1076
What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts?
(sh.itjust.works)
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.
The fact that no one in these comments, seems to have had a really decent FOSS IDE \ engine to recommend for 3D game development, makes me sad.
Like, Unreal is pretty great, but it's not FOSS (& won't run on any of my machines anyway).
Is there anything FOSS that really streamlines 3D game development?
(I want to say Vulkan but I feel like that's some sort of perennial "gotcha!" joke, at this point?)
I've no firsthand knowledge about it, but I've been hearing a lot of good stuff about Godot ever since Unity shit the bed
Godot is not bad for 2D & 2.5D, & it's a lot better at true 3D than it used to be, but as far as speedy usability, I'd compare it to UnrealEd 2.1 in many ways.
I really think the main reason anyone uses Godot, is the licensing & cross-platform support.
If Unreal 5.1 would run at all on any of my machines, I couldn't even really begin to make any kind of objective comparison between it & Godot; it's like the difference between having a bunch of clever hand-tools, versus having a bunch of really well-made power-tools.
Try making a mountainous landscape, sprinkle a handful of different trees, then carve out a tunnel that loops under itself with a ledge overhead. Anyone proficient with both the Godot & Unreal toolsets, seems to get good (& stable) results in moments using Unreal compared to minutes or hours, using Godot. Unreal's interface & free assets have set such a high standard for so long, that I find Blender is the only thing I could compare it to, but Unreal's workflows make Blender look like Maya.
Gimp is a shame, they really had something to begin with. I use Krita now which is way more like you would expect a FOSS image editor to be. Much more similar to Photoshop if you came from there.
At work, we use gimp headless though. The scripting capabilities are great!
I feel like you replied to someone else's comment?
Gimp feels just like Photoshop before Creative Suite editions...
Everything that's not MS Paint, feels like a huge upgrade to me. On Windows, I open
Paint.NETas often as any other image editor, just because I don't need more than that for most copy\paste\crop\color tasks.I haven't done any illustration or background\logo art in about 20 years. I'm not even sure what features are considered most defining, for a good image editor these days?
Yes that was the wrong comment. Hmm. Someone said they don't use some of the FOSS tools because they are so bad.
I think the main complaint with Gimp is that it is way more complex than the simpler editors, without actually being excellent for experienced users, like Photoshop is. Photoshop is also simpler to use for beginners to Gimp really missed both targets.
Krita is simpler than Photoshop and Gimp but much more powerful than n base level like Paint.
I'd say layers and masks (and operations that go with that) are the main step up from entry level.
Edit: fix typo