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)

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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    5 hours ago

    Microsoft Terminal vs the default Command Prompt haha. VS Code vs Visual Studio.

    In general software is one of the rare thing where ordinary people can “mass produce” things that compete with commercial offerings.

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 hours ago

      FOSS software is great :D

      I would also suggest VSCodium as basically VSCode without MS’s telemetry. The only actual downside is that a few proprietary extensions don’t work (most notably the MS ones)

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        5 hours ago

        Yeah, I’m just too lazy to reinstall and copy over my settings to VSCodium.

        Supporting open source projects by small teams has been the only good thing MS has ever done. Imagine if MS would even partly open sourced part of windows. Like there are bugs in explorer for 3 decades that just don’t get fixed lol. And then there still would be bloat and shitty things, but it still would be better.

        • sbird@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 hours ago

          VSCodium supports syncing settings the same way VSCode does :D

          alternatively, you could probably just copy the settings.json