It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
Discord. It’s extremely popular and has no direct alternatives (Matrix spaces thing isn’t ready at all yet)
EDIT: I didn’t know Revolt and Zulip existed. I’m doing a research on them now
Matrix is also extremely complicated to sign up for. I tried getting some tech savvy friends to sign up for Matrix the other day. Even for someone tech-savvy it is waaaaaaaay too complicated. Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
Yeah…for many of these programs the onboarding is so daunting, even for those who are tech savvy. Laymen don’t stand a chance with something that is that complicated. It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
Oh 100%. The problem is that there’s a lack of UX designers and such in the Open Source community. There’s technical people building stuff but they often don’t know how to make a good user experience (or in some cases they don’t care to).
personally when it comes to the onboarding im more on the side of “self host your own onboarding, for friends and family and shit, and then federate out from there if needed.”
Theoretically doing a clean onboarding shouldn’t be very difficult. More involved i suppose, but if you don’t have the time to figure out how a federated instance works, (or to properly document it) you shouldn’t be on the internet, you have more pressing matters to attend to.
There are instances that are not very hard to sign up for. The main issue with Matrix is instability and performance, especially when communicating with users/groups on different instances. It’s really not a great experience. And the inability to properly delete messages can be a big deal too
@SorteKanin I’d like to see that. I have already onboarded about 35 students and my whole family to matrix, nobody had any problems with signup. Bigger problem is later if they get the infamous “Unable to decrypt message” error.
Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but think of it as an assurance that you’re not locked in with one app.
That said, I completely agree that Matrix and Element need to work on UX, particularly making it easy for new users to adopt it as well as verification/device switching.
Can’t relate. It’s not harder to get your hands on a matrix account in comparison to a mail account. And for those that want it even easier, just download Element and you are guided through the default registration at matrix.org
I keep hearing people recommend signal messenger as an alternative to discord, and honestly that’s the most obvious sign you don’t actually use discord
Yeah signal is amazing for one to one or small groups, but not for what discord servers are used for.
Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to Discord
The privacy policy of their app’s captcha solution is horrendous so no thank you
Doesn’t seem that bad, when you go to log in it checks your IP, length of time on the site and mouse movements.
hCaptcha
This section has been adapted from hCaptcha’s documentation.
We use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (hereinafter “hCaptcha”) on our website. This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation (“IMI”). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behavior of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled.
When using the Revolt App, hCaptcha will only begin analysis when you:
Submit a login request.
Submit a registration request.
Submit a password reset / email resend request.
For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Data processing is based on Art. 6(1)(f) of the GDPR (DSGVO): the website or mobile app operator has a legitimate interest in protecting its site from abusive automated crawling and spam. IMI acts as a “data processor” acting on behalf of its customers as defined under the GDPR, and a “service provider” for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For more information about hCaptcha and IMI’s privacy policy and terms of use, please visit the following links: https://hcaptcha.com/privacy/ and https://hcaptcha.com/terms.
Honestly i never enjoyed discord It is messy and difficult to find information once its a few days old
Id much rather use a decent forum really
This is more of a hammer as a screwdriver problem, where everyone decided to use chat software as a forum.
almost every hobby has moved to facebook and it’s the same damn thing. utterly useless for the purpose people try to use it for.
i don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people, but this is definitely one of the pinnacles.
Especially with the upcoming implementation of ads. Really sucks that many communities and software support (who should have just had forums) are deeply embedded into it and will have to start from scratch and lose any and all helpful content. Its hard to see big communities moving to anything else anytime soon, even of there was a great Foss alternative. It would indeed be amazing to have one in the first place
You had me for a second, lol. Unfortunately it is not an April fools joke :/ luckily for us though, the worse the application gets, the higher a chance a Foss alternative will emerge from a madlad who was sick of discord’s shit
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ads-discord-blocking-adguard.html
https://zulip.com/ is likely your best alternative. It’s more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there
I recently ran into that very issue, leading to me downloading (one foss) third party clients for discord which are privacy focused. As long as discord is still the place to be I have to be there too, but I can certainly limit the data they can gather about me. I found
- goofcord for desktop (supports plugins too)
- aliucord for android
Perhaps they are an option for you too
Didn’t know those existed.
Aliucord looks like a modified client tho, so not really open source.
If you’re talking about voice channels specifically, then there is Mumble.
If you’re talking about chat rooms, old school solution is IRC and we have XMPP that works fine for most people.
Mumble needs a server, iirc
Edit to be more precise, it needs you to host a server of your own
No I meant an app that looks similar and contains most of the features (servers specifically) so it’s easier for not tech savvy users to get into. Someone suggested Revolt but its privacy (as in sending the data to not privacy respecting third parties) is questionable so idk if I can consider it a good enough alternative
There is a project, but it’s really early in it’s development. It’s called Cabal. Has a nice desktop client, looks kinda like Discord. It’s p2p, so no server required. BUT AGAIN, VERY EARLY IN DEVELOPMENT.
Not something you should use, but look out for how the development is going.
Plain banking apps for smartphones. Having those developed in the open would hopefully make it possible to have forks that work on rooted devices without hiding magisk and whatnot.
That would be awesome. I wish banks would also have standardized (or at least open) APIs so I could use FOSS financial software to pull my live purchase history and then categorize that and etc. I think some banks do this, but not very common in the US from what I can tell.
Yeah, if banks had open and standardised APIs we could all use the same FLOSS banking app — or choose from any of a bazillion FLOSS apps. Instead they’re going the authoritarian route and locking customers in with bloated black box, proprietary apps…
I had to leave VirginMoney because the lady on the phone told me I needed an iPhone to reset my password (seriously) even after trying with three separate Android devices.
There’s no desktop functionality (mobile is king with them) and it amazed me that day I had to use the Current Account Switcher to go to an equally meh banking service.
Sorry state of affairs across all mobile apps to be honest and as seen by the prevalence of MDM and accessing data Vs doing the very same, on a desktop “PC”. Why the data is more precious on a mobile device to them is telling…
My phone firmware
god i fucking hate android, i await the day linux on mobile actually functions with great anticipation.
I’ve been so excited anytime I see updates from gnome-mobile. It’s looks much cleaner than phosh
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
Android may be ‘meh’ to you. I like it, but only because it’s good enough for what I need. Fair. But it’s got something the green Linux phone never had: massive presence.
Droid is a bad Linux with a huge ecosystem, and that’s why this may be the best we can hope for. We could have a perfect phone, but without that massive presence to get the apps and the dedicated devs, anything with less presence will suffer.
Think about it. It’s a sad fact, but you know it’s a fact.
That’s like how Xz didn’t get trojanned because it was a nothing project: it is a crucial part of everything. It lost its presence and when the sole Dev was deep in burnout he was hoodwinked. Ya need the eyeballs, and that’s a popularity game for foss.
My 2c.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
unsure what you’re trying to say, but they make linux phones now, people do buy them, not very many. But for me, a linux user, it’s exactly what i want.
IDK where you got me “thinking android was meh” It’s fucking awful. I said as much. I don’t understand why people keep bringing up market saturation like linux isn’t an enthusiast OS to begin with. It doesn’t need it, perhaps some day it’ll grow beyond that. But for the time being, there is no need for it to do so. It works perfectly fine as is. The only issue right now is app support, and UI compat.
Linux already has the apps you would need, all you need to do is port them, or make a fork. Most apps these days can be used on a web browser, which solves like 90% of everything significant. Literally just build it with arm compat and give it a mobile UI.
no idea what you’re trying to say about XZ, it got backdoored most likely as a result of state actors, and like you said, the dev being burnt out. That’s just part of the game when it comes to open source, unfortunately for that team that was working on it. That’s going to be a highly scrutinized path of action going forward, and much more difficult. Also it never lost it’s presence? That’s literally WHY it was backdoored. It was a prime target for being infiltrated due to basically every linux distro using XZ on a fundamental level, and basically every machine shipping it.
FOSS CAD softwares. I know FreeCAD exists but it’s very unintuitive compared to the proprietary ones. I am thankful that it exists but it’s a long way apart to become a household name like Blender.
I wish I could start writing one but I don’t have a clear picture of requirements to plan and start writing one. If anyone is expert in this field please link some research papers and guidelines for someone to start fresh.
Check out Ondsel. They’re working on improving FreeCAD and making the workflow not suck.
Still definitely a work in progress, but the dimension/constraint tools and 3D feature naming are already lightyears better in their version.
I think FreeCAD is still the best bet, it does.seem to be making a few strides recently. Topo naming and sketcher workbench are both getting updates. For me personally it’s definitely usable for personal projects. I want better FreeCAD rather than an alternative new thing.
Yeah I should look up some tutorials for it. I jumped in thinking I could figure it out after working with Creo, Solidworks and AutoCAD but I should have RTFM.
Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.
I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).
Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.
100%
I put together a list of open source CAD software a couple of years ago, but none of the options are quite there yet.
Most definitely - Especially for woodworking FreeCAD is horrible and inefficient - even a friend who has been a contributor takes longer for some things than I do in Fusion360 as an occasional user. As a maker I love the idea of FreeCAD and the implications it has for third world countries, the amateur maker scene,etc. But I hate it for what it is. Which is so sad.
I use FreeCAD for woodworking, and…yeah. It works, it has its limitations, and I figured I know some Python, maybe I can code up some tools for woodworking specific tasks that would speed the process up.
Almost none of FreeCAD is documented and what documentation exists is wrong. You can’t learn how to contribute to FreeCAD, you have to be born knowing how. It makes no goddamn sense. “You know the chamfer and fillet tools in the Part Design workbench? I want one that makes Rabbets” is a bigger R&D problem than the Manhattan Project.
My understanding is that there are long-term developers who have left, and new blood is starting to appear, which is why the next version is going to have a lot of improvements to the sketcher among other things.
Blender is not CAD software though, it’s 3D modelling software. They’re not quite the same thing, and they’re intended for (and excel at) different things.
I know. I’m just comparing the reputation and how polished they are wrt to each other. Given they have similar scopes with modeling and graphics and everything.
But they don’t really have similar scopes… One is for technical models, based on extruded 2D drawings, the other is for abstract 3D modelling. Sure in both if them the end product is a 3D model, but they’re achieved in vastly different ways with completely different skillsets and different use cases.
I wish there were more Open Source games.
Just wanted to shout out https://osgameclones.com/. It has a pretty decent list of them and source ports.
Veloren is great, there is also Mindustry and Shattered Pixel Dungeon to name a couple of high quality ones.
I wish we had an opensource game store to sell or donate to opensource games.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip
sleep 0.2
(echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy
[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
```bash'
cat "$0"
echo '```
:::') | xclip -selection clipboard
xte "keydown Control_L" "key V" "keyup Control_L"
Perhaps not Foss, but definitely free (beer) , endless sky, available on steam
Looks like Endless Sky is under GPL license, so definitely FOSS
I really liked how Id used to release their old engines as open source, but of course once they got bought out all that stopped. The biggest problem for OSS games is with assets though. There are a few decent open source engines now for a lot of types of games, but it’s a lot harder to find decent looking assets to make games. I wonder if stuff like stable diffusion might help with that going forward.
There: https://mander.xyz/post/11076441
There was a post recently about people’s favourite open source games and it’s been a nice repository of games for me :)
