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.
In many regards using Blender can be a much more pleasant experience than using many of the commercial “standards” such as Maya or 3dsmax. Depends what aspect you’re looking at of course, it’s not perfect and it is lacking in some areas. Krita is amazing for painting, infinitely better than Photoshop.
Blender is so widely used in professional 3D work it almost doesn’t count for this discussion, it’s already well known and widely used.
Blender has been on fire these last few years, 2.8 to 3.6 has been nothing but bangers, and 4.0 seems to be great, too.
Why do you compare Krita to Photoshop? They do different things.
Because a lot of people do use Photoshop for painting, and Adobe does recognize that and implement some painting tools into Photoshop.
Cool, but there are plenty of painting apps and they all are better than Photoshop. Because Photoshop is not a painting app even if you can paint there.
Yes, and the person you replied to gave an example of one. What’s the problem?
Exactly
Yes, people do amazing things with Blender, and the customisability allows creators to make it fit their workflow and their usage perfectly. Look at Dillongoo and his Goo Engine, which is their custom build of Blender and the insane production quality they are making with this tool.
why is blender lcking and why is krita better
There are so many reasons. You can peruse the BlenderArtists forum for details, these programs are so complex it’s hard to condense everything into a single post, not to mention I’m just one user. I’d say Blender still has poorly designed gizmos (they’re not necessary to do work, but still), lacking UV features (this is being remedied as we speak, Chris Blackbourn has been working on UV tools for the past few months), and its most compelling feature in my opinion (=geometry nodes) is very low-level and still not very accessible (the plan is to ship Blender with premade node groups in the future).
Krita has very well thought-out shortcuts that make painting a breeze. Picking layers, changing/tweaking brushes, it’s all very simply presented, yet powerful. The performance is also unparalleled : Krita can handle immense canvases and that’s a rare enough occurrence in FOSS to mention. I work regularly with 7k*14k images for print and it stays snappy and responsive. As long as you have the RAM for it (32GiB is enough for most situations).
I tend to disagree. I’m trying to integrate Blender to my work flow and I find very difficult to do so. Simply because 95% of it is accessed through arbitrary button combinations and has no GUI counterpart. This in turn makes the learning curve a cliff, which I really don’t consider a pleasant experience.
Also you can’t track viewport with a camera easily. Something that literally every other 3D app I’ve ever used allows you to do.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean (track viewport ?), feel free to ask on BlenderArtists we’ll be happy to help.