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.
VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn’t know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft’s store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It’s a real shame it doesn’t have a GNU/Linux version, it’s the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn’t look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn’t cockblock you with paywalls. For me it’s the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it’s because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don’t have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
+1 for Newpipe, my favorite feature is hiding thumbnails so I don’t have to see that stupid fucking “wow” wide-eyes face everyone makes with pointless arrows and circles. Now I just read the video title and my brain hurts less.
That’s actually a good idea and it also saves data, apparently.
Have you tried flameshot? Its an opensource and cross platform screenshot utility.
I did, as well as Spectacle, which now has the same functionality seg as flameshot and works without issues on wayland, unlike flameshot.
Neither of them comes even close as a replacement for ShareX, just try this thing yourself.
Yeah, you’re totally right. This is a very feature rich and comprehensive piece of software. This could maybe be accomplished with many different linux utils, but would lack to cohesion and polish. Thanks for sharing this, I might use this on the work computer.
Thank you for actually taking the time to try my recommendation out! :)
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Why would it? It’s the same as original except for the removed telemetry and some proprietary module part. I don’t think that could break much
I tried it but need the SSH extension as a daily driver (it’s a MS one apparently). Didn’t work, spent 30 minutes trying the suggestions found online but that didn’t work either so had to get back to doing actual work instead of fiddling with an IDE.
Oh, that sucks. I’m going to edit my comment to mention this problem
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It actually does. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I switched back to VSCode after a while
Some extensions simply didn’t install/work properly
Pylance, I believe, doesn’t work due to a Microsoft proprietary language server. But installing Pyright does most of the job. Something like that.
Interesting. I didn’t install much extensions manually because most of then are available from the open store but the onees I needed, like Microsoft’s C/C++ extension, worked fine
Agree on all of them!
These are a lot of great recommendations I’ll have to look at! Especially VSCodium. I’m using VS Code right now for my SvelteKit projects, so if I can add the Svelte and Tailwind CSS plugins… that’s really all I need.
I want so badly to hop ship from VS Code, I’m doing a trial of JetBrains WebStorm right now. Another piece of proprietary software…
For text editing, I love Gnu Emacs. Cannot quite explain how much time I save by not having to reach for a mouse. Emacs pinky sucks though, slightly better with Ctrl and Caps swapped.
If anyone likes Vim, try Doom Emacs.