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)
A more relevant question: What proprietary software is better than its FOSS counterpart?
Because I can’t come up with any.
some proprietary apps have more functionality, are more stable, are easier to use, etc. because it’s very hard for a community of hobbyists to compete with the likes of multibillion corporations. Honestly, I really respect the FOSS projects that ARE really good, competing with these huge companies with pretty much only donations and their determination.
Some good examples of proprietary software I think that are functionally better include a bunch of apps used in professional workflows (though there are many FOSS apps used professionally like Blender!) and Unity/Unreal Engine (Godot is amazing for what 90% of most people need and is a lot lighter too, and is catching up in terms of 3D graphics/lighting. Unreal/Unity and Godot both have pros and cons)
If everything was FOSS and received the kind of funding proprietary apps get, the world would be very different indeed.
I mean the best big tech “products” are FOSS as well. But I guess it depends on which definition of FOSS that you use.
Usually, nowadays, proprietary software is built on 95% FOSS and then you maybe have a thin layer with your own stuff (which will become FOSS in a year or two when there’s someting better that can replace your own hack). The rest is content and marketing.
Proprietary software which doesn’t have an objectively better FOSS counterpart (that I can come up with right now):
Many people bring up proprietary CAD and graphics software. Though I suspect that’s a more subjective opinion. My experience is that proprietary CAD apps and the Adobe suite are buggy as hell. My experience is also that the people who use these softwares have learned how to cope with the legacy crap and they refuse to learn new and better ways.
I had to integrate Photoshop into a project a few years ago. The whole software just smelled huge legacy bad quality code base. Buggy as hell. But good marketing and/or user lockin I guess.
I don’t consider anything from Apple to be good in an objective way. Unless you count social status symbols as an objective quality. I do consider price to be an objective quality though.
The only good things that has come out of Microsoft are open source. VS Code, dotnet core and Lean. Same goes for Google.
Proprietary CAD/design software is very subjective. I’ve seen many people saying that the proprietary stuff is more “professional” and that FOSS software isn’t. I don’t work in thise kind of workflows so I can’t comment on that, but my personal experience with things like kdenlive and inkscape have been AWESOME
IntelliJ IDEA comes to my mind.
https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
Nice! Didn’t know it. Have to try…
yeah, there’s not really any alternatives for Jetbrainsls IDEs. As a non-professional I use VSCodium (VSCode minus MS) but I get why IDEs are preferred in professional environments
I use vscode for everything these days, but I work mostly in go. I always preferred intellij to eclipse and the like for java and never used vscode for it.
I have tried several times to use VSCodium for Java but it’s unreasonably hard to setup, especially if you have an application split into several projects.
In IntelliJ it just works, its so easy…
VSCodium works for web development and is okay for Python, but stuff like C/C++ and IDE is super helpful
Seems you don’t know how to configure your editor/IDE. There is nothing in a “Jetbrains IDE” which you cannot also get in Neovim, Emacs or VS Code. Using only FOSS plugins. Or what functionality are you thinking of?
IDEs are kind of plug and play, things like debuggers and compilers come with them making it nice and easy. A code editor requires you to jump through a few hoops by installing plugins and such. You can achieve the same thing with both, but an IDE, as the name suggests, is all integrated.
I don’t know, I mean I’ve seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it’s best I haven’t seen it as comprehensive as what I’ve seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don’t apply very well anyway, so it’s moot for me and I’m happy with Kate with LSP.
Adobe premiere?
Unfortunately proprietary professional software suites are still usually better than their FOSS counterparts. For instance Altium Designer vs KiCAD for ECAD, and Solidworks vs FreeCAD. That’s not to say the open source tools are bad. I use them myself all the time. But the proprietary tools usually are more robust (for instance, it is fairly easy to break models in FreeCAD if you aren’t careful) and have better workflows for creating really complex designs.
I’ll also add that Lightroom is still better than Darktable and RawTherapee for me. Both of the open source options are still good, but Lightroom has better denoising in my experience. It also is better at supporting new cameras and lenses compared to the open source options.
With time I’m sure the open source solutions will improve and catch up to the proprietary ones. KiCAD and FreeCAD are already good enough for my needs, but that may not have been true if I were working on very complex projects.
I think this speaks to the potential strengths and weaknesses of open versus commercial.
It boils down to amount of resources and how they are invested.
In terms of amount of resources, open source has a rather organic pool of software developers. So if you have a use case that impacts every software developer in the world, well the open source has a lot of free labor that can produce impressive results that a commercial player would have a hard time out-spending. Conversely, if the use case is relatively more niche and the users are either not programmers or too busy using the software to do other things they couldn’t spend any on software, a commercial player can force the issue by paying some developers to work on it. Now the quality of that work may be reduced by the developers doing it for the pay without necessarily an inherent passion for the task at hand, but it can be pretty compelling and people can tend to get invested in their work even if they don’t care to start with. Incidentally it’s why at my company when they lucked into someone with actual passion for the work comes along I advocate strongly for retention, but those folks tend to be neglected and leave while some passionless sycophant gets the retention and promotion.
Then there’s how that resource is invested. Here we have professional software versus the more prolific general consumer software. In the general consumer case, the commercial interest takes the user as a given, and goes straight into how to gouge that customer relationship as hard as possible without regard for a good user experience. Stuff them with ads. Implement telemetry with rights to sell it off for marketing data. Nag them at every corner to buy some other offering at increased price. Have a confusing set of tiers and actively screw with the bottom tier. Actually making the software fit for purpose is so far below those others. With software for business, well, you still get the ‘must subscribe and confusing portfolio’, but some of the other stuff tones down. The target market is smaller, and the potential for marketing data and advertising revenue isn’t as attractive. The target market is frequently companies that take their confidentiality seriously and will readily get a lawyer to pursue issues, so the telemetry is both less valuable and a bit of a grenade waiting to go off if something screws up. So OSS tends to cover the ‘general consumer’ cases surprisingly well because the commercial interests are so much more invested in making things worse, while business to business can actually have a chance still.
adobe animate is better than all other software i tried
GIMP and Inkscape are unfortunately worse than their commercial counterparts.
The Adobe suite sucks big time, but it’s still the de facto standard.
Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are lighter and snappier than Adobe, but still better than GIMP and Inkscape.
The facto standard is not an objective quality.