Some FOSS programs, due to being mantained by hobbyists vs a massive megacorporation with millions in funding, don’t have as many features and aren’t as polished as their proprietary counterparts. However, there are some FOSS programs that simply have more functionality and QoL features compared to proprietary offerings.
What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their non-FOSS alternatives? Maybe we can discover useful new programs together :D
I’ll start, I think Joplin is a great note-taking app that works offline + can sync between desktop and mobile really well. Also, working with Markdown is really nice compared with rich text editors that only work with the specific program that supports it. Joplin even has a bunch of plugins to extend functionality!
Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, etc. either don’t have desktop apps, doesn’t work offline, does not support Markdown, or a combination of those three.
What are some other really nice FOSS programs?
edit: woah that’s a whole load of cool FOSS software I have to try out! So far my experiences have been great (ShareX in particular is AWESOME as a screenshot tool, it’s what snip and sketch wishes it could be and mostly replaces OBS for my use case and a whole lot more)
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
LibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
The others 100% were always better.
You sound like you know your LibreOffice.
My experience is they are quite different but I’ve been able to do the same things for the most part.
But how the hell do I make a pivot table that looks and functions as nice as the plain old default one in Excel?
Excel is the one thing LibreOffice still falls behind on. It’s really hard to compete with Excel, specifically.
Ugh I hate excel. It can’t do the most basic things like search and replace things reliably in all cases. I have moved literally all data analysis besides the absolute basic “count” and “sum” operations to python in spyder. 200x faster, repeatable, won’t freeze up with large datssetd, and has never once failed a basic operation like a search and replace. Not to mention the localization issues and the fact that it will fuck things up completely if you install a new printer because Microsoft decided the printer has priority of your document and spreadsheet layouts over choosing a default.
I had some evaluation board software that whenever the value dipped below -1, would place the comma completely randomly in the floating point number.
Excel almost had a heart attack when I asked it to search and replace ”-1” with “-1,” and it found all of the cases just fine, but decides to ignore the replace and not place a comma at all. If I tried to convert them to a number, it freaked out and placed the decimal place also randomly, different than the input. And of course trying to do in-place operations on a column for export is just painful.
Hell, in notepad++ I could just regex the digit range that was preceded by a ”-1” and get everything replaced using a few brackets.
Not to mention how terrible the graphs work in comparison and how bad they look with the default options 😅. But hey, you can automatically put in a drop shadow or frame it in a useless way.
There are some people who can work very efficiently and do some crazy things in excel (like the excel doom) but unless you have literally been using it daily for many years and actively looking for ways to speed up, then it is just as easy or easier to do things in an actual data processing program like matlab, octave, python, or R (And I am not a coder) and you can literally copy paste a file name for the next full dataset.
Excel is probably the one sore spot for LibreOffice, but also Google’s suite and really everyone else. Excel is tough to beat, especially when you consider the additional power of things like Power Query and Excel on web having JavaScript functions.
That said: I truly despise pivot tables and I no longer use them. I use lookups, countif, or other functions to display what I need, otherwise I use Power Query.
Whaaaaaaaat? Pivot tables are a 2 second job to summarise large amounts of transaction data or similar by month or year. Lookups or countifs would take so much longer!
Not to mention that you can drill into the data using them.
OBS and VLC yeah.
You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and… yeah, no, unfortunately.
I don’t even think it’s necessarily better than MS Office, but I’d (unfortunately) take Google’s Office suite over both.
Only Office is a much younger project and is leaps ahead. It’s sad really, I used to champion LO since the OOo days. Doesn’t make sense these days anymore.
I feel the same. It’s my daily driver for about 6 months now in a professional setting with high demands. I have kept the Microsoft suite (and have not yet transitioned Powerpoint). When I go back to compare I can’t stand all the needy Microsoft interruptions getting in my way.
Sorry, freudian slip. Edited to avoid future confusion.
Nope, you were right and I was agreeing with you, and adding that a much younger project compared to LO is already ahead.
Oh, I’m changing it back, then.
FWIW, OnlyOffice IS much better (hey, at least it doesn’t open xls files with black text on black backgrounds on dark mode!), and I do think its Google-inspired “apps-as-tabs” thing is the future for this stuff. I’m not sure I’d rank it above those, but it’s certainly a much more… competitive, I guess? approach.
Also the fact that it’s self hostable and can also work offline and can also work as a desktop client for remote collaboration and supports several remote backends.
I feel PowerPoint is much more user friendly and functional than Impress
I really like OnlyOffice, pretty much a carbon copy of the MS Office UI and doesn’t screw up on MS-specific files (docx, pptx, etc.)
Also, I like that OnlyOffice, unlike MS Office, has all the things in one app vs having separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc. You can just tab between your different documents!
I posted this in another thread yesterday but it’s relevant here too:
That said, IDK if I’d go as far as to say LibreOffice is clearly the “best” because that’s subjective. IMO it’s certainly comparable and is a shining example of great FOSS. Hopefully LibreOffice enjoys some attention in the current move away from American products.
OBS is foss? huh, never knew that. I use it all the time for screen recording
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio
OBS is absolutely the best software in the field.
LibreOffice is also more compatible that Microsoft Word. It helped me and a friend to save his grandpa’s old writings that were stored in AppleWorks (.cwk) files.
MPV blows VLC out of the water when it comes to playback. After using it at work to sift through collectively hundreds of thousands of hours of video, waiting for VLC to do anything feels painful
Depends on your criteria. As long as your calculations are simple, it doesn’t matter which tool you use.
For slightly more demanding calculations, Calc just can’t handle it like Excel does. Then again, using spreadsheets for demanding calculations is just asking for trouble.
Definitely lichess. It makes it very obvious how much of desperate cash cow chesscom is.
i hoped someone would say VLC second only to 7zip.
I work with Microsoft Office on a daily basis for work, so professional use. I wanted to try LibreOffice privately, tried it and hat to notice that besides the terrible UI, there are many features missing and it’s just way clunkier. So I tried OnlyOffice, which had some features which I missed at LibreOffice, but now I’m missing other features…
So sadly, there isn’t a real competition for MS Office yet.
also, I’ve never heard of Lichess. I might have to check that out