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)

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      yeah, there’s not really any alternatives for Jetbrainsls IDEs. As a non-professional I use VSCodium (VSCode minus MS) but I get why IDEs are preferred in professional environments

      • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
        0·
        2 days ago

        I use vscode for everything these days, but I work mostly in go. I always preferred intellij to eclipse and the like for java and never used vscode for it.

        • pathief@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 days ago

          I have tried several times to use VSCodium for Java but it’s unreasonably hard to setup, especially if you have an application split into several projects.

          In IntelliJ it just works, its so easy…

      • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        VSCodium works for web development and is okay for Python, but stuff like C/C++ and IDE is super helpful

        • mapumbaa@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          Seems you don’t know how to configure your editor/IDE. There is nothing in a “Jetbrains IDE” which you cannot also get in Neovim, Emacs or VS Code. Using only FOSS plugins. Or what functionality are you thinking of?

          • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            0·
            2 days ago

            IDEs are kind of plug and play, things like debuggers and compilers come with them making it nice and easy. A code editor requires you to jump through a few hoops by installing plugins and such. You can achieve the same thing with both, but an IDE, as the name suggests, is all integrated.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 days ago

            I don’t know, I mean I’ve seen a fair amount of IDE capability out of VSCode after some invested effort to try to get it there, but at it’s best I haven’t seen it as comprehensive as what I’ve seen in a Jetbrains IDE. That said, in my use case the IDE capabilities don’t apply very well anyway, so it’s moot for me and I’m happy with Kate with LSP.