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sbird Apr 18, 2025

What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?

What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? - Lemmy.World

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?

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Tux960 Apr 18, 2025

LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?

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MudMan Apr 18, 2025

OBS and VLC yeah.

You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and... yeah, no, unfortunately.

I don't even think it's better than MS Office, but these days I'd (unfortunately) take Google's Office suite over both.

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acockworkorange Apr 18, 2025

Only Office is a much younger project and is leaps ahead. It’s sad really, I used to champion LO since the OOo days. Doesn’t make sense these days anymore.

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MudMan Apr 18, 2025

Sorry, freudian slip. Edited to avoid future confusion.

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acockworkorange Apr 18, 2025

Nope, you were right and I was agreeing with you, and adding that a much younger project compared to LO is already ahead.

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MudMan Apr 18, 2025

Oh, I'm changing it back, then.

FWIW, Only Office IS much better (hey, at least it doesn't open xls files with black text on black backgrounds on dark mode!), and I do think its Google-inspired "apps-as-tabs" thing is the future for this stuff. I'm not sure I'd rank it above those, but it's certainly a much more... competitive, I guess? approach.

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acockworkorange

Also the fact that it’s self hostable and can also with offline and can also work as a desktop client for remote collaboration and supports several remote backends.