FFmpeg, OBS and VLC. I promise I use my computer for more than video.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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ffmpeg is a GODSEND. saves me going to those "convert to file type" websites when I can do it locally and so much faster 😩🙏
ffmpeg is where my mind went. It's so good I don't even know what the alternative is.
I have not used it personally, but Blender is famously used in high value Hollywood productions.
it gained big notoriety recently because the Oscar winner Flow was completely made with Blender https://m.filmaffinity.com/en/film989516.html
This film gets cooler and cooler the more I hear about it! Really gotta watch it.
There is no better archive utility than 7-Zip IMO
Just wish there was a MacOS version
rar has recovery records. i know it's a somewhat niche feature, one far more popular in the 'olden days' especially in certain uh.. 'venues'.. but it's something i've always used when making backups with it.
Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I've tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.
Folks will argue that it's harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child's play in comparison.
Jellyfin.
LibreOffice, OBS, and VLC are definitely the best out there. And Lichess (Online Chess platform) . Do you agree with me?
LibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
The others 100% were always better.
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I feel PowerPoint is much more user friendly and functional than Impress
I posted this in another thread yesterday but it's relevant here too:
I have a small consultancy with several staff and work with documents and spreadsheets all day. We use LibreOffice exclusively.
Occasionally I encounter similar threads discussing the difference between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, and the comments are all the same. So many people saying LibreOffice just "isn't there yet", or that it might be ok for casual use but not for power users.
But as someone who uses LibreOffice extensively with a broad feature set I've just never encountered something we couldn't do. Sure we might work around some rough edges occasionally, but the feature set is clearly comparable.
My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.
That said, IDK if I'd go as far as to say LibreOffice is clearly the "best" because that's subjective. IMO it's certainly comparable and is a shining example of great FOSS. Hopefully LibreOffice enjoys some attention in the current move away from American products.
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.
Linux is so much better than Windows.
... Unless of course you're trying to connect two external monitors through a docking station with a USB-C into the laptop with a closed lid and disabled inbuilt screen.
Unfortunately, in my experience, Linux routinely fails at this task (tried many different distros) while Windows "just works".
You mean the ease of setup, or the native handling of the world's most popular applications?
Like the Internet?
Also dude, I just spent 8 hours trying every last weird hack that I could find on the internet, including editing the registry to try to get a Windows game to work on Windows 10. It would just crash on a fresh install of Windows. Steam on Linux worked flawlessly, riddle me that Batman, Linux was able to do better at Windows than Windows.
what game was it
Helldivers 2, which is otherwise excellent.
oh, I think maybe that is poor game design from the developers, I have heard many PC people experiences crashes/black screens etc, I suspect from poor utilization of system resources. it's possible the developers managed memory poorly in a windows environemnt
Syncthing!
I don't even know what to compare it to, I have been using it so long.
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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.
woah that looks really cool, I have to try those out. 👀
edit: WAIT SHAREX HAS OCR????
IT CAN CAPTURE REGIONS OF THE SCREEN? IT HAS ACTUALLY GOOD HOTKEYS??? WOAHHHHH
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Functionality, list of supported sites/services and simplicity
The only drawback for some users would be that it's CLI-only, but there are GUI frontends like Open Video Downloader (a.k.a youtube-dl-gui)
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
The plain mail app in windows used to be quite alright. But then they deprecated it and now there is 10 different outlooks for it.
I have said this since discovering it years ago: 7zip is superior to WinRar.
Blender for 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and (simple) video editing.
Several movies were either made (almost) entirely with Blender (Flow, Next Gen), or in parts (e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SpiderMan 2, The Midnight Sky).
It is also used by many (indie) game devs.
Speaking of games: Godot is an awesome 2D/3D game engine, which gained a lot more momentum after the Unity fuck-up. It's licensed under the MIT license. Among a plethora of smaller indie games it has been used for financially successful and/or popular titles by indie and non-indie devs alike such as Brotato, Cassette Beasts, RPG in a Box, Endoparasitic, Dome Keeper, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, and several more.
Give it a try if you're into game development!
Inkscape is really good and I prefer it over Adobe Illustrator. It's a bit worse in some regards but its really stable and does everything very reliably and can be molded into svg production machine.
Kdenlive is the best simple video editor out there. Sure other editors are better but kdenlive really hits that sweet spot of being simple but powerful.
Digikam is the best photo management suite I know off. Everything else seems to be missing one thing or another and Digikam just does everything and does it pretty well.
Ansel (fork of Darktable) is often better than Adobe Lightroom for casual photography as it comes with very strong opinionated defaults. I generall just follow the default pipeline and have amazing shots. Light room could probably get me a bit further but Ansels hits the sweet spot between too basic and too clunky.
Then as a developer foss libraries are basically uncontested to the point where proprietary libraries and programming languages basically do not exist anymore.
REALLY simple, but "Open Sodoku". It's just a Sodoku app without ads. I'm very bad but it's pretty fun
Firefox is the best browser (uBlock). Linux is the best OS for a growing number of things. Android is terrible but still the best mobile OS. Lemmy is the best social media platform.
Honourable mention to Luanti which most people wouldn't say is better than Minecraft yet but it's absolutely getting there.
I don't know about Luanti. The world size limitation is an issue that's hard to address, and there's some 'denial' going up within their devs about it. Stating that the current world size is more than enough, ignoring the great amount of people asking for bigger worlds.
The world is unfathomably massive. What is it that people want to do with bigger worlds?
Some people like to travel in Minecraft. There's something in just picking a direction and moving there for days, exploring. In Minecraft you would never reach the end. In Luanti you'll hit the end of the world in a few hours.
Also for massive multiplayer purposes. Servers with hundreds of people are impossible in luanti's size.
And it's not just me. You go to Luanti's forum and one of the biggest threads is one asking for infinite worlds, players want it.
They used to say the the world size was embedded deep into the code and that a massive rewrite would be needed for that and that it was not worth it. But someone already made a fork that has this feature and didn't change that much so... And no, the fork is not a solution due to Luanti "modular" approach that fork is incompatible with any Luanti game so there's no game really just the base "engine".
I don't have high hopes of devs ever addressing that, so I stopped following the project. I hope be proven wrong, but something tells me that it's a change that will never me made.
I like that Luanti already has a really cool community making loads of different “games”! Furefox I agree, Android I agree, Lemmy is debatable.
VLC
I agree with most of the programs that others have posted. I'll just mention two that I absolutely love but no one has mentioned yet, rsync and mpv.
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.
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