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.
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.
TV Headend + Kodi
+ Elementum
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:
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
Pandoc. I’m not even sure there is a decent alternative.
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?)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)
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!
- XBMC forked off into Plex. Plex introduced a far better UI.
- XBMC became Kodi. Kodi learned from Plex.
- Jellyfin came along and learned from both of them.
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.
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The scanner app on Linux is far better than Windows: auto preview white scanning, auto pdf creation WITH multiple pages.
Hey what about Kodi?
I use Shotcut instead of Premiere Pro for work. It’s much lighter and simpler.
GNOME Document Scanner is surprisingly working smoothly out-of-the-box (with Brother printer at least)
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.
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.
