OSS/Libre alternatives I use every day (or occasionally)
After working in IT for over 10 years and 5 as an embedded dev I've managed to find out some OSS/Libre alternatives to common tools devs and sysadmins and others use every day. So I compiled a WIP list below:
| Product | Alternative | Info |
|---|---|---|
| VMWare | Proxmox* | |
| MailChimp | listmonk* | Runs on everything, even NetBSD |
| VSCode | VSCodium | No more AI and telemetry |
| Router firmware | OPNsense / OpenWRT | OpenWRT is best if you have WIFI |
| Bambu Slicer | Orca Slicer | Because bambulab sucks |
| SynologyNAS | TrueNAS SCALE* | |
| Any streaming service/Plex | Jellyfin* | |
| GitHub | Forgejo* | Used by Codeberg |
| LastPass | BitWarden* | |
| DaVinci Resolve | Kdenlive | |
| Fusion360 | FreeCAD/OpenSCAD | |
| Hardware debugging | BlackMagic Debugger | Works great with blue pill/black pill |
| Altium Designer | KiCad | |
| C/C++ DevTools (VSCode extension) | clangd and CodeLLDB | C/C++ DevTools cannot run on VSCodium |
| Copilot for VSCode | Continue | Good if you have local LLMs |
| Discord/Teams | Matrix* | |
| Matlab | GNU Octave | |
| Saleae Logic 2 | sigrok pulseview | I still use Logic 2 at work since the GUI is wonderful, and Saleae is a pretty nice company |
* available as self hosted services