What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts?
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.
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VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
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
You can even install the free oem istaller in the windows store thats hidden iirc.
I tried that recently on a few machines and it didn't work.
Same.
looked it up, you’re right. The payment is for the codec out itself which is normally done by GPU companies and often can be downloaded for free.
My bad for not reading text on a window from Windows with a “$ please”.
So you admit you didn't read it, but then you happily go around spreading misinformation?
Why do you guys do that?
You can still pay 1$ for playing a codec in WMP. It’s still 90% correct.
People have been asking this same question since the existence of the internet.
I read that news. It was an out of season April Fools' joke, right?
They're wrong, see my reply above
I really don't miss trying to find codec packs to install. Good riddance.
Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don't get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I'm saying.
I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; "Media Monkey" etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.
For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.
What do you feel makes it better?
VLC can do that too as far as I know. I haven't used it in a while since I use the default media player on Arch and MXExplorer on Android and for my Movies/Series I use Jellyfin
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.A lot of apps just use their own keyboard or micro browser type thing. Despise that
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.
As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
You definitely should, it is lightyears improved
It’s like the opposite of GIMP
And LMMS
A lightyear is a distance. Not a time.
Isn't distance more suitable to describe an improvement than time? Don't find anything wrong with that comment.
"It is better by a mile" vs "It is better by three hours"
Good point. I guess it depends on the interpretation. If you consider that developments take time, be it developments in software, technology, research or whatever, then saying something like "this software is years ahead of its time" sounds appropriate.
That's how I read the comment. Additionally, given that it's a common misconception that a lightyear describes a timespan, I felt the urge to be a smartass.
But you typically can't influence time, while you can influence distance travelled. The faster car will get you further in the same time than a slower car. So IMO distance (travelled) is the better measurement.
Your argument is leaps and bounds ahead 😎
To continue dissecting this, since I don't have anything better to do right now:
What you do in that time depends. If you drive a faster car, sure, you'll travel a further distance in less time than a slower car. If you use the same car however, the distance is as meaningful as the time for a symbol of progress. Since technological and scientific advancements in general don't depend on people driving around in cars, but on people investing a lot of time and effort, I would prefer time as a measurement.
Usually, if we think about scientific, technological or cultural progress, we tend to judge based on time and not on distance. For example, consider some indigenous cultures which live their lifes isolated from the rest of the world. They are often compared to primitive "stoneage"-like cultures. We specifically use time as a measure.
However, I am not completely opposed to agreeing with you. I think it depends on what you want to emphasize. A distance can be useful for reflecting some aspects in which, e.g., a software, takes the lead compared to alternatives. Then again, time would be better suited to highlight very innovative features or significant futuristic advancements which may have groundbreaking qualities.
And if someone is already using "lightyears" as a measure, I think that's already an amount of improvement which deserves a time-based phrasing.
Anyway, I see good points for both and I am no longer interested in this. Take it or leave it. I don't care anymore.
I used 3dsmax until I started uni and was forced to use Maya. Then trying to learn zbrush and mudbox. And then marmoset, and then early 2000s blender, it was too much for my poor brain to wrap around so many different UIs with so many different workflows.
Then my uni lied to me about how much I'd learn, then about overseas exchange, and then about getting a work placement (they just gave me an email address for a modeller who didn't respond) and left me with no useful skills so I gave up completely.
I have so much wasted useless 15 year old 3d knowledge in my brain.
They had a big push and update a few years back focusing on redoing the UI to make it more friendly to beginners. Although I haven’t personally used it a ton since then.
Im always amazed at the amount of stuff Blender can do. It's just so nice to be able to have software that lets you learn a useful skill that isnt behind a paywall or crazy license
I like to mess around with architectural CAD as a hobby, with the likes of Revit and Chief Architect, but I ain't about sink enterprise levels of money for something I play with.
There's always the open seas. That said, if you make money with something, pay for it, either via their revenue channels or donations to FOSS projects.
Just a warning when it comes to this type of software, in some cases like solidworks they will catch you and sue you for every dime.
I've heard that too, Autodesk doesn't fuck around either. I keep any no-no software firewalled to hell and looped on localhost as best I can.
every few years i make a donut, it gets easier every time. Someday i'll do something creative with it. Donut tutorial guy, if you're out there, gday mate.
Make a bagel next time. I believe in you.
Deep
Have you used zbrush? I heard someone talk down blender in favour of zbrush and some other one for colouring ad texture, then maxon.
i tried to explore it in the 10s but it seemed designed to be complicated and hard to learn. every obvious starting step required like 5 non obvious clicks
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
And KDE looks so much better than windows' DE. It's also more versatile.
Gnome just copied Apple, which I guess somebody had to do in order to have them switch to something that looks familiar.
Actually, Apple copied GNOME.
Wouldn't surprise me. The AppStore isn't the first thing that Apple copied.
Still relevant 11 years later: Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything?
Also the part where they remove some features with every release to dumb it down?
elementaryOS has tried so hard to fill that niche, and they got so far. I just always run into the weirdest issues when I try and daily drive their distro.
Honestly in the end it probably doesn't even matter
Honestly I love pantheon, feels more natural to me than aqua at this point
I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
you mean the "longer security updates with ubuntu pro" thing?
No. I got that too. I’m talking about:
“ Strictly confined Kubernetes makes edge and IoT secure. Learn how MicroK8s just raised the bar for easy, resilient and secure K8s cluster deployment. https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-kubernetes-at-the-edge”
You see this when you ssh in??? I’ve never heard of this. What Ubuntu version is this?
It’s part of the motd, I’ve seen it too.
Also see this on my 20.04 LTS servers.
It might be time to consider using a distro that isn't ubuntu.
Contemplated it, but dealing with infrastructure bores me. So I think I will just put up with the ad and the lowered expectations.
OBS is so good that I don't know why anyone would ever use X-split.
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!
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.
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.
I cannot get my work excel to stop correcting my proprietary product name to a three letter word. Eg correct ATC to ACT. Painful stuff havebto copy and paste it in with a space to not give the chance to correct. No ad to dictionary button anymore.
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.
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 😒
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.
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:
https://github.com/gavr123456789/Katana
I was a mac head from the early nineties to the mid two thousands. Column mode is the only thing I truly miss.
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.
First time I hear about inkstitch. Looks great!
+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
Similarly, Calibre for ebooks. I set it up to use my Google Drive (so I can automatically sync between my various computers) and have never looked back.
I use it too, wouldn't call it better than audible though. IOS beta app is not great.
I don't use iOS, so your mileage may vary. The android App works fine.
I haven't even heard of this and I don't use audible, but I know how popular audio books are these days, can you break down the benefits of it?
It looks more consistent, has a simpler UI, has a series-feature that is actually useable and doesn't link to an embedded website for almost everything.
And it can be used as a podcast app as well.
Con is that you need to bring your own audio books. But you can download them from Audible and such with many programs that are just freely out there on GitHub.
Also it can do podcasts, and even ebooks (the ebook support is pretty rough, I don't recommend it yet, but the developer is updating at a crazy pace).
I love this one. I still download the books locally and use a local app to listen, but its a wonderful manager.
Honestly, no. It's objectively worse. It's not bad, but by far not as good.
Interesting. I hate Audible because it redirects you to the stupid embedded website for almost everything and tends to get effed up when listening with multiple devices.
Audible isn't perfect either, but for the library and listening part it's better (for me, at least, but maybe I'm just too basic).
I hate Audible's library. I listen to series of books mostly and keeping them that way has been shoehorned in only recently with audible. What so you like more about the listening part?
Well, that's just not my use case, so I don't have this problem.
For me the playback just seems a bit more refined. Audiobookshelf is a bit buggy for me.
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
Firefox/LibreWolf
Calibre vs... em something that's not calibre.
I'm honest not sure what I would use instead, but it would be hard to replace.
Uhh... yeah, I'm stumped trying to think of the proprietary alternative to Calibre, too. I don't think there is one in the mainstream? Everywhere I look, the only recommendation is Calibre.
Honestly I hated Calibre. The worst part was how it just couldn't render some books properly, and there was no way to zoom many of them, even via CSS. Readability is #1 priority, but Calibre was absolutely broken for a lot of that.
I ended up using software that could made thumbnails from PDF, CBR, CBZ, and ePUB, then I used Sumatra for all of it.
It never occurred to me, that people would use calibre to read books. I only use it to move books between devices (kindle →PC ⟷ smartphone) and to strip DRM. The stripping of DRM is actually my primary motivator to use calibre.
I see.
That’s arguable. Calibre is a database manager, not a reader. It has a reader, sure. But it’s an afterthought when compared to the rest of the program. The program is primarily aimed at people who have a reader and want to be able to manage their library. It’s days ahead of literally any other program when it comes to things like metadata management or managing multiple devices.
It’s sort of like saying that Notepad++ is bad at making Word documents. Like sure, it may be able to edit Word docs, but that isn’t what it’s primarily designed for.
That's not what I was told on the multiple sites that I stumbled on when searching for an all-purpose digital book reader. But you're probably right, and they're probably wrong.
I'm curious what features that Calibre was missing for reading that you are looking for specifically? I know that it's got some pretty standard features built in, though I've never used it to read, only to check files before sending to eReader.
It's more that it's clunky, bugged, and unusable than "it's missing features". It tries to rectify this with a very terrible and still often unusable CSS editor
Reader is very much a tertiary function of Calibre. It's an ebook manager and converter first, an editor second.
I see.
VLC >> everything else
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
Windows just rips off every plasma feature at this point, even kde devs make fun of it
luckily windows users, and the rest of people that go outside, can laugh at y'all for finding this niche content funny.
then we can laugh at you having a superiority complex because of the way you navigate the internet. ever done a one arm pullup or anything else that's somewhat of a physical challenge? its like crack to train.
I am 85kg 180cm tall and currently have 25% bf. Yes, I lift and I don't see how this is relevant.
Did you mean Audacity?
You've got the audiobook to correct him? Unbelievable....
Errr... yes. Good catch
Agreed with everything. As a programmer, I use the IntelliJ suite (mainly PHPStorm, WebStorm, GoLand, RubyMine, PyCharm, and IDEA), which is basically industry standard in most companies (except those fuckers who still use Eclipse or NetBeans).
Well, those aren't FOSS, but I agree that they're really good at what they do.
Of course, I referred to the part that FOSS are enough for hobbyists amd beginners.
They are used a lot but I don't think they could be called industry standard. Tons of people run vim, emacs and such aswell the occasional vendor provided IDE. Probably like 60% of software engineers run IntelliJ.
I am yet to find a job where a single person uses Vi(m) or Emacs. And I've been to some big companies.
Perhaps nobody says they use it out loud although knowing vim users (and being one myself) they tend to be very willing to share how bad a mouse is for productivity while programming and how using vim is the ultimate solution. As for emacs I only ever have seen greybeards use it and it dosen't to have had much of a revival with the newer generations.
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.
VLC is obviously the best media player, I can't think of one I've used that comes close ever, either in ease of use(hotkeys) or functionality.
Audacity is such a simple yet comprehensively functional audio editor.
OBS is a very simple video recording software that works so well.
I personally prefer mpv, but that's still FOSS. Nothing in the proprietary world is comparable to these two.
I used MPV for a while, seemed a little bare bones to me compared to VLC? Maybe that's just because I was more familiar with VLC and know how to do most things with it already.
I went from winamp to VLC and then tried probably everything and then went back to VLC
I had the same experience when I first tried mpv. Went back to VLC.
I tried mpv again years later due to some annoying bug in VLC, and finally made some efforts to customize the shortcuts to my liking (most were fine, just added a couple extra ones like k for pause) and installed some plugins (like mpv-sub-select and skip-intro). Now I can't be satisfied with anything else.
It's kinda like Neovim in that sense. Super customizable and integrates with everything.
I don't think I've had to reconfigure mine for different window sizes... of course, I don't typically record individual windows I record a screen.
If I may ask, what do you use OBS for that you have to record individual windows that are sized differently each time?
Right, right. I think it's a little unfair to say OBS isn't simple in that regard, though, as recording small snippets of screens isn't really what it's targeted towards. It's more of a content streaming/recording software, IMO. I honestly don't know what I would use if I needed to regularly record differently sized small portions of my screen to send to people.
VLC gave me trouble last year so I ended up using Haruna. The only thing I miss is downloading subtitles, but I can use VLC for that, everything else I think Haruna is near perfection.
I think PotPlayer is a lot better than VLC— although it's a little weird out-of-the-box, so you have to change a few of its many, many customizable settings.
I can't really think of a customizable option I've wanted that VLC doesn't have, what do you mean by better?
I'm too sleepy to list them, but check it out. Right-click and check out the options, it's like an explosion xD
I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.
Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.
Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.
I used to exclusively use clang but IMO gcc is just as good if not better. Both are pretty bulky but sometimes the LLVM toolchain can feel like bloat. Most of the time GCC is preinstalled on my linux distro so I don't even need to install it I just git clone my projects and run my Makefiles. The only reason I ever use clang now is on my chromebook because gcc isn't available through Termux.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) beats pretty much all streaming services in terms of UI.
Yup. I even pay for YouTube TV but if something I want to watch is available over ATSC, I switch to my Kodi tvheadend HTSP client on Chromecast (I have a pcie tuner) because the UI doesn't make me stabby.
I moved and don't have an ATSC setup anymore sadly. I didn't use it much but it was great to catch the news during special events and to PVR a couple of local shows that are worth watching and hard to get elsewhere. Tvheadend is a bit of a pain, but when it works it's great!
The Netflix plugin in Kodi is better than their own interface too 😂
I wished the MPD plugin was better though tbh
Once you grok tvh's architecture, it's incredibly versatile. I have a TV sound stream profile so I can listen to local news (not Sinclair thank God) in the car over icecast, or have home assistant cue it up on a Google Home. A great, underrated project. And I can share an antenna among 3 TVs without worrying about RF amplification!
Yeah it's really good. Schedules could be made easier, but sadly the issue is at the source :/ I also wished that tuners were cheaper. DVB-T tuners are dirt cheap, they can literally be bought for less than ten bucks. It would be fantastic to have multiple channels at once on tvheadend, but I can't justify the cost of extra ATSC tuners.
I used xbmc back when it was a Mc for xb haha kodi now seems more trouble than it's worth
What's the trouble with Kodi? I love it works great! Very flexible. Nothing even comes close to it in terms of functionality.
I couldn't tell you now, it was a long time ago I fiddled with it. I just moved on to other solutions lol
Personally, I prefer Stremio (also FOSS)
Seems to rely on some externally hosted service, thanks but I'm good.
You can self host it: https://hub.docker.com/r/stremio/server
I really want to like Kodi, but somehow I've always struggled with its UI. I can't seem to logically find the options I'm looking for (in the first place I look.)
Librera Reader is a PDF // ebook reader for Android. It has a very smooth user experience and useful options. I used to have 5 or so different PDF readers installed and would pick and choose according to the task at hand but now I'm down to just 1.
Emacs and vim are both vastly superior to all other text editors.
Which one you like better is a matter of taste.
Vim is a girlfriend with rock hard abs who wants to take you rock climbing and of whom you're secretly a little scared.
Emacs is a big bouncy happy girl who wants to take care of you in every conceivable way, then split a bucket of RAM while binging pirated movies.
Ah, sexism is alive and well in tech.
In my case, lesbianism.
Unrelated but I've got the urge to use Vim more now.
Nano is kind of fat but she's an absolute freak in the sheets and is waiting for me to come home so her friend can come over and we can all get naked, and well quietly laugh with each others' genitals in our mouths about the Byzantine hoops everyone else's girlfriends make them jump through to get the moist wet.
📸🤨
Lol, I was more thinking Nano is a hufflepuff who's just really easy to be around. Who needs rock climbing when you can just lie in on Sunday mornings scrolling your phone and showing each other memes.
you know these are public rite
Vim is a great input method for other text editors like intellij or vscodium. The actual text editor? Nah.
vim unclips your carabiner with a disappointed look
😂 The mental image is perfect.
I don't know if you've read The Three Body Problem but that's the image in mine
The whole GNU+Linux distro on your desktop computer. Or on your server.
Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I'm too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much "free", but rather "unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge".
Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:
Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don't care if there is a counterpart
Unironically, the terminal.
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.
Xournal++ for pdf annotating, note taking
LibreOffice, I'm not sure it's better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.
Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store
Inkscape, I'm not even sure what the proprietary version is?
(neo)vim
Linux in general. MacOS if fine, but the app ecosystem is often annoying. And Windows is just a complete dumpster fire these days.
I was setting up a Plex server, but when I noticed I had to pay to be able to play my own content on my phone I immediately switched to jellyfin. Haven't been able to test it yet, but as long as I don't need to pay them to be able to watch my own content on my own devices on my own network, I'll be happy!
I switched to Jellyfin two years ago and never looked back.
Kicad beat the crap out of EagleCAD. So much so that autocad just folded and discontinued EagleCAD.
I recently started playing with LibrePCB. Best PCB tool out there which I've used. The project is 5 years old roughly, the documentation is not complete and the library of parts does not compete, but for small projects it's really a delight. It focuses on simplicity, compatibility with versioning, fully open parts library and ease to send to manufacturing with built-in partnerships with PCB manufacturers. I highly recommend having a look: https://librepcb.org/
Edit: They very recently released version 1.0 of LibrePCB, with many exciting changes such as the 3D parts viewer. Read more about it here:
https://librepcb.org/blog/2023-09-24_release_1.0.0/
Thanks for sharing, LibrePCB looks amazing, much simpler than KiCAD.
Last time I used KiCAD (admittedly quite some years ago) it was amazingly powerful but kinda overwhelming to get started
I could be biased but 2009scape. While originally a Runescape clone of 2009, they've preserved the integrity of the game much better than the official versions
2009Scape definitely a different vibe than the official game, but I still thoroughly enjoy modern RuneScape. There are the typical “RuneScape 3 is just EZScape” complaints that are valid… But as an adult with very little free time, the old school grind just isn’t appealing anymore.
I love being able to idle grind most skills, because it means I can just have it running on my second monitor while I go about my day. It doesn’t take up all of my attention like it used to, and that’s not a bad thing. Lots of people idolize the old school grind because it’s nostalgic. But as someone who only gets a few hours a week (if I’m lucky) to play, it just doesn’t work for me anymore.
On Android; mpv, KeePassDX, FlorisBoard, AntennaPod, Read You, NewPipe, Jerboa, Unitto Calculator, CloudStream, Aegis, TrailSense, OpenKeychain, K-9 Mail, EDS lite, ViMusic, InnerTune, GrapheneOS Camera, Librera FD ...are my favourites.
To that I'd add Simple Gallery and some of the other "Simple" apps by the same dev, Tibor Kaputa.
Honestly, F-Droid should be your first stop on Android because the open source apps are usually better. Most apps on the play store are basically just adware at this point.
I've really fallen in love with the Aves gallery app. It's finally got me started with organising and tagging my photos.
I use most things here but I hated FlorisBoard so much. To each their own, but I’m sticking with Gboard.
¿Does florisboard support multiple input languages at once? I might switch within a conversation or even mix words within a single sentence. So far I haven't found a good open source alternative to SwiftKey in that regard.
So I don't think you can really criticise Plex too much here. They were perhaps getting complacent and they've definitely been shown up, but they were an important step to where we are now.
Pandoc. I'm not even sure there is a decent alternative.
Every time someone mentions Pandoc, I like to mention that the author has created a new markup language called djot. Its very nice.
haha no surely not. It can now even convert Typst docs to html.
It supports Typst now? But it is basically a programming language
Well it is also a document format just like .tex. I think it's called .typ or smth...
I would love to use Jellyfin but it (indexing, changing metadata...) is too slow with a few hundred movies and shows on my Synology. Plex is way faster.
not sure why indexing speed is a factor - it doesn't require your attention and Jellyfin only needs to index things once, doesn't it?
Yeah, I kind of understand one wants to hit the ground running after installing but still. Let it do its thing over night and you should be good?
Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I've just given up -- everything says it should work and I've tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex's ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!
Let this be a lesson: never use .NET in new projects.
Yeah I was kinda surprised when I saw that 😞
Agreed. This is my largest and really only gripe after switching from Plex. I moved my server over from Mint to Arch and rescanning my hundreds of shows and movies for the Metadata took over an hour. It still missed plenty of shows too. Had to manually update those and each time it took like 5 minutes per season.
The jellyfin UI has been 1000% more responsive and the CSS customization is clean, but damn is the scanning slow. Still not going to back to plex though the input delay was disgusting for me.
Having Sonarr/Radarr put .nfo files on all my shows/movies sped the scanning speed way up, for the record. You can have JF pick up the metadata from the .nfo and not make like 6 different slow queries to metadata providers. Likewise, if you have JF save metadata to .nfo files, full library re-scans go much more quickly as well.
I think that's mainly a problem in Synology. I'm running it on a small arm media server and it basically takes a minute. (OS on nvme, files on NFS via 1G LAN)
Runs nicely for me on a Pi 4B
I just let it index mine overnight, everything was ready to go next day. Adding new media to the server isn't really a problem, IMO.
It's worth it for the UI responsiveness alone, disregarding the fact that Plex just... stopped working one day for no discernable reason. No errors in any logs, my Plex server was running fine. No changes to the network, everything hosted the exact same, all my clients were logged in, running the same way, etc. Just... stopped seeing each other one day. Couldn't access my server from any device in the home.
If your Plex server was hosted on Hetzner and only stopped working very recently, this is probably what happened.
Yeh, Plex is still great, jellyfin sucks ass
That's a strong opinion. Why do you think Jellyfin sucks ass? It's been nothing but delightful for me.
The scanner app on Linux is far better than Windows: auto preview white scanning, auto pdf creation WITH multiple pages.
Pidgin. Consume soo little memory in comparison to other chat applications. Is really fast, just try start and scroll history in a chat conversation. But it looks ugly.
Godbolt. Thank whatever cosmic great fortune sent goldbolt.
The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.
Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it's not FOSS (& won't run on any of my machines anyway).
Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that's some sort of perennial "gotcha!" joke, at this point?)
Hey what about Kodi?
I use Gimp and Krita, ShareX also with the complementary Extension, integrated with FileCoffee, old but gold VLC media player, PicView image viewer/editor (IMO best alternative to IrfanView), ProtonVPN (yes, it's OpenSource), Crow Translate, FreeTube, Portmaster, Cherry Tree editor, apart of some games (The Dark Mod, Armagetron Advanced, Scorched 3D, and some more)
Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.
Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.
I don't 100% understand LPPL, but I believe it qualifies under open source, but regardless if it's open source or not, LaTeX > Word and I will die on this hill.
Typst >= LaTeX >> Word
Oooh! I've been waiting for someone to try to replace LaTeX.
It's really nice. I have high hopes that this project will succeed.
...elaborate?
I don't think that we have to discuss how much superior LaTeX is over Word. Typst on the other hand is a new approach in the whole typesetting language space. It's syntax is very similar to markdown but it provides (almost) everything you would expect from LaTeX with the benefit of a far more organized, intuitive and efficient workflow. You may visit their website typst.app to get more detailed info.
Does it do PGF/TiKZ or have something comparable?
Built in natively and it's getting better every day!
Home assistant vs Homeseer.
Home seer will cost you 300-500$.
It's add-ons and extensions are all paid.
Home assistant is literally better in every way possible.
Feeder, a RSS reader for Android. It has great UI, is fast at finding and parsing .xml from a link and has a comfortable reading experience. It has basicslly replaced social media for me besides the fediverse. The only thing I wish it had was more customizability. Being able to install Nord theme on it would be great.
Plex, running locally, on my server: “You should add a server!”
Plex, running locally, on my server: “Claim 10.0.0.10!”
Plex, running locally, on my server, after claiming my server: “You should add a server!”
Let's be honest though, the Android app for jellyfin is so so buggy. My partner can't even use it because there are certain orders of starting a video, casting, closing the app, reopening to starting subtitles, recasting, just to get it working
I use Shotcut instead of Premiere Pro for work. It's much lighter and simpler.
I can't wait until 10.9 comes out next year. Intro skipper is the killer missing feature.
Pulsar is better than VS Code for JavaScript.
https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar
Jellyfin would be great if only you could change subtitle colors. With HDR content, having pure white subtitles is eye-scorching.
@cujo NewPipe
gimp
Depends on what is counterpart.
Man, I've been running Plex for about a decade without a ton of issues. I tried jellyfin, and I can't get video to play anywhere that's not the PC that's running it. What am I doing wrong?
I play a lot lately with SuperCollider (sound design + algorithmic composition software) and I love it. I don't even think there is a commercial alternative.
does anyone know if there's a free alternative in Visual Studio to PHPTools? I refuse to believe the only way to debug PHP in visual studio is a paid license extension
Does JellyFin have a equivalent Music Streaming Solution? Or does anyone know an other FOSS program?
I'm really attached to Plex Amp. It is everything that Play Music promised to be with automatic radio playlists.
I have 40 GB of music that I'd listen to for hours all day.
I want jellyfin, but the number of devices I'd have to manually setup around my house, tvs etc, is daunting and terrifying.
GNOME Document Scanner is surprisingly working smoothly out-of-the-box (with Brother printer at least)
TV Headend + Kodi
+ Elementum
I’m a little curious what you replaced Photoshop with :)
Just found this I wonder if it works on Linux. Not quite as cheap, but it's getting there!Scratch that, it apparently only does 720p.https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004266435517.html
ublue kinoite. Immutable OS FTW.
I personally run an older build of emby, the open source software jellyfin was forked from. It's very similar, but I found emby's video transcoding (or explicit not transcoding) to be more reliable
The fact is, there is no replacement for Calibre, which is honestly kind of frustrating. For some things it works great, for other things it can be extremely difficult, and the dev has some really interesting ideas, like refusing to let the Linux client use books on a network storage device. Or that time he decided he could maintain Python 2 on his own rather that switching to Python 3.
I want to use jellyfin but the android TV app is bad and that's the only place I use it
DWM, Newsboat, MPV, NSXIV
I don't think the lump of abbreviations here will help many people
Desktop window manager, miles per velociraptor, Ninal Santansy 14
Dark Wandering Menagerie, Minimum partial varnish, nobody said xylophone in Vermont
I'm going to use Nobody Said Xylophone in Vermont as a secret passphrase.
"secret"
Yeah, right.
Department of Wide Movers, Mechanised Papal Vocalizer, Neverending Sandwich XIV
Disassembly With Malice, Multithreaded Pi Visualiser, and NASA Space eXplorer 4
newsboat and mpv are awesome. How is nsxiv better than sxiv?
sxiv is no longer mantained (AFAIK)
I wouldn't know any differences, as I wasn't using Linux back when sxiv stopped being developed.
Bitcoin is FOSS. You ever tried to use western union or SWIFT to send money internationally? Slow, painful, highway robbery of a special variety. Bitcoin does it in seconds to minutes perfectly every time for next to nothing and I don't even have to put pants on to go to the bank.
Jellyfin can't utilize local network storage... How is that a useful tool for a HOME MEDIA SERVER??!?It looks as though there are methods for utilizing network storage solutions. This has not always been the case with Jellyfin but either way I was dead wrong. My bad folks.
Yeah but Jellifin kinda sucks ngl