Some FOSS programs, due to being mantained by hobbyists vs a massive megacorporation with millions in funding, don’t have as many features and aren’t as polished as their proprietary counterparts. However, there are some FOSS programs that simply have more functionality and QoL features compared to proprietary offerings.
What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their non-FOSS alternatives? Maybe we can discover useful new programs together :D
I’ll start, I think Joplin is a great note-taking app that works offline + can sync between desktop and mobile really well. Also, working with Markdown is really nice compared with rich text editors that only work with the specific program that supports it. Joplin even has a bunch of plugins to extend functionality!
Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, etc. either don’t have desktop apps, doesn’t work offline, does not support Markdown, or a combination of those three.
What are some other really nice FOSS programs?
edit: woah that’s a whole load of cool FOSS software I have to try out! So far my experiences have been great (ShareX in particular is AWESOME as a screenshot tool, it’s what snip and sketch wishes it could be and mostly replaces OBS for my use case and a whole lot more)
Im not sure i can say its objectively better, but i like godot much more than unity
GDScript is way easier than C#, and there’s C# support in Godot so you can choose between either! I also like that Godot us a lot lighter :D
Previously on my old laptop it took a good half a minute for a MOUSE CLICK to register (I have since gotten a newer laptop that can most definitely handle unity, but I’ve gotten used to godot’s workflow and I don’t want to go back to unity)
They just upgraded their physics library too. Far more performant…
yep, they are catching up with GD 4.0 :D
Godot is objectively better as an engine, you might still prefer Unity for the amount of content you can pay to get, but if you’re doing everything yourself Godot is miles ahead of Unity. I always give this example because it’s so dumb but perfectly illustrates my point:
If you’re writing a Single player game, you don’t care which controller pressed a button, otherwise if for some reason there are multiple controllers connected only one of them will provide input to the game. In Unity the way to deal with this is to make multiple mappings, e.g. Controller 1 button A means jump, Controller 2 button A means jump, etc, etc. Unreal has the same thing, Godot used to be the same, but a quick look at the code base and a couple of lines of code later and boom, Godot now has an Any Controller button A means jump mapping.
This sort of thing makes Godot objectively better than Unity. There are other things too, but this one takes the cake for me.