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.
Calibre vs… em something that’s not calibre.
I’m honest not sure what I would use instead, but it would be hard to replace.
Uhh… yeah, I’m stumped trying to think of the proprietary alternative to Calibre, too. I don’t think there is one in the mainstream? Everywhere I look, the only recommendation is Calibre.
Honestly I hated Calibre. The worst part was how it just couldn’t render some books properly, and there was no way to zoom many of them, even via CSS. Readability is #1 priority, but Calibre was absolutely broken for a lot of that.
I ended up using software that could made thumbnails from PDF, CBR, CBZ, and ePUB, then I used Sumatra for all of it.
It never occurred to me, that people would use calibre to read books. I only use it to move books between devices (kindle →PC ⟷ smartphone) and to strip DRM. The stripping of DRM is actually my primary motivator to use calibre.
I see.
That’s arguable. Calibre is a database manager, not a reader. It has a reader, sure. But it’s an afterthought when compared to the rest of the program. The program is primarily aimed at people who have a reader and want to be able to manage their library. It’s days ahead of literally any other program when it comes to things like metadata management or managing multiple devices.
It’s sort of like saying that Notepad++ is bad at making Word documents. Like sure, it may be able to edit Word docs, but that isn’t what it’s primarily designed for.
That’s not what I was told on the multiple sites that I stumbled on when searching for an all-purpose digital book reader. But you’re probably right, and they’re probably wrong.
I’m curious what features that Calibre was missing for reading that you are looking for specifically? I know that it’s got some pretty standard features built in, though I’ve never used it to read, only to check files before sending to eReader.
It’s more that it’s clunky, bugged, and unusable than “it’s missing features”. It tries to rectify this with a very terrible and still often unusable CSS editor
Reader is very much a tertiary function of Calibre. It’s an ebook manager and converter first, an editor second.
I see.