
Ask HN: Which open source software is better than its commercial counterparts? - stealthmodeclan
I am looking for examples where open source products outdid commercial offerings.
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taylodl
LibreOffice. Writer is a competent word processor that does everything you
expect it to the way you expect it to. It even has a navigation pane. Nice!
Ditto for Impress. Draw is simply better than Visio. Visio was good until the
latest version, which as far as I and my colleagues are concerned is simply
unusable. Even though we're an MSOffice Fortune 200 enterprise there are a lot
of people here downloading LibreOffice just for Draw. Incredible.

Gimp is another well-known tool I use somewhat frequently. I'm not a graphics
designer so perhaps Adobe's tools are better, but for the kinds of tasks
developers find themselves doing I find Gimp more than adequate. Not to
mention I can run it on any platform, which is nice.

Open source compilers are so good that for the most part people don't even
bother with commercial compilers. I've been around the block enough times to
remember when that was not the case.

Linux/BSD. Unless I needed a tool for my livelihood requiring Windows, why
would I ever buy it? Mac OS I get because people are buying the machine and
the OS is free - otherwise there's not much point to buying it either.

QEMU and Xen are other successes in the virtualization space.

The only place open source isn't faring as well is in the mobile space - at
least not that I'm aware of. Yes there are a lot of mobile projects on GitHub,
but I don't know of people using Open Source mobile apps.

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robin_reala
I guess it depends what you mean by outdid? If you mean more popular then open
source web frameworks are wildly more popular than the equivalent closed
source ones (ignoring ecommerce for the time being). If you mean technically
better then you’d be hard pushed to argue that the Windows kernel is much
better than the Linux kernel. If you mean genuinely a better user experience,
then Firefox vs Internet Explorer comes to mind.

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_emacsomancer_
Though it has no clear commercial counterpart (Adobe Pagemaker? QuarkXPress?
Adobe InDesign?) (La)TeX is far superior to any rough equivalents for document
production.

For text manipulation (including editing), GNU Emacs (which also was superior
to and eventually beat out commercial Emacs like Gosling Emacs [
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs)
]) is far more powerful than any commercial offerings.

As an operating system, Linux seems to be well-established as the server and
scientific/supercomputer OS.

Maybe OpenZFS over commercial RAID offerings?

