Linux, hands down and tied behind its back. Both for servers AND desktop OS.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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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!
It's amazing how much time is saved on projects when you don't have to deal with and maintain Autodesk's and Adobe's licensing insanity.
Like 90% of downtime would be because the license server was down because of a security update and IT was trying to troubleshoot with Autodesk or a user forgot their Adobe password... Not because of anything actually breaking.
I love Godot even though I still lack the skills necessary to actually make a game.
If I remember correctly, Blender began it's life as a closed source commercial product, but then later went open-source under new stewardship.
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.
Well, Thunderbird, for one. Outlook makes me sad.
Can you give any details at all
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 are basically do not exist anymore.
Thanks for that. Just knowing those options are ‘good’ is exciting to see.
I still miss freehand.
I’ll have to check out kdenlive vs resolve.
Do you know of good tutorials for these I miss old school manuals.
Libre Office.
Damn straight. I was an open office guy for a while, but word had a slight edge. Now that edge is gone and Libre Office is the clear winner. I will not be going back.
Stepmania, the way better free DDR for PC!
Holy shit, I haven't thought about this in years! I remember back in 2008 I had a copy of Stepmania on a flash drive and played it on school computers during class.
A new german democratic republic? Only kidding, that looks pretty interesting.
Dnscrypt-proxy has no comparison, IMO. DNS encryption, caching, IP & domain blocking, local DoH. It's so useful.
Microsoft Terminal vs the default Command Prompt haha. VS Code vs Visual Studio.
In general software is one of the rare thing where ordinary people can "mass produce" things that compete with commercial offerings.
FOSS software is great :D
I would also suggest VSCodium as basically VSCode without MS’s telemetry. The only actual downside is that a few proprietary extensions don’t work (most notably the MS ones)
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Pdftk
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.
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My paint and Krita are great, I use them daily
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.
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The Apache Web Server
Honestly, just about anything in the web application hosting vein. httpd, nginx, redis/memcached, varnish, etc. You could make an argument that MS-SQL outperforms Postgres sometimes, but in my book, the cost of entry isn't worth it and I've only ever used Postgres since I left an explicitly Microsoft shop many years ago.
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Molly for signal if that counts
OBS for streaming is amazing.
Ardour is a pretty amazing DAW that can compete with proprietary ones. There're also loads of FOSS plugins out there that don't have to hide behind the commercial ones. My favorites are the Calf Plugins and the Luftikus EQ for mastering. Helm and Yoshimi are great synths. Pure Data is lightweight and can compete with MaxMSP.
Krita has already been mentioned.
But, I think what strikes me most is that there's a lot of FLOSS software out there that just doesn't have direct proprietary counterpart. Small command-line tools like FFMPEG or ImageMagick. Linux as an customizable OS. Programming Languages to make music like SuperCollider. I never learned how to use proprietary CAD software but recently got into OpenSCAD to model some things and it's really fun once you get the hang of it. I don't do this professionally so there's no need for me to learn Fusion360.
Some have a bit of a learning curve but are all the more satisfying to use once you get into them. People are just too stuck in their "industry standard" (which really just means "the most common product that has been around the longest"), but if you're not bound to that, there's just a huge number of programs out there that allow you to do amazing things. That to me is the beauty of FLOSS.
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