No Stupid Questions

Zotero

NMAP still has a semi-open-source license. Not sure if anyone else considers in FOSS, but it's a critical tool in network security.

Also, I've never used any commercial video editing software but kdenlive is awesome.

Breezy weather for Android. It works exactly the same, and doesn't have any of the privacy bullshit strings attached.

LibreWolf and other Firefox forks.

I'd say Logseq is better than any note-taking alternative that works in the same way. It's a bit different to regular note-taking apps as it acts more as a knowledge database based on tags, than with a regular file-folder structure. Also I prefer Actual Budget to YNAB, as it's starting to have even more features than YNAB and actually supports things like bank syncing for major parts of Europe that even YNAB doesn't. And it's free to host yourself or really cheap to host through PikaPods. But it's hard to say "objectively" because in the end, a lot of it is subjective. If people are used to running one program, it'll be hard to switch to another, even if it's "objectively" better.

The largest issue with FOSS applications is that many contributors don't have any UX/UI knowledge, which is a huge factor in why people choose one program over another. I'd argue GIMP is a mess compared to Photoshop, even if GIMP is able to do many, many things that Photoshop is able to.

Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.

OpenDroneMap. It's a suite that provides photogrammetry, stitching, volumetric analysis, geographic correlation, and 3D model conversion from aerial and non-aerial photos. And that's only the features that I use myself. It defaults to CPU-only rendering, so you don't need a big bad GPU to GSD.

Even ignoring the lack of subscription cost, ODM performs at least as well as other applications I tried such as Pix4D. Professionally, I use it for year-over-year kelp bed monitoring, photosynthetic mass analysis, and home construction analysis, specifically volumetric infill needs. Personally, I use it to generate 3D models of my boat interior, which I convert to STL files for arranging infrastructure in limited spaces.

A lot of non-graphical utilities

basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.

I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is "developer friendly"

tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.

AntennaPod is a pretty great podcast player, far better than the one Google did (and abandonned)

Newsblur is the only RSS reader that I've found that can apply filters to feeds

I've switched from Discord to Element with some friends for daily text chat and vocal chat (video games) and it's less cluttered than Discord, and the voice even sounds better

SpamBlocker is a better phone/SMS spam filter than the proprietary ones I've tried

Firefox (and forks) has been my browser for more than 20 years, I can't go back to proprietary ones

https://www.visidata.org/

Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child's play in comparison.

Honestly, almost all Microsoft products are objectively worse than FOSS alternatives, they are just so big that people are unwilling to escape the Microsoft ecosystem.

MuseScore sheet music.

Any FOSS Linux/Unix shell, bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, whatever, is a million times better than cmd or the early versions of PowerShell. Yeah, I know, PowerShell Core exists now, and it's even open source and cross platform, but it still sucks.

emacs

i am using Darktable to edit raw photos. i don't know if it's better than Lightroom or Capture One overall, but it is for my use case.

Borg is an amazing backup utility.

OBS, Portmaster, Trilium, FlightGear

+all the minimalist Adwaita apps on the Flathub. Love 'em.

Markor: one of the few Android text editors/notepads that saves text to text files (crazy idea, right?) and works rally well with Syncthing.

Conversations.im for Android is an incredibly well made XMPP/Jabber messenger, and their message polling and real-time message delivery is unmatched AFAIK.

ratbag (and the frontend, piper) is a tool for remapping buttons on mice with a sensible interface. Beats installing proprietary Logitech software.

Krita is a fantastic image editor with a customizable UI that’s very powerful but easy to use.

Pixelmator is a waste of $70 when you get more (you can resize the toolbar buttons!) for free with Krita.

ShareX or flameshot for taking screenshots. ShareX needs some tweaks out of the box but once it's tweaked it is so much more convenient when you need to make super quick tweaks/edits like adding steps or highlights or something.

I am blown away by KDEnLive and how quickly I’ve been able to pick it up to learn it.

It’s as simple as the classic Windows Movie Maker but also just as capable as iMovie or what little I did in FinalCutPro on a Mac.

One feature I love on this is that I was editing a video on my Windows gaming PC and have the files all on the cloud. I then loaded that same project on my Linux laptop and it gave me an error that it didn’t have the media… however…it would parse a folder FOR ME and then add that media back into the project. In minutes I had the complete video timeline just as it was on my Windows machine now on my Linux laptop.

It’s also just so basic and easy to use. It’s a bit refreshing and not intimidating to use. Granted, I am someone who’s somewhat familiar with video editing from other applications, but not a pro by any means.

Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!

I'm really sorry but Joplin is not and will not ever be "objectively" better than Obsidian. SilverBullet is subjectively better than Obsidian though. Note taking is such a heavily opinionated matter that there's no scope for objectivity there.

Syncthing.

Supports LAN Syncing and no limits other then the hardware you host yourself.

emacs

vi (incl. vim etc.) and it's only counterpart emacs are both open source.

apache and nginx are the undisputed top webservers.

samba is better than Windows server.

Over the last few years I've been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.

But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It's as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.

Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I'm working much faster.

Now, Krita doesn't have all of CSP's niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.

Similarly CSP's 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender's. Which is weird because CSP isn't a modeling program - you'd think they'd stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.

I really like Flameshot for screenshots.

Apache?

I think it's still the leader and I certainly prefer it to other alternatives.

Lichess -> chess.com

But it's hard to be impartial / objective about modern stuff like that.