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)

  • iarigby@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    The core is open source for some of their editors, WebStorm is not for example. Some frameworks and tools are only supported in the paid edition, and I missed then within the first hour of using the community version.

    vim and VS Code are not alternatives as they are not IDEs, just editors. Especially for vs code, it manages to barely do half of what IntelliJ does while being slower and hogging way more memory (this is before extensions). I also do TDD and when I pair up with my coworkers sometimes we are not able to find equivalent features that make my development easier. And don’t even get me started with a debugger, in vs code it manages to take up more space while giving less information and options. It’s simply inferior.

    I’ve tried and tried to create an IDE equivalent setup in vim and emacs but it was always “off”, I was stuck for hours and days trying to set up functionalities that work out of the box in IntelliJ, and after some months I just gave up.