’re insane though if you think Inkscape is better than Illustrator. I’m not an Adobe fanboy by any means, but it is a really good (if bloated) product.
Inkscape just gets out of my way. I was using it for a quite particular application of drawing CNC mill plans though, and through that, I got into using it for other graphics stuff!
