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.
Desktop: Zotero, RStudio, Thunderbird, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, NoMacs (image viewer), Espanso (text expander), qBittorrent, Inkscape
Android: FairEmail or K9 Mail, Authenticator Pro, Feeder, F-Droid, Pocket Casts, SD Maid
Multi-platform: Home Assistant, Wireguard, Syncthing, Jellyfin, Kodi, Samba, Firefox
Honorable mentions that don’t have the best UX but are still hugely appreciated for existing: Joplin, QGIS
I used Zotero for the references for my Bachelor’s thesis. I’m happy that I don’t need to use it anymore but the software itself is fine.
It’s not perfect, but it’s just miles ahead of anything else on the market in capability!
I love Zotero so much. It’s way better than Mendeley
Agreed. I made the switch after Mendeley pushed their online manager with only a new limited desktop client, which was awful. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t gone with Zotero in the first place. Originally only used for my thesis, now I use for work and personal interests as well.
+1 for Sumatra. Use that and a thumbnail loader, and it’s superior to Calibre for a library of books (ePub, PDF, CBR, CBZ).
I also use Notepad++ and qBittorrent. Looking into Inkscape now. Firefox is the best.
Sumatra PDF is the best. It’s become an essential tool for me. Nothing I tried comes close.
+1 for Sumatra. I just wish it had some minimal pdf editing like moving and inserting pages like Apple’s MacOS Preview.
Inkscape is the goat
I actually came to this thread in hopes of finding a replacement for Thunderbird. I’ve been using it for 10 years or more now, on various machines, always hoping it would somewhen stop being laggy. No plugins installed, and it frequently freezes for several seconds or even minutes, when I’m idle but also while I’m typing.
Hm… I’ve never seen it do that to me (on Windows with multi GB mail storage).
Though I think there is a setting to auto compress the mail storage every so often if it will save more than X, though I can’t remember the details on top of my head. If that setting is too low (e.g. if it will save more than 1mb) then it might be running very often for minimal gain.
Perhaps rummage around in there and see if it helps.
I appreciated the advice! Found the setting, which was indeed low. Raised it to 200 MB and to require manual confirmation. Today I was asked if I want to compress. The sad part is, the freezes continued in between. So this was not the cause, but thank you still.
Sorry that didn’t work. Maybe also try this:
Privacy & Security --> Security --> Scam Detection
Turn off the “Tell me if the message I’m reading is a suspected email Scam”
Thanks again, though just for the record, that didn’t help either. It’s alright, I’m used to the Thunderbird lags. Let’s stop here :)
QGIS isn’t that bad really. Some parts are more intuitive than ArcPro.
I didn’t say it was bad. Just that the UX isn’t great.
Swap f-droid for droid-ify for a more modern UI.
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Yep, I did! I also use its shizuku integration to install in the background, which is awesome
I absolutely love Espanso. So much faster than TextExpander and I like that it’s config is plain text files.
You’re insane though if you think Inkscape is better than Illustrator. I’m not an Adobe fanboy by any means, but it is a really good (if bloated) product.
Inkscape just gets out of my way. I was using it for a quite particular application of drawing CNC mill plans though, and through that, I got into using it for other graphics stuff!