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.
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
I am by no means a master at OBS, and I wouldn’t know where to point you to learn. Everything I know I’ve learned by either poking around in the software or googling specific questions, i.e. “how to overlay twitch chat in OBS”. As you can probably guess, I used to use it to stream to twitch. Not very suddenly, mind, but I did it. Lol!
OBS is designed for streaming out and recording video, not really for music production. I’m sure there are some FOSS music production softwares worth checking out, though!
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
Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape
Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid
Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox
Honorable mentions that don’t have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS
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.
