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
You can even install the free oem istaller in the windows store thats hidden iirc.
looked it up, you’re right. The payment is for the codec out itself which is normally done by GPU companies and often can be downloaded for free.
My bad for not reading text on a window from Windows with a “$ please”.
Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don’t get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I’m saying.
I have still yet to see any other media library handle so many tens of thousands of audio files of varying encoding & naming conventions, so smoothly; “Media Monkey” etc were oft recommended but never once up to the task. Until just a few years ago, it was remarkably convenient for ripping a CD, too; correct metadata & all.
For a short while, WMP was to music files, as Calibre is to ebooks.
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
My argument for self host of something that needs to be ultra secure is, they will do a better job at it than me.
It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it’s annoying
Try the AutoFill keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-L (or Cmd-Shift-L on Mac). Works well enough for me.
But that’s only auto after a manual button press, that’s half the auto! In lastpass when I visited a page, it would just fill it in and log in for me without any input.
Sometimes bit warden doesn’t even realise it has a password for the site because it’s looking for a specific URL rather than a wildcard match to the domain.
I’ve been looking for a good password manager, and I’ve heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden… guess I’ll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!
Also KeePass, I’ve switched from bitwarden to KeePassDX on mobile and set up syncing to nextcloud and google drive. Aegis for time based OTP’s.
Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
Bitwarden is to me the simplest and most effective PW manager, just perfect at what it does. I however switched from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only because the latter has a mail aliases generation integrated (with Proton Unlimited)
I used Bitwarden a lot but it pissed me off that I couldn’t add new entries while offline, that accessing attachments requires me to be online as well, and that attachments are not part of the backup.
I switched back to Enpass due to that, which has even a slightly better UX IMHO. It’s not FOSS though, but uses the FOSS sqlcipher library for storage. So if push comes to shove, I can still exfiltrate my data without relying on the vendor.
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.
As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
I used 3dsmax until I started uni and was forced to use Maya. Then trying to learn zbrush and mudbox. And then marmoset, and then early 2000s blender, it was too much for my poor brain to wrap around so many different UIs with so many different workflows.
Then my uni lied to me about how much I’d learn, then about overseas exchange, and then about getting a work placement (they just gave me an email address for a modeller who didn’t respond) and left me with no useful skills so I gave up completely.
I have so much wasted useless 15 year old 3d knowledge in my brain.
every few years i make a donut, it gets easier every time. Someday i’ll do something creative with it. Donut tutorial guy, if you’re out there, gday mate.
Im always amazed at the amount of stuff Blender can do. It’s just so nice to be able to have software that lets you learn a useful skill that isnt behind a paywall or crazy license
I like to mess around with architectural CAD as a hobby, with the likes of Revit and Chief Architect, but I ain’t about sink enterprise levels of money for something I play with.
There’s always the open seas. That said, if you make money with something, pay for it, either via their revenue channels or donations to FOSS projects.
Just a warning when it comes to this type of software, in some cases like solidworks they will catch you and sue you for every dime.
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
And KDE looks so much better than windows’ DE. It’s also more versatile.
Gnome just copied Apple, which I guess somebody had to do in order to have them switch to something that looks familiar.
Wouldn’t surprise me. The AppStore isn’t the first thing that Apple copied.
Still relevant 11 years later: Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything?
elementaryOS has tried so hard to fill that niche, and they got so far. I just always run into the weirdest issues when I try and daily drive their distro.
I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
there is an ad in the terminal!
you mean the “longer security updates with ubuntu pro” thing?
No. I got that too. I’m talking about:
“ Strictly confined Kubernetes makes edge and IoT secure. Learn how MicroK8s just raised the bar for easy, resilient and secure K8s cluster deployment. https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-kubernetes-at-the-edge”
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
I adore OBS. I’ve been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they’ve all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
