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
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Also KeePass, I’ve switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP’s.
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!
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.
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
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.
Firefox/LibreWolf
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
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
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!
I personally run an older build of emby, the open source software jellyfin was forked from. It’s very similar, but I found emby’s video transcoding (or explicit not transcoding) to be more reliable
Inkscape?
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.
LibreOffice, I’m not sure it’s better than M$Office per se, but it does everything most people need it to.
Chocolatey GUI > Microsoft store
Inkscape, I’m not even sure what the proprietary version is?
I could be biased but 2009scape. While originally a Runescape clone of 2009, they’ve preserved the integrity of the game much better than the official versions
2009Scape definitely a different vibe than the official game, but I still thoroughly enjoy modern RuneScape. There are the typical “RuneScape 3 is just EZScape” complaints that are valid… But as an adult with very little free time, the old school grind just isn’t appealing anymore.
I love being able to idle grind most skills, because it means I can just have it running on my second monitor while I go about my day. It doesn’t take up all of my attention like it used to, and that’s not a bad thing. Lots of people idolize the old school grind because it’s nostalgic. But as someone who only gets a few hours a week (if I’m lucky) to play, it just doesn’t work for me anymore.
VLC >> everything else
One thing that I hate about VLC (hasn’t made me drop it in 15 years but alas) is that you can hit E to go forward one frame but there’s no key (nor capacity to set your own) to go back one frame.
Is it a niche use case? Sure probably. But not having the option to set one myself kills me whenever I frameskip one too far and have to shift-left and mash E again.
i don’t think it’s a niche feature, and totally agree, very annoying. there’s some long technical explanation about like stream buffering but i don’t care, many other players have it. you can rewind but not rewind 1 frame?
From what I recall it has to do with encoding and how the data stored references the following frame but not previous. Still seems like some engineering could be done to solve, so it it’s not as simple as “current Frame–”
VLC is heavily bloated with features you need a guide to use (may as well use a command line tool if you need to refer to a guide every time). It crashes (or did about 2 years ago) some of our Linux systems. MPV spanks the piss out of it.
DWM, Newsboat, MPV, NSXIV
newsboat and mpv are awesome. How is nsxiv better than sxiv?
I wouldn’t know any differences, as I wasn’t using Linux back when sxiv stopped being developed.
