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.
VLC absolutely wrecked Windows Media Player. Firefox was the same with IE.
Did you know that MS now charges for you to play some codecs with windows media player?
Unless something has changed recently, that’s not exactly true. They charge 99c for the distribution of it through the windows store (or whatever it’s called) but you can install them the traditional way no problem
I think it’s still dumb but it’s a distinction worth making. I think the description even links the website where you can download it
looked it up, you’re right. The payment is for the codec out itself which is normally done by GPU companies and often can be downloaded for free.
My bad for not reading text on a window from Windows with a “$ please”.
I read that news. It was an out of season April Fools’ joke, right?
They’re wrong, see my reply above
Windows Media Player wrecked its own dumb self. It was good right up to Windows 2000 and Windows ME (which is a whole other kettle of fish), and then it got bloated, unintuitive and it kept nagging you for random shit. VLC is a great app, don’t get me wrong, the bar was not all that high is what I’m saying.
Bitwarden password manager. I’ve used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.
Bitwarden is so good. I cant be bothered to self host it tbh, but ill gladly throw money their way for premium for having the best cloud-hosted PW manager
My argument for self host of something that needs to be ultra secure is, they will do a better job at it than me.
It is great and I do use it, and it was super easy to export from lastpass
BUT the autofill is so unreliable in comparison, it’s annoying
Yeah that could definitely be improved. There’s been talk on GitHub issues about adding support to fill Shadow DOM fields, honestly don’t know if they’ve done it yet but that would be a big help for web apps like HomeAssistant.
I’ve been looking for a good password manager, and I’ve heard a LOT of good things about Bitwarden… guess I’ll have to bite and see what all the fuss is about!
Pro tip : if you self host use vaultwarden. It’s 100℅ compatible with all bitwarden clients but has many more features and is lighter weight
Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
Yeah, I just went with Bitwarden’s own cloud because it was so affordable, accessible, and easy.
And their integrations are really solid too.
Bitwarden is to me the simplest and most effective PW manager, just perfect at what it does. I however switched from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only because the latter has a mail aliases generation integrated (with Proton Unlimited)
You can setup anonaddy or duckduckgo with bitwarden to generate alias emails automatically. The best setup we get for free.
Blender. I feel pretty confident in saying that there is simply nothing like it in the commercial world. Its feature set is unreal; its like the swiss army knife of 3D modelling programs. I can’t say enough good things about Blender. It has replaced so many secondary programs in my workflow and is slowly dominating to become my entire workflow.
It used to suck to use in the late 2010s and then work was done to overhaul its space-shuttle cockpit interface, and now it actually feels concise and usable. I freaking love blender now. Big time blender fanboy right here.
As someone who gave up on Blender back in the 2010’s, I may need to revisit it.
You definitely should, it is lightyears improved
It’s like the opposite of GIMP
And LMMS
I used 3dsmax until I started uni and was forced to use Maya. Then trying to learn zbrush and mudbox. And then marmoset, and then early 2000s blender, it was too much for my poor brain to wrap around so many different UIs with so many different workflows.
Then my uni lied to me about how much I’d learn, then about overseas exchange, and then about getting a work placement (they just gave me an email address for a modeller who didn’t respond) and left me with no useful skills so I gave up completely.
I have so much wasted useless 15 year old 3d knowledge in my brain.
They had a big push and update a few years back focusing on redoing the UI to make it more friendly to beginners. Although I haven’t personally used it a ton since then.
i tried to explore it in the 10s but it seemed designed to be complicated and hard to learn. every obvious starting step required like 5 non obvious clicks
My Pop!_OS system has never shown me ads for Candy Crush.
I just installed Ubuntu server on my little home server which has faithfully run Windows 10 Pro since it came out. I didn’t want to deal with the ads on Windows 11. I ssh into the Ubuntu install and there is an ad in the terminal!
OBS is so good that I don’t know why anyone would ever use X-split.
I adore OBS. I’ve been teaching my friends the basics on how to use it, as they’ve all been using some proprietary crap that makes their lives marginally easier in one or two areas but adds a huge headache in others.
Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?
I am by no means a master at OBS, and I wouldn’t know where to point you to learn. Everything I know I’ve learned by either poking around in the software or googling specific questions, i.e. “how to overlay twitch chat in OBS”. As you can probably guess, I used to use it to stream to twitch. Not very suddenly, mind, but I did it. Lol!
OBS is designed for streaming out and recording video, not really for music production. I’m sure there are some FOSS music production softwares worth checking out, though!
Thanks!
God, remember Fraps?
I try not to
OBS is lifechanging, i watch TV through it so i can cut out the garbage graphics that are often onscreen during live sports and actually focus on the game and appreciate the beauty of the camerawork
Signal. Who else is making a post quantum secure e2ee algorithm and making sure the code is open source and not duplicating the keys everywhere? Thank goodness for the kind devs on this project and for other FOSS projects everywhere!
And everyone who uses it should give it a thought whether they can afford to support the devs, signal devs will appreciate it!
how do we even know something is quantum secure, like the tech isnt out yet is it?
People have been able to model quantum computers mathematically since the time normal computers were the size of buildings.
Do you count all signal protocol messengers like session too?
Session is definitely an option. They have an interesting decentralization approach but idk if they have quantum resistant e2ee yet.
Blender for video editing. I haven’t even touched its 3D animation features.
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
The UI has most of all gotten more flexible. Previously you had highly efficient but also hard to learn workflows for everything, now you have a UI which also has non-efficient ways to do everything so you don’t have to be good at everything to get shit done, can build your own mix of “yeah I’m doing this every other second, I want this to be fast, I use that twice a day, I can click through menus for that”. Blender has way more functionality than will ever fit onto keybindings so customising the UI to your workflow is a must if you want to be efficient.
Generally the whole thing has been a giant success, however, I do have a criticism: They made left-click select the default. Right-click select has always been superior but it was not what the Maya etc. folks are used to. Have it available, even as a choice on the first startup screen for those people, sure, but don’t make it the default for people just getting into 3d editing.
And, yes, Blender still breaks plenty of UI conventions in plenty of other areas. Saying “For good reason” would be kinda missing the point, very often it had those conventions before Microsoft or whoever came up with worse ones and made those popular.
Last time I tried blender for video editing, the experience wasn’t great. Has it changed significantly in the last couple of years?
I tried out in the late 2000s, and it was clunky and limited.
I tried it again in 2020, and it is completely different. Super powerful and polished.
Yes. 100%
No clue about video editing though.
Also, why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
I only use it for video editing.
why the FUCK would you use Blender as a video ed nxitor. That is one of the last things you use Blender for.
Do you have recommended alternatives? I like it using Blender for video editing because I can automate any arbitrary repetitive task with a Python script.
I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.
I second Kdenlive.
Not too familiar with it, but what I do know is that it is an incredible video editor.
I’ve tried exactly once (given that I know blender anyway and no video editor), and ran into audio sync issues at export that didn’t happen when playing the timeline from blender. There were some mentions of the issues on forums, but no purported solution worked.
The gist of it is that Blender is not a video editor, but a highly capable 3d kitchen sink containing so many features that, in combination, mean that you can use it to edit videos, outranked in its own area of expertise only by Houdini. There was never a real push to make it particularly good at video editing, and unlike in other areas it didn’t happen by accident, either (Blender is e.g. arguably the best 2d vector editor ever since it got grease pencil).
Yes! the video sequencer has received dramatic improvements over the past years. It now shuffles or overwrites timeline content when you move a strip over another (based on a user setting), it transform-snaps to strip bounds and other elements, it auto-generates proxies so you never have to touch anything, it plays in realtime… for a full overview of improvements see the release notes : https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes
If you want to only edit video you can use kdenlive. I tried blender several month ago and it still lacks lots of feature and exporting time is higher than kdenlive, even though they both use ffmpeg inside btw kdenlive let me write my own exporting script
VSCodium is better than most text editors. BTW, if you didn’t know, you can still install some (turns out not all of them will work so you might still need the proprietary build from MS) extensions from Microsoft’s store manually.
ShareX is the best software I have ever found for taking screenshots and/or quick gifs/videos. It’s a real shame it doesn’t have a GNU/Linux version, it’s the only app I miss badly from my Windows days. Any other screenshot software is just nothing in comparison with it.
Joplin is my fav note-taking app. I have tried a lot of them but this one just works, has quite a big feature set, can synchronise using different mediums, from Dropbox to using Syncthing and synchronising files locally, doesn’t look poorly, is cross-platform, has e2ee, doesn’t cockblock you with paywalls. For me it’s the perfect note-taking app.
Aegis is the best 2FA app for Android there is atm. IIRC, it got created because Google Auth had some problems with privacy so the whole idea of Aegis is to be the better option.
Lichess — a chess server with no BS and there are 0 paywalls. chess.com would force you to pay for stupid things like puzzles, with Lichess I am able to procrastinate with chess. For free.
NewPipe is the best YouTube client there is. For me, it’s because of fast-forward on silence and the ability to unhook pitch and video speed. That means you don’t have to either waste your time on literal nothing or struggle to understand what a person is saying anymore. NewPipe also gives you everything YouTube Premium does.
+1 for Newpipe, my favorite feature is hiding thumbnails so I don’t have to see that stupid fucking “wow” wide-eyes face everyone makes with pointless arrows and circles. Now I just read the video title and my brain hurts less.
That’s actually a good idea and it also saves data, apparently.
Agree on all of them!
Doesn’t VSCodium break quite a lot of extensions even if installed manually?
Why would it? It’s the same as original except for the removed telemetry and some proprietary module part. I don’t think that could break much
It actually does. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I switched back to VSCode after a while
Some extensions simply didn’t install/work properly
Pylance, I believe, doesn’t work due to a Microsoft proprietary language server. But installing Pyright does most of the job. Something like that.
Interesting. I didn’t install much extensions manually because most of then are available from the open store but the onees I needed, like Microsoft’s C/C++ extension, worked fine
I thought so too but then I read some complaints about some extensions breaking. I’ve never used it myself so 🤷♂️
These are a lot of great recommendations I’ll have to look at! Especially VSCodium. I’m using VS Code right now for my SvelteKit projects, so if I can add the Svelte and Tailwind CSS plugins… that’s really all I need.
I want so badly to hop ship from VS Code, I’m doing a trial of JetBrains WebStorm right now. Another piece of proprietary software…
For text editing, I love Gnu Emacs. Cannot quite explain how much time I save by not having to reach for a mouse. Emacs pinky sucks though, slightly better with Ctrl and Caps swapped.
If anyone likes Vim, try Doom Emacs.
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
+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.
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.
Thunderbird
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.
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!
Inkscape?
I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won’t lie, it’s pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.
First time I hear about inkstitch. Looks great!
Absolutely love Inkscape. It’s one of the first pieces of software I add on any new install.
+1 un
How does it compare to Affinity?
inkscape (and gimp) is dog shit ass compared to an actual vector (and photoedit/raster) design program
im a graphic designer but im also not a huge adobe guy i think affinity products r fire.
im talking about inkscape and gimp 7-8 years ago but its not nearly as robust or user friendly as an actual design program if you desire to create more than one image trace. image tracing is the only thing inkscape is good for.
Unfortunately it’s not so good on Windows, performance is sluggish.
The thing I find hard to convey is that FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software for many reasons, most of which are non-technical: FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software if it isn’t spying on you, if it’s governance is collective, if it’s not build to make you pay for things that should be free, if it lets you decide where your data goes, etc…
we’re often missing the point when we attempt at side-by-side comparison of FLOSS and proprietary software… It’s usually one-dimentional, and playing on our opponent’s field: these companies racketing their users based on rent-based exploitative business models will always have more resources than independant developpers to improve “UX/UI”… so I think this must not be the only prism through which reading these things.
You’re absolutely right, and in lots of areas I use FOSS alternatives solely because they are FOSS despite less resources and objectively worse UI/UX. Photography is a hobby of mine, a huge love. There is nothing on Linux that gives even remotely close to the ease and comfort of use for RAW image editing as CaptureOne Pro, a software I paid a pretty penny for some number of years ago. I’ve tried every RAW image editor that’s been recommended, and I dislike them all so much that I actually prefer to move my RAWs to my phone and edit them there.
Despite that, I’m still running Linux. I understand the trade offs that often need to happen to adhere to an ideal, and I largely agree. However, sometimes FOSS comes out on top in all regards, including UI/UX. And those are the apps I’m inviting everyone to share. 😉
You’re right that it mustn’t be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn’t also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of “free as in freedom” either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it’s not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.
And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.
Those are different dimensions that should be considered together. Of course we should still invest efforts into UI/UX, where possible and where it represents the will of the participants in the project… but when answering questions such as “which FLOSS piece is superior” i think we should always find a balance between those, and bring them together…
Another important point to add is that closed software depends on the company making money to exist. If the company goes under then the software goes away. However, what’s even worse is that the company constantly has to change the software to chase trends and attract new users.
You might’ve been the target demographic when you started using the software, but the target will inevitably move on to a different demographic sooner or later. At that point you either have to adjust to the changes or find a new piece of software.
On the other hand, open source software doesn’t need to chase trends, and even if the original project decides to move in a direction existing users don’t like then they’re free to fork it. This is precisely what we saw with Gnome when a bunch of users wanted to keep their existing experience and made forks like Cinnamon.
This is a really underappreciated aspect of open source in my opinion. You can safely invest in learning an open source tool without worrying that it will go away or change in a way you don’t want it to.
Here is my opinion on some FOSS software. PS, I’m too old to give a shit about team mentality, I just want stuff to work. Also, my motivation for liking FOSS is not so much “free”, but rather “unencumbered and unrestricted shared human technology and knowledge”.
- GNOME, for the hate it gets, it comes close to getting everything right. I’d give it a 95/100 score. Windows a 30/100, and MacOS a 35/100. No verdict/comment on KDE as I haven’t used it. I have good reasons for disliking W10/W11 and separate ones for MacOS. As desktop environments, they are both shit for each their own reasons.
- Blender. 3D/Scultping/Drawing/Video Editing. Aside from Linux kernel, the most impressive and well managed FOSS project there is. I grew up with pirated 3dsmax, and what a dream it would be to grow up today with Blender as it is.
- Linux as a OS kernel. One can argue about the desktop market share, but people don’t know better. They think the software that runs on it defines it. But, there is a reason why 100% of top 500 supercomputers in this world run on Linux. I’d also mention the Arch/AUR community. Doesn’t matter if you use Arch or not, arch/aur wiki is a goldmine.
- Godot: 2D game engine. As a 3d game engine, it’s not nearly as good as the non-FOSS competition.
- Firefox: If it wasn’t for Firefox, I don’t know what I would do. I don’t trust chrome one single bit.
- Alacrity terminal: I’m sure there are plenty great FOSS terminal emulators, but the built in ones for MacOS and Windows are garbage.
- Prusa Slicer: I think this one is as good as the commercial counterparts for FDM G-code generation.
- VLC. Mixed feelings about this one, as I think it’s UI is lacking, but since it plays almost everything the UX ends up being great.
- LibreOffice Writer. Perhaps debatable. But the fact that you can trust LibreOffice to respect and adhere to the OpenDocumentFormat, and equally trust Microsoft Word to deliberately not do so in subtle ways, LibreOffice Writer is ultimately the better software IMHO.
Projects I wish had an edge over commercial proprietary software:
- Gimp. It just isn’t as good, even if you get used to it. Some things, of course, it can do much better (e.g the G’Mic QT filter pack). The lack of non-destructive work flows is the key part that is missing.
- FreeCAD. It’s good, and you can do wonders with it, but oh so rough compared to onshape/Fusion/etc.
- Darktable. Not as good as commercial counterparts like Lightroom.
- Kdenlive. Not as good as Davinci Resolve, or the adobe counterparts.
- LMMS: Not as good as most commercial DAWs.
- Krita: This one is actually not too far away from being best in class. I still suspect photoshop and has an edge
- InkScape: A “best for some vector things but not all”-kinda thing. It’s FOSS nature makes it the defacto vector editing software for certain kind of makers. But as a graphical vector editing suite, adobe’s stuff is just much more solid.
Mobile stuff that I think is better than the counterpart, or at least so good that I don’t care if there is a counterpart
- Tuner: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/ It just does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of these on the play store, with ads or paid. There is no need for it.
- Aegis Authenticator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/ For handling 2FA keys.
- Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.gallery.pro/
- Telegram: Sort of FOSS. Aside from security concerns whereby Signal would win out, it’s still the best UX. Compared to Messenger and Whats’App, not even a contest.
Gnome
true. To be fair, it but it does some things that are unnerving: mainly, their default file manager is too basic / abstruse to use (to copy the file path you have to use a hidden shortcut, seriously?)
I agree. Nautilus could be better. But to compare it with Finder in MacOS, which straight up hides the root file system (“a feature” of course), you cannot mount sftp/ssh etc, or even let’s you cut and paste files, not to mention the crappy traversal of folders. The worst part of gnome (if you can call the file manager a part of gnome) is still miles better than the commercial counterpart.
Oh yeah, I agree. I like the integration macOs has with iOS (copy-paste and stuff), but yeah I like GNOME much more
Im old too, my loyalty lying with FOss is that it can’t get turned off or enshittified if I can fork it. Especially true with most self-hosting stuff vs cloud services. If I have no alternative to a cloud service, I do without instead.
Tuner: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/ It just does what it is supposed to. There are hundreds of these on the play store, with ads or paid. There is no need for it.
My god this is wonderful!! Thank you so much! It looks like it’s only inferior to an in-line tuner, but a little better than those clip on ones, and far better than all the apps that just play a note for you to tune by ear.
Edit: To be clear to everyone, the reason this app is so good is that it uses the mic to measure your instrument, giving you a visual representation of how far out you are.
Glad you like it! Developer (it’s mostly one) deserves the thanks though.
Nah both of you deserve thanks, the app is no good if no one knows about it.
I agree with you in the mindset. “Free as in free beer” is not the important aspect for me, so much as the “free as in free speech” bit.
Funny that all the things you listed you wished were better than the competition falls almost entirely under the purview of artistic solutions. GIMP, DarkTable, Inkscape, etc. I’ve always heard, and I think for the most part it holds true, that FOSS software for artists is usually a worse experience because it’s primarily dominated by software designed and implemented by technically minded people for technically minded people who happen to be artistic, rather than designed by artistically minded people and implemented by technically minded people.
I know it’s probably an unpopular view, but I’ve found it to be true a lot.
That is an interesting observation, though, it is getting quite better. Blender is top tier. Gimp, Krita and InkScape are also exceptional software. Just a little bit rough around the edges, and some niche commercial applications. Very easy to be highly productive with those tools. Same with FreeCAD. But, where as Gimp, Krita and InkScape I would say are 8/10 in feature completeness, FreeCAD is more 5/10.
Solid list and arguments 👍
Didn’t know about the Android ones. Thanks a bunch.
VLC >> everything else
One thing that I hate about VLC (hasn’t made me drop it in 15 years but alas) is that you can hit E to go forward one frame but there’s no key (nor capacity to set your own) to go back one frame.
Is it a niche use case? Sure probably. But not having the option to set one myself kills me whenever I frameskip one too far and have to shift-left and mash E again.
i don’t think it’s a niche feature, and totally agree, very annoying. there’s some long technical explanation about like stream buffering but i don’t care, many other players have it. you can rewind but not rewind 1 frame?
From what I recall it has to do with encoding and how the data stored references the following frame but not previous. Still seems like some engineering could be done to solve, so it it’s not as simple as “current Frame–”
It’s absolutely possible, though. MPV has it. It definitely takes longer than going forward, and sometimes I have to press the “back one frame” shortcut 2-5 times per frame. But, it does exist.
A simple explanation: Compressed video is typically stored in such a way that you have say, one full frame every 5 frames or so. The in-between frames are just what changed from the previous frame. (Actually, smart compression is adaptive, changing how many full frames it needs depending on what the content is.)
So going forward a frame is easy. The current view is stored in the frame buffer, and you just add the changes to the next frame.
Ah, but how to go back? There are (at least) 3 possibilities.
- Reverse the process. “Subtract” the last frame data. But this may leave nothing behind, and so probably isn’t viable.
- Double buffer. You have to keep the previous frame around in a second buffer. This adds a new copy operation every frame, and another buffer in memory, but performance for that probably isn’t too bad. But you eat that performance all the time just so you can rewind one frame. And to rewind more than just 1 frame, you actually need many past frame’s buffered! So something more like a stack of old frames would need to be kept around (like a stack of photos) and you can riffle back through them anytime. We’d throw away old frames past the last checkpoint, but ultimately this is just an increasingly expensive way to do it. This would need to be optional I think.
- Last option is the classic comp sci tradeoff: if option 2 used a lot of memory, option 3 uses a lot of calculation. Each time you go back a frame, we find the previous checkpoint frame, and then apply each change frame up to where you rewound to. This takes a moment to calculate each time, but unless you’re QTE-ing on the frame back button it’s probably fast enough!
The best solution probably mixes 2 and 3. Maybe a double or triple frame buffer, with the option to calculate new back-frames as further needed?
Anyway, that was fun to think about!
Removed by mod
Different tools for different purposes
No different tools. Only VLC!
MPV is better than VLC, but it clearly depend of the utilisation.
mpv gang
I wish VLC updated their UI to include a dark mode. I’ve never had luck with VLC skins
Try v4 (edge)
Mpv.io if you are using low end computer to watch high bitrate videos or if you have high end computer you can use various image upscalar algorithm to improve your anime quality, Where VLC lags
Removed by mod
What about media player classic black edition?
IINA on macOS
I’m gonna be the one to mention Amberol, then. If I just want to play music, and have a pretty interface while doing so, that’s what I’ll use.
Otherwise, VLC for everything
for desktop I prefer mpv
Ehhhh, VLC keeps glitching on videos for me these days, I’ve switched to MPC and definitely prefer it.
VLC is heavily bloated with features you need a guide to use (may as well use a command line tool if you need to refer to a guide every time). It crashes (or did about 2 years ago) some of our Linux systems. MPV spanks the piss out of it.
VLC is obviously the best media player, I can’t think of one I’ve used that comes close ever, either in ease of use(hotkeys) or functionality.
Audacity is such a simple yet comprehensively functional audio editor.
OBS is a very simple video recording software that works so well.
deleted by creator
I don’t think I’ve had to reconfigure mine for different window sizes… of course, I don’t typically record individual windows I record a screen.
If I may ask, what do you use OBS for that you have to record individual windows that are sized differently each time?
deleted by creator
Right, right. I think it’s a little unfair to say OBS isn’t simple in that regard, though, as recording small snippets of screens isn’t really what it’s targeted towards. It’s more of a content streaming/recording software, IMO. I honestly don’t know what I would use if I needed to regularly record differently sized small portions of my screen to send to people.
I think PotPlayer is a lot better than VLC— although it’s a little weird out-of-the-box, so you have to change a few of its many, many customizable settings.
I can’t really think of a customizable option I’ve wanted that VLC doesn’t have, what do you mean by better?
I’m too sleepy to list them, but check it out. Right-click and check out the options, it’s like an explosion xD
Removed by mod
Wait, is 7zip not available on Linux? Then what have I been using??
xzcomes with most linux distros nowadays and uses the same compression algos as 7zip, and works very similar togzipRemoved by mod
p7zip. TIL it is not official! Damn.
thnx, very usefull! Small remark: Okular has a Windows package.
Removed by mod
Guess I’m nobody
Removed by mod
Dont know, didnt compare them much. I ignored Calibre untill now because it seemed primarly for e-books which I dont have. Sumatra seems not available for Linux. And I am on dual boot but prefer the same apps for both Win11 as Deb12
Removed by mod
In general I like your list, but you should not recommend uTorrent to anybody for several reasons, they have pulled a lot of bullshit before, they have ads, and they possibly might be giving feds a back door, but I can’t prove that by any means.
Removed by mod
Fair enough, but considering the possibilities and the shitty things they’ve verifiably done, knowing that QB is available on both, it just seems like a bad idea to recommend uTorrent.
Removed by mod
No, and I appreciate your efforts, it’s a good list but that one entry caught me off guard.
Your File Manager list is sorely missing Krusader and Total Commander. ;)
EDIT: and Sublime Text runs native on Linux (and I do believe there is a Mac version)Removed by mod
pull hundreds of KDE dependencies
Very true. i3 users would get half of KDE when they install Krusader. For a KDE User it’s pretty cool to have the same settings and bookmarks across Plasmahell, Dolphin, Krusader and Konqueror.
Everything that Total Commander does, Double Commander can do
I don’t think I agree here. But maybe I have been using TC too long (since Windows Commander for Win 3.1). V 11 brought many cool new things. I don’t think I can use a Windows box at all without it anymore.
Sublime even has their own repos for various distributions. You may still install and evaluate it for free but it requires a paid license to use. The only limitation is a nag screen though. Like it’s been since Sublime2.
https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/linux_repositories.htmlOther editors are catching up quickly. The coolest Sublime feature now is their Plugin repository.
Removed by mod
I actually used DC for a while on my Arch box at work. I found it not there yet and went back to Krusader. It’s been a while maybe it’s become a lot better. I’ll check it out again.
I also have to use and administrate Windows for work, so yeah: knowing both can be a blessing and a curse (mostly me cursing at Server 2022).
Removed by mod
Haha, we have only a handful of PCs that upgraded to Win11 so far. I think it’s just as bad as Win10, maybe better than Win10 18H2 and earlier apart from the UI.
For totalcmd: Viewer than can easily search an 8GB binary file at the speed of the disk, switched seamlessly between UTF-16, ASCII, HEX. The whole Search feature now integrated with Everything. Multi-Rename with Regex and or renumbering. Treeview that can be enabled or disabled for one or both panes. Copy/Move queue with speed limiter and pause. Tab management for sorting and removing duplicates. History of most frequently used directories. Integrated wget (via the FTP-URL button). Fast image gallery view. That’s what comes to mind that didn’t work or not as well with DC.
Maybe also work in DC: Plugins for NTFS streams, WebDAV (windows default implementation sucks donkey balls), SCP. I even used it for burning CDs back under XP.
