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.
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.
Firefox/LibreWolf
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.
Emacs and vim are both vastly superior to all other text editors.
Which one you like better is a matter of taste.
Vim is a girlfriend with rock hard abs who wants to take you rock climbing and of whom you’re secretly a little scared.
Emacs is a big bouncy happy girl who wants to take care of you in every conceivable way, then split a bucket of RAM while binging pirated movies.
Ah, sexism is alive and well in tech.
In my case, lesbianism.
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.
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–”
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?
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.
gimp
Listen, I love GIMP. I would never try to argue that the UI/UX is better than alternatives. There’s a reason it’s not the defacto tool to use in its industry, and it’s not the name.
That said, if you take the time to learn GIMP, it’s delightful. I personally like using GIMP more than, say, Photoshop, but I also learned photo manipulation on GIMP, and didn’t touch Photoshop until well after. GIMP’s UX leaves a lot to be desired for a newcomer to the software.
Awesome for being a free tool, but it pales in comparison to Photoshop.
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.
