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.

  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
    21·
    1 year ago

    From my computing guide https://lemmy.ml/post/511377 :

    The following software is shared by both Linux and Windows, which will astound you, because the quality of these is the best in their respective categories. There will be a (*) marking for the better one, and (^) if it is FLOSS.

    Category Windows/Linux common Windows only Linux only
    PDF reader Calibre (* ^ ) SumatraPDF Okular
    Audio Player Audacious (* ^ ) foobar2000 -
    Video Player SMPlayer (* ^ )/VLC (* ^ ) MPC-HC -
    Image Viewer - JPEGView (* ^ )/IrfanView nomacs (* ^ )
    File Manager Double Commander Explorer++ (*) Nautilus/Nemo/Dolphin/SpaceFM/Thunar
    Media Information Tool MediaInfo (* ^ ) - -
    Torrent Client Deluge (* ^ ) / QBitTorrent uTorrent -
    Screenshot/Record Tool FlameShot ShareX (* ^ ) Greenshot (*)
    Image Management XNViewMP (*) - ImageMagick
    Media Library XNViewMP (*) Shotwell (*) -
    Video Converter HandBrake (* ^ ) Freemake -
    Download Manager Xtreme Download Manager (* ^ ) Internet Download Manager -
    Specialised Downloader JDownloader (* ^ ) - -
    Compress/Archive Tool PeaZip (* ^ ) 7-Zip (* ^ )/WinRAR -
    Colour Picking Tool Colorpicker.fr (* ^ ) Instant Eyedropper gPick
    Search Index Tool - Everything (*) FSearch (* ^ )
    Light Photo Editor Pinta (* ^ ) Paint.NET (*) -
    Advanced Photo Editor Krita (* ^ ) - -
    Professional Photo Editor GIMP (* ^ ) Adobe Photoshop (*) -
    Bulk Rename Tool Inviska Rename (* ^ ) Bulk Rename Utility -
    Bootable ISO Maker balenaEtcher (* ^ )/Ventoy Rufus (*) -
    FTP Client FileZilla (* ^ ) - -
    E-Mail Client Thunderbird (* ^ ) - -
    Office Suite LibreOffice/WPS Office MS Office 2007 (*) -
    Lightweight Text Editor Gedit (* ^ )/Lite XL - -
    Advanced IDE/Text Editor Geany (* ^ ) Sublime Text (*) -
    RSS Reader QuiteRSS (* ^ ) - TinyTinyRSS (* ^ )/Liferea
    Phone Remote Control KDE Connect (* ^ ) Pushbullet -
    File Index Creation Tool Filelist Creator (*) Snap2HTML LinuxDir2HTML
    Data Recovery/Disk Diagnosis R-Studio (* )/Testdisk (* ^ ) - Recuva
    SMART Disk Monitoring Tool R-Studio (*) CrystalDiskInfo (* ^ ) GSmartControl
    Disk Partitioning - AOMEI Partition Standard Free (*) GParted (* ^ )
    DOS Emulator DOSBox-X (* ^ ) D-Fend Reloaded (*) -

    As you might have noticed some patterns and anomalies:

    • Most of the winners here are FLOSS and cross platform at the same time, consistently.
    • I did not mention the best for Linux file managers
    • A few of these do not have ^ which means they are not FLOSS
    • XNViewMP and Filelist Creator are rarities in that they are not FLOSS, yet are benevolent pieces of adware/spyware-free software available as cross-platform, and also XNView is the winner of 2 types of software, because it is the ultimate tool for anything to do with images. Nothing comes close, and never has.
    • SMART HDD/SSD monitoring tool is an issue on Linux, because free tools cannot do external HDDs for some reason, even though on Windows this is possible. (https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux) R-Studio can, but it is extremely expensive and nothing else works from my experience.
    • MS Office is the superior tool for office and document work. This is a truth we have to live with.
      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        04·
        1 year ago

        Grateful, you can read the full linked guide at the start of comment. If you go to the sublemmy/community, you can also see my very famous nonroot smartphone privacy guide. These will help you a lot!

        In exchange, I demand cute emojis as donations.