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
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.
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).
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.
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.
Google Keep
My wife and I use it all the time for things like grocery lists, packing lists, etc. It’s nice to be an able to collaborate in real time on a checklist, and I haven’t found an app that can replicate that convenience.
Joplin? Can basically do all this.
Does Joplin actually have real-time (as in two people simultaneously editing with two cursors and changes streaming in a character at a time) collaboration? All I found was some vague language about shared notebooks and some guy’s stab at a real-time collaboration plugin that hasn’t been touched in 3 years.
Realtime? No. There are various Tab Solutions for that,like Etherpad,etc
But especially if you selfhost you can put in really short synch times, that will give you near real time collaboration and comes out of the bo without any plugins.
OP was asking for real-time collaboration in a package similar to Google Keep: a simple, mobile-friendly UI (my bar for this is at minimum a UI that has a dedicated button to make a checkbox, automatically adding a checkbox on the next line when hitting “enter”, and the ability to check or uncheck boxes by touching them alone) with an at-a-glance view of available notes, both private and shared.
It’s something that I want, too. I’m happy using tons of weird stuff, but I need something simple, easy to use, and with real-time collaboration to use with my partner, who is very much not interested in anything less convenient than Google Keep. The closest thing I can see coming is HedgeDoc 2.0, but it would still be a hard sell.
The definition of real time collaboration does vary widely from usecase to usecase and user to user. While the Joplin mobile app in theory does limit the minimum synch time to every 5 minutes there are (easy) ways to circumvent that and have a faster synch (I use every 60sec, but I selfhost).
Everything else you mentioned/require is available with Joplin. It literally has a checkbox Note-Type (but checkboxes can be easily added to every other note as well) which can easily be check off, Notes can be categorised into folders (Shared or not shared, with additional privacy locks available),etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a myriad of ideas/things I would like to see Joplin do better. But its usability beats Google Keep - by far. And by now my extended family has adopted it - from an 8 year old to an 80 year old.
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As far as I understand the app menue, tracking is an opt in.
- Digital wallets (for things like cc, ID, coupons)
- Map apps (like google maps)
- Dating apps
Swiping library and keyboard.
Yousician or similar entertaining musician motivator. One that has scoring or analysis, specifically. Not just a video/backing track player.
Some kind of buy/sell/auction/freecycle system service/app/front-end that isn’t evil and it’s simple enough for normos to use so it gets critical mass and makes it easy to buy/sell/give/recycle stuff locally.
HeliBoard. Swype library must be downloaded and currently only working ones are closed source but the keyboard itself is open source and amazing.
I’ve just switched this week from SwiftKey, which was the best keyboard I have ever used. Made the switch just to abandon a piece of proprietary software, but oh boy… HeliBoard has way exceeded my expectations!
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…
In Europe we have PSD2 but I dunno if it’s enough to create a full app
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…
It may sound boring, but I would appreciate a good open source alarm app for android.
An alternative to iTunes so that I don’t need a Windows VM to backup my company iPhone. But I know it’s never gonna happen because Apple is the devil.
Just so you know, libimobiledevice can backup iPhones with their idevicebackup utility. It’s CLI only, so maybe not as easy to get into as iTunes but it has worked pretty well for years on my end.
