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.
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
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
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.
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
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!
how do we even know something is quantum secure, like the tech isnt out yet is it?
Because we already know how quantum encryption works.
It’s like how we proved the Halting Problem was undecideable long before the first computer was ever built.
People have been able to model quantum computers mathematically since the time normal computers were the size of buildings.
This might be helpful: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs
I’m guessing they can say the methods of encryption are “1 way” ie unreversable, and therefore quantum resistant (the way that quantum solves equations).
Not quite, no encryption is truly irreversible (that’s the point). We’ve built quantum computers and we know how they work. We found weaknesses in the prime number generation that powers most encryption, so we’ve built around that.
The time when they essentially went closed source to implement MobileCoin in kind of a covert operation really didn’t do them any favors, though.
And everyone who uses it should give it a thought whether they can afford to support the devs, signal devs will appreciate it!
Do you count all signal protocol messengers like session too?
Session is definitely an option. They have an interesting decentralization approach but idk if they have quantum resistant e2ee yet.
VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn’t know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft’s store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It’s a real shame it doesn’t have a GNU/Linux version, it’s the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn’t look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn’t cockblock you with paywalls. For me it’s the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it’s because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don’t have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
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
Please post on lemmy! I really liked seeing the devs give updates on Reddit.
An open source platform feels completely natural for a project like jellyfin!
I mean we have !jellyfin@lemmy.ml
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !jellyfin@lemmy.ml
It’s much easier to discuss Jellyfin here for me than on the forum.
Thanks so much for your hard work making amazing software.
Blender for video editing. I haven’t even touched its 3D animation features.
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.
All the Linux file managers I’ve tried are nicer to use and more stable than the Windows File Explorer.
Inkscape?
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
Audiobookshelf. Way WAY better than Audible
