No Stupid Questions

There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO

Just wish there was a MacOS version

I have not used it personally, but Blender is famously used in high value Hollywood productions.

Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I've tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.

Folks will argue that it's harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.

FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.

Linux is so much better than Windows.

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

Just from top of my head and from what I have to use at work:

• Dolphin vs. Explorer - Dolphin is sooo much better and useful it's not evwn funny
• Notepad++ vs. Notepad - day and night, even though Notepad got an overhaul in W11 it's still piece of shit compared to Notepad++
• literally any foss player vs. what MS offers - be it VLC, SMPlayer, MPV, anything is better than windows built in crap
• ImageGlass, Nomacs, Gwenview, etc. vs. MS Photos - same as above, windows picture viewer is now worse than ever while open source alternatives get better and better
• and plenty others, like Linux vs. Windows, lol

I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.

Blender for 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and (simple) video editing.

Several movies were either made (almost) entirely with Blender (Flow, Next Gen), or in parts (e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SpiderMan 2, The Midnight Sky).

It is also used by many (indie) game devs.

Speaking of games: Godot is an awesome 2D/3D game engine, which gained a lot more momentum after the Unity fuck-up. It's licensed under the MIT license. Among a plethora of smaller indie games it has been used for financially successful and/or popular titles by indie and non-indie devs alike such as Brotato, Cassette Beasts, RPG in a Box, Endoparasitic, Dome Keeper, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, and several more.

Give it a try if you're into game development!

I'm surprised I haven't seen blender here yet, but I really think blender is one of open source's greatest achievements. It feels like a professional software and is also used in the industry.

Actually, there's lots of FOSS software which is at least just as good as proprietary. Most FOSS lacks the support of proprietary though. And I don't mean the "call someone on the other end of the world" support, I mean manuals, tutorials and stuff like that. /Off topic

On topic: Apache, Git, Home Assistant and Jellyfin.

These comments are like a treasure trove.

I didn't see anyone mention Kodi as an alternative to smart TVs. It's better in every way than the Apple TV I won from a raffle at work. The best part is that my TV box is just a computer so I can use it to host other services too

I haven't checked to see if someone's mentioned it yet (it's a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I'm always touting: Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection!

It's a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it's completely free, has no ads, doesn't track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don't. But you should know about it.

collapsed inline media

Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity

The only drawback for some users would be that it's CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)

Syncthing!

I don't even know what to compare it to, I have been using it so long.

I certainly like GIMP and Inkscape better than Photoshop and Illustrator, though any professional photo editor or graphic artist would probably fight me on that lol

But Krita is the best drawing/painting program of all time and I stand by that.

Firefox is the best browser (uBlock). Linux is the best OS for a growing number of things. Android is terrible but still the best mobile OS. Lemmy is the best social media platform.

Honourable mention to Luanti which most people wouldn't say is better than Minecraft yet but it's absolutely getting there.

Jellyfin.

OBS for streaming is amazing.

Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There're also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don't have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.

Krita has already been mentioned.

But, I think what strikes me most is that there's a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn't have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it's really fun once you get the hang of it. I don't do this professionally so there's no need for me to learn Fusion360.

Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their "industry standard" (which really just means "the most common product that has been around the longest"), but if you're not bound to that, there's just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.

Blender has to be the best at being a swiss army tool, the other software require using other software for what they are missing while blender can do it all, its objectively better at being the singular tool for the job if you want to not leave one software

Linux. For desktops I like it as well, but I can understand some arguments against it. However, for all other cases there is hardly any match. The internet basically runs on it.

Jellyfin vs Plex

Plex is terminal with the enshitification virus

Almost any Foss image editor, PDF viewer or simple app that does one thing without ads or bullshit. Markor, Wireguard, etc. They have nothing else to do but function.

The Linux ecosystem of distros vs other OSs.

Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.

VLC

Compiz, Wayfire, and KWin all outshine both Windows and MacOS in quality and render performance.

The amount of visual magic in Compiz and Wayfire especially is both incredibly useful but also hilarious.

3D desktop cube is a great way to handle multiple desktops, but rotating your windows to any angle is just to show off to your friends lol.

Immich might not hold up yet in every aspect to Google photos, but I was and am still blown away by how much better face detection and grouping works. I cannot believe how ridiculously bad that feature is in Google, you just have to pray that it works, and if it messes up, it's extremely annoying to fix. In immich, it works exactly as you'd expect.

Inkscape is really good and I prefer it over Adobe Illustrator. It's a bit worse in some regards but its really stable and does everything very reliably and can be molded into svg production machine.

Kdenlive is the best simple video editor out there. Sure other editors are better but kdenlive really hits that sweet spot of being simple but powerful.

Digikam is the best photo management suite I know off. Everything else seems to be missing one thing or another and Digikam just does everything and does it pretty well.

Ansel (fork of Darktable) is often better than Adobe Lightroom for casual photography as it comes with very strong opinionated defaults. I generall just follow the default pipeline and have amazing shots. Light room could probably get me a bit further but Ansels hits the sweet spot between too basic and too clunky.

Then as a developer foss libraries are basically uncontested to the point where proprietary libraries and programming languages basically do not exist anymore.

Im not sure i can say its objectively better, but i like godot much more than unity

The Apache Web Server

Libre Office.

NMAP still has a semi-open-source license. Not sure if anyone else considers in FOSS, but it's a critical tool in network security.

Also, I've never used any commercial video editing software but kdenlive is awesome.

all fossify apps in android. I find most android apps for basic tasks heavily overbloated, even the ones directly from google.

Okular for pdf viewing on pc

REALLY simple, but "Open Sodoku". It's just a Sodoku app without ads. I'm very bad but it's pretty fun

I'd say Logseq is better than any note-taking alternative that works in the same way. It's a bit different to regular note-taking apps as it acts more as a knowledge database based on tags, than with a regular file-folder structure. Also I prefer Actual Budget to YNAB, as it's starting to have even more features than YNAB and actually supports things like bank syncing for major parts of Europe that even YNAB doesn't. And it's free to host yourself or really cheap to host through PikaPods. But it's hard to say "objectively" because in the end, a lot of it is subjective. If people are used to running one program, it'll be hard to switch to another, even if it's "objectively" better.

The largest issue with FOSS applications is that many contributors don't have any UX/UI knowledge, which is a huge factor in why people choose one program over another. I'd argue GIMP is a mess compared to Photoshop, even if GIMP is able to do many, many things that Photoshop is able to.

LibreWolf and other Firefox forks.

Breezy weather for Android. It works exactly the same, and doesn't have any of the privacy bullshit strings attached.

I agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I'll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet, rsync and mpv.

Zotero