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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
Agree on all of them!
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
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
I thought so too but then I read some complaints about some extensions breaking. I’ve never used it myself so 🤷♂️
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Don’t forget to go vote on the issue!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/27
Also check out:
I was a mac head from the early nineties to the mid two thousands. Column mode is the only thing I truly miss.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
+1 un
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
+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.
I love Zotero so much. It’s way better than Mendeley
Agreed. I made the switch after Mendeley pushed their online manager with only a new limited desktop client, which was awful. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t gone with Zotero in the first place. Originally only used for my thesis, now I use for work and personal interests as well.
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.
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!
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.
“Every morning while I drink my coffee, I start up Ubuntu, load up Microsoft Edge, have a good laugh, and then close it.”
I love this.
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.
Is this a copypasta?
Audible is more audio programme than most people need
Did you mean Audacity?
You’ve got the audiobook to correct him? Unbelievable…
Errr… yes. Good catch
