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.
I use Gimp and Krita, ShareX also with the complementary Extension, integrated with FileCoffee, old but gold VLC media player, PicView image viewer/editor (IMO best alternative to IrfanView), ProtonVPN (yes, it’s OpenSource), Crow Translate, FreeTube, Portmaster, Cherry Tree editor, apart of some games (The Dark Mod, Armagetron Advanced, Scorched 3D, and some more)
And if you REALLY need the Photoshop workflow… there is always gimpshop.
While i’m browsing i mostly use MiniPaint on the fly in the browser itself (Html5). Despite of its name it has nothing of “Mini”, its a very complete editor with all needed features, filters, tools and effects, super fast and FOSS (MIT license). Works also great as PWA.
I have to disagree here, these are not all better than the non-FOSS programs. Photoshop destroys Gimp and frankly VLC has gone to shit, I use Media Player Classic a lot more now because VLC fucks up too often.
I don’t have problems with VLC, works fine for me, even permits me to download videos. Photoshop vs Gimp, well Photoshop is somewhat better with RAW files, but in this case you can use Krita, which as paint app is way better than any commercial alternative. I agree in not all FOSS is better than proprietary apps, but a lot of them have similar or even better quality. Apart, do you know that some feature in Photoshop, eg to eliminate objects in a Photo, are Gimp inventions (Resythesize)? If you ar not a profesional Photografer, Gimp offers a lot more features and functions that a normal user can use or need, same with other FOSS graphic apps, like Blender, it’s used even used by profesionals, same with Krita. The ShareX which i also use is way better than most others screenshot/cast out there, including proprietary paid ones. IrfanView is freeware proprietary soft and certainly the best image/multimedia viewer outthere for Windows, but the mencioned PicView (FOSS) isn’t far from it and multiplatform. Windows include a lot of apps, but all of them are pretty basic and not a real alternatives to alternatives FOSS, or at least you must pay to have a good Window app (eg MS Office €150-€200, which has an FOSS alternative, LibreOffice, which is used even by official sites and corporations).
To be fair, I am not a photographer, nearly all my work is digital. I haven’t used Gimp in at least a decade, but it was a puddle compared to the ocean of Photoshop when I did use it. I’m sure it’s come a long way, but I’ve yet to see any reason it would be superior to Photoshop in any way.
Gimp certainly isn’t better as Photoshop, i didn’t say this, but it’s the best after Photoshop and it’s free. Krita isthe best in it’s category, paint editor at professioinal level and also is FOSS, same with Blender, or Bforartist, also FOSS. As said, certainly not all FOSS is better as commercial apps, but also not all commercial apps are better than FOSS. Anyway, it is always the question whether it is worth paying for a commercial program that may have some more specific functions (or not) that are not needed anyway.