Ask HN: Which open source software is better than its commercial counterparts?

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.

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.

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 ]) 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?