I'm trying to think of different classes of software and how well FOSS stands up to proprietary software. I'm strictly referring to FOSS versus proprietary here, not commercial versus non-commercial etc. Diversity of software is a plus (e.g. there being three great video editors instead of one), but I'll be trying to judge this by the best of the best rather than all of the applications taken together. Each will have the following rating, basically from 1–5:
- No-brainer – FOSS is at the top of its class and substantially better than proprietary software. If proprietary software does exist, it's at best used for niche reasons, at worst used due to inertia in the userbase or being the default software for an OS.
- Fiercely competitive – FOSS is heavily competitive with its proprietary counterparts and can more or less do what they do. No one would bat an eye if you said you used FOSS.
- Some tradeoffs – FOSS is quite usable but may not have all the bells and whistles (or, if applicable, install base) of proprietary software. Maybe you use it because it's what you're used to, out of principle, because the proprietary alternative is enshittifying, because you genuinely prefer it over the proprietary alternative once you've figured out its quirks, or because it's free as in beer.
- Massive tradeoffs – FOSS is usable but with considerable difficulty. User experience may also be very poor, and it's used out of principle, because you want to help develop it, because you put a lot of weight on a niche consideration, or because you have the means and expertise to use it efficiently that most people wouldn't.
- Not possible – No FOSS exists, or what FOSS does exist is unusable for the vast majority of people even with compromises.
Video player: No-brainer. Built-in video players on commercial desktop OSes are trash, and video players like mpv and VLC are fantastic. Even people who don't know much about software will download them for a better experience.
Server OS: No-brainer. Windows Server is still a valid choice, but that's often going to come down to familiarity rather than an actual good technical reason not to use Linux. The bulk of commercial servers run Linux, and a hobbyist would find Linux easily the most accessible option.
Desktop OS: Some tradeoffs. Plenty of software people really need to use simply won't work on desktop Linux. There are serious reasons you'd want to use it over Windows and macOS, but it can lack major quality of life features and consistency present in those OSes.
Mobile OS: Massive tradeoffs. Doing this precludes many phones, including some top-of-the-line ones. Some which are viable may only be possible using an exploit with some level of risk. Installing one immediately voids your warranty (and irreversibly destroys security features like Samsung's Knox if you want to switch back), which could put you out hundreds of dollars. From there, you have choices between a GNU/Linux distribution, GrapheneOS if you have a Pixel, or LineageOS. If you didn't have to worry about installation, these would probably be more under "Some tradeoffs", as even GrapheneOS (intentionally) doesn't seem quite as streamlined as vanilla Android.
Smart watch OS: ~~Not possible. I'm not aware of any way to get a FOSS operating system onto a modern smartwatch.~~ Major tradeoffs. Revising this due to mention of the PineTime and Bangle.js, and I'll be looking at the Bangle.js 2 for this, since the PineWatch seems substantially cheaper. The first part of this that makes this a major tradeoff is that you have a very tiny selection to choose from, and you can't do anything with your existing watch (contrast this with, say, Linux, which can almost certainly work on your current PC). I've compared two example devices below.
Watch comparison
Going to estimate it at about $120 including shipping. I'm going to find the cheapest general-purpose, non-Apple watch I can, which ends up being a Pixel Watch 2 open box in excellent condition at $195 with LTE functionality (assume ~$220 with tax).
- Both have GPS.
- The PW2 has an estimated 50 meters of water resistance compared with the BJS2's one meter (IP67), making it a non-starter for exercise when swimming or probably just going on a boat.
- The PW2 has about the same size for the watch body.
- The display for the PW2 is an AMOLED display with ~320 ppi opposed to an LCD with ~135 ppi (PW2 has 1000 nits; no indication for BJS2, but probably much less).
- The PW2 has much greater storage at 32 GB eMMC with 2 GB of RAM opposed to 1 MB flash with 256 kB of RAM.
- No mention of Wi-Fi or mobile data on the BJS, just RAM, while the PW2 has 802.11n and LTE.
- Crucially, the PW2 has Gorilla Glass 5 instead of 6H hardened. No indication what the body is made of (PW2's is aluminum; not bad, not amazing), which is concerning to me.
- The PW2's battery life is 306 mAh (opposed to 175 mAh) and presumably much faster charging, and the AMOLED display being able to turn off black is likely to compensate somewhat for the higher pixel density.
- I would also guess that by nature of being made by Google, the PW2's sensors are substantially more accurate and robust than the BJS2's.
- The processor too of course is much lower-powered.
- Finally, Android Wear 4 is likely to have substantially fewer hiccups than whatever software the BJS2 runs by default.
For what is a pretty substantial 180% of the price, you're getting so much more with the PW2 that I still wouldn't consider the BJS2 a viable option unless I had the kind of serious know-how to tinker with it and a reason to do so.
Game console OS: Not possible. I'm not aware of any way to get a FOSS operating system onto a modern game console like a PS5, Xbox Series, or Switch.
TV OS: Major tradeoffs. You'll have to find a dumb TV and then you'll want to use a Raspberry Pi for something like OSMC or LibreELEC. The process is just considerably more difficult than finding the least enshittified smart TV and never connecting it to the Internet.
Photo editing and image creation: Some tradeoffs. This rating will depend on what you're using it for, where I've heard professional photo editing is more like "Massive tradeoffs". Software like GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape are good, but Adobe products are the industry standard by a wide margin and are likely to continue to be that way for a long time. The price will probably be the biggest advantage for the average user.
Video editing: Some tradeoffs. Software like Kdenlive and Shotcut are good, but Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Vegas Pro are likely to handily beat them for anything more than basic editing, and FOSS meanwhile really only has the selling points of being free as in beer and free as in freedom.
Audio editing: Some tradeoffs. This rating will depend on what you're using it for. Audacity and similar applications seem, as before, to not be quite as robust as other solutions like Adobe for professional work, but they've served me well for basic editing.
Office suite: Some tradeoffs. Not including email client here. LibreOffice just isn't as powerful as MS Office for complex workflows, but it's absolutely fantastic if you just need something for everyday use and don't want to pay MS' ridiculous fees or use a shitty online service like Google Docs.
Email client: Fiercely competitive. This almost went in "Some tradeoffs" simply because most people aren't going to care about a desktop-based email client and will instead use the web client (unless they have addresses from multiple domains), but the fact that the Thunderbird setup these days is so trivial saved it. I've heard that unlike Outlook, Thunderbird doesn't scale well to an enterprise environment, but I've never had any problems using it as just a regular user. Maybe if you already pay Office365's absurd subscription prices for OneDrive or the other applications you could be inclined to choose Outlook, but Thunderbird seems like the much better option for most users otherwise for the price difference.
Browser: Fiercely competitive. I would almost say that it's a no-brainer given that popular browsers like Chrome and Edge are made up predominantly of FOSS, but they're still proprietary, so what can you do. Firefox is realistically just as good as Chrome or Edge (and if you really like Chrome, just use Chromium). You might choose one over the other for specific features, but likely much of the share of Chrome and Edge comes from just being the de jure or de facto defaults.
PDF reader: Fiercely competitive. For reading PDFs, I really like MuPDF on mobile and Okular on desktop. For anyone who needs to edit PDFs, something like LibreOffice Draw probably doesn't work very well, but strictly for reading them, I even prefer Okular to the bloated experience of Adobe.
Social media: Some tradeoffs. Communities are often smaller and more fractured, which to some who prefer everything to be completely centralized isn't preferable. There are things on proprietary, centralized social media you simply can't currently find on FOSS social media. Getting to a point where I'd bump this to "Fiercely competitive", and a lot of this is a networking effect issue rather than the underlying software. (However, some is still a software issue, for example underbaked moderation tools on Lemmy compared to on Reddit.)
Video sharing: Major tradeoffs. Treating this as separate from 'Social media'. PeerTube is much harder to use than major VoD sites like YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch. First, you need to find an instance, and this is in my opinion way harder than something like Mastodon or Lemmy. The instance you choose massively impacts the videos you have access to (in a way that's hard to really understand until you sample them over multiple days), and because it's PeerTube, that's already not a lot in the best case. Sometimes an instance will just shut down with no warning. There's usually a pretty small upload limit for videos (which makes sense, but YouTube has none). And because of the network effect, the content just isn't there at all even for the kinds of niches you'd expect like tech news. I wish PeerTube were there, but it just isn't for the overwhelming majority of people.
News: Fiercely competitive. An RSS application works so nicely for news that I've stopped using news apps entirely. I would honestly almost put this into "No-brainer" except that 1) certain news just isn't available this way, 2) you have to go out and find the feeds that do exist, and 3) an RSS feed can be really disorganized by default in a way a proprietary news app usually isn't.
Donations platform: Some tradeoffs. Liberapay is really nice for taking payments, but unlike something like Patreon, you can't really give your patrons different rewards tiers at any kind of scale. They take a very minimal amount of 3.1% for Stripe or 5% for PayPal. They're a non-profit funded by donations, so they're not scraping much if anything off the top.
Emulator: No-brainer. This one's kind of niche, but going over it because I enjoy emulation. It's very rare these days to find a proprietary emulator that's top of its class. Emulation for most systems is very mature, and FOSS almost always leads the pack. Quasi-exceptions to this are DuckStation (PlayStation) which recently went non-FOSS but still operates on a source-available, contributions welcome model, and redream (Dreamcast) which went closed-source in 2018 and has since fallen behind Flycast but not by much.
Music streaming/podcasts: Absolutely no clue. Sorry, but I'd love to hear from someone who does know.
Code hosting: Fiercely competitive. Codeberg is FOSS and a non-profit, and obviously Git itself is FOSS. For enterprise levels of software development, GitHub or GitLab may be more desirable, but for smaller or medium-size projects, Codeberg seems like a great choice.
3D modeling: Fiercely competitive. This one's not my area of expertise, but it seems like Blender is giving proprietary programs a serious run for their money.
Game engine: Some tradeoffs. This one's going to depend heavily on if you're an indie dev or not. I'm sure AAA game studios would put this under "Massive tradeoffs" compared to Unreal, but Godot seems like a great choice these days for indie devs, possibly soon to become "Fiercely competitive". It seems right now that there are still some growing pains compared to Unity but that these are being gradually ironed out.
Screen recording/streaming: No-brainer. OBS Studio took what was a disorganized mess of garbage proprietary software in the early 2010s and burnt it to the ground.
Writing a program: Some tradeoffs. JetBrains, Microsoft, and Apple still handily lead the pack here for IDEs. There are plenty of FOSS text editors, a lot of extensibility in editors like Emacs, and some IDEs like Eclipse, but you could find yourself missing quality of life features in the more robust IDEs. Probably the biggest saving grace here is that VS Code is FOSS as long as you compile it yourself, but that is at least a bit annoying and frankly something most people aren't going to know.
Computer-aided design: Some tradeoffs. FreeCAD (3D) and LibreCAD (2D) seem generally inferior in terms of usability compared to AutoCAD, and you probably wouldn't choose them for a complex professional project. Good enough for a student or garage project, though.
Text messaging: Some tradeoffs. The tradeoffs are mainly related to the network effect. There exist plenty of free SMS apps, and there are secure messaging apps like Signal, but it's usually easier for most people to stick with what their acquaintances are already on. The apps themselves are quite nice but may miss some frills that come with proprietary apps. For example, iMessage now also uses secure E2EE with other iOS users, and it uses SMS for non-Apple users, which means plenty of users won't want to keep tabs on a separate app just for messaging one or two people.
Group messaging: Some tradeoffs. Referring here to Discord-esque platforms. The tradeoffs are mainly related to the network effect. The main two I know of are Matrix and Telegram. Telegram is shitty in that it rolls its own dubious cryptography, makes you sign up with your own phone number, and doesn't encrypt group chats by default. It's fine, but using Discord is honestly more intuitive, and there are more tools for moderation. Matrix is also lacking in moderation tools, the scheme where you often need a secondary key to log in is unintuitive for a typical user, and they give you a list of rooms to check out sorted by popularity despite having no guarantee that they're moderated (which is horrible UX; you really shouldn't be recommending them if you can't at least have some confidence it isn't flooded with crypto scams and other garbage). In general, you won't find all the bells and whistles Discord has, but more importantly, you'll be hampered by the network effect. Of course the major benefit to Matrix is privacy, and Element is a fine client for desktop and mobile.
Torrents: No-brainer. Applications like qBittorrent and Transmission are far ahead of shitty proprietary ones like μTorrent.
Smart home control: I actually have no idea on this one. As someone without smart devices, I'd love to know how Home Assistant stacks up.
Video games: Not possible for the most part. Some basic or niche games are FOSS, and plenty of games have gotten decompiled to become source-available, but you have desperately few options for most FOSS games. I know it seems silly on the surface to think of FOSS video games, but they're a class of software that many of us play.
Navigation: Some tradeoffs. OpenStreetMap has good apps like OsmAnd and Organic Maps, but these aren't quite as streamlined as apps like Google Maps. For example, if I input an exact address on OsmAnd~, it'll just show me the street rather than the precise address (which is often close to useless). OsmAnd~ also has noticeable buffering when moving around the map despite the fact I have the entire thing saved locally. (Organic Maps doesn't have this but also doesn't seem to have satellite terrain maps). Lastly, OSM often just doesn't have up-to-date information on locations like GMaps does.
Weather: Fiercely competitive. OpenMeteo is great, and mobile apps like BreezyWeather are honestly better UX-wise for me than stuff like AccuWeather.
Encyclopedia: No-brainer. This isn't entirely technically under the FOSS umbrella, but it's close enough. Wikipedia's app is FOSS. MediaWiki is FOSS. All of Wikipedia's text is available both under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL, 99.99% of the media is available under a copyleft license too hosted on Wikimedia Commons. I don't think that their backend is FOSS, but this is about as close as it gets. Plus you can have it offline too. Britannica just gets blown out of the water here in almost every aspect.
Drivers: Some tradeoffs. This will vary from product to product, but it seems for the most part that drivers on average work well enough but (again on average) maybe not quite as well as their proprietary counterparts. I imagine sometimes they work better or are the only option.
Search engine: Major tradeoffs. Here I'm referring to searX (now seaXNG?) as the only one I know of. It's great that you can self-host, but the first major here is – as a normal user – having to find an online instance in the first place. This would just put it under 'Some tradeoffs', but frankly the default results are just garbage (searX allows for a lot of customization, but manually adjusting which results get included from a list of hundreds is a terrible UX except for a select few people who want to spend an hour configuring their search engine for what are probably similar results to what you could receive on DuckDuckGo). Example results below:
Click here for example search results
A search for 'hello' on searx.be returned in order: a header for the Wikipedia page on Hello; a random question in Chinese on Zhihu; five consecutive answers.microsoft.com questions; another Zhihu question on Windows Hello; an answers.microsoft.com question; a Zhihu question on Windows Hello; and an answers.microsoft.com question as the entire first page. Page 2 begins with Zhihu. DuckDuckGo meanwhile returns the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary 5th edition, the Wikipedia article, Hello magazine, the Merriam-Webster definition, the Cambridge definition, the Wikipedia article again, the same Cambridge dictionary definition again (??), the Collins Dictionary definition, the Oxford learner's Dictionary definition, the Vocabulary.com definition, the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary definiton, and the yourdictionary.com definition. Adele's song 'Hello' begins the second page. StartPage with Google's backend meanwhile is basically just Hello by Adele, Hello by Lionel Ritchie, the shitty, overpriced service hawked by YouTubers HelloFresh, and finally the dictionary definition. So none really do it "well", per se, but searX's is just trash.
- Desktop firmware: Not possible.
- Laptop firmware: Massive tradeoffs. You have to explicitly get a niche device with coreboot or you're shit outta luck. Once you have it, though, it seems to work great. It just hugely limits your options.
- Mobile firmware: Not possible.
- Router firmware: Fiercely competitive. Not quite a no-brainer since 99.9% of people are unlikely to ever use the features that make firmware like OpenWRT better, but the install being trivial and it being an altogether better piece of software keep it at "Fiercely competitive".
- Printer firmware: Not possible. I'm sure it's been done by someone at some point, but you really only have FOSS printer drivers, not firmware.
Anything I've missed? Any where I'm way off-base?
