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AlternativeTo: a resource I wish I would have had when I started using Linux (alternativeto.net)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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AlternativeTo is a site I use quite a bit. Personally I use it when I get fed up with an Android app having too many ads / creepy network behavior or want to find a self-hostable version of a freemium service.

It has filters for free, open source, platform type, etc. From my understanding it's all crowd sourced, so if you disagree with a rating put in a vote! Sharing this in hopes that others find it as useful as I do.

If you know of similar or better resources I would love to hear about them.

Edit: many people are noting that the comments and reviews are out of date. I agree! Despite that I still find it to he useful. It would be great if this little bit of visibility gets more folks engaged over there to improve it.

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[–] MonkCanatella 21 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I always thought this and all the other sites like it were just SEO bait. The quality of the alternatives is no better than random, though I guess you can discover software you didn't know existed. One example: I'm always looking for an alternative to Roon. Like Plex for music, plus you can add in tidal or qobuz, so you can essentially listen to anything on your own library, or the streaming services, from anywhere. It also has an incredible metadata system, letting you view for example, all the players on a jazz album, view bios of every one, and easily start to check out some new music that way. It's unbelievably flawed and poorly run though.

What is alternativeto.net's suggestion as a replacement? Fucking VLC Media player. The only real contender is PlexAmp, or if you want something similar but only for classical music (and without self hosting your own library), there's idagio. results like that make me think it's totally useless

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

AlternativeTo is crowdsource, so one individual might find software A as suitable alternative, while others are not.

The same way that some people find GIMP enough to replace Photoshop, while others prefer Affinity Photo, Paint.NET, or Photopea.

I personally find so many cool underrated FOSS software, such as Inochi2D, AB Download Manager, Miria, OpenUTAU, Our Paint, Mihon, and Wick Editor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

This is also my experience. The results are usually very vaguely related with what I search. I had better luck with Wikipedia comparison tables, but often they are incomplete.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah it seems mostly SEO bait whenever I get results for it. I mostly rely on "awesome" lists on GitHub to find actual alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I have not once seen anything of value in their "alternatives", they always show the weirdest shit that has nothing in common with the other. It's been in my Kagi block list from the very beginning, I don't miss those results one bit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

It's mostly that it's just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you're gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren't curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.