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
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
Well some people use Discord as a messenger for some reason and for them Signal is probably the best but yea it’s not a Discord alternative at all
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.
They want to use a single account for everything and have the most people possible.
That is it really. They don’t want to have to make 50 new accounts where every account has to deal with getting past the spam policies and filters only to find that their potential base is 1/10 of that on other platforms
That’s why reddit became the de-facto forum for many things also. 1 interface, 1 account, people can trace your account across different “forums” and it was searchable (on search engines, not shit reddit search).
There are currently a wave of people moving certain activities to Band of all fucking things (using it side by side with facebook due to facebook policies). It’s basically a shitty korean clone of facebook but slower and with less stability and even less features.
They could have picked ANY of the platforms actually designed for the intended purpose. But Band? It’s the OPPOSITE of useful.
People don’t make sense.
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
I thought the Discord ads drama was an April Fools joke?
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
Hmm I really hope so
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
Something like Revolt could maybe be a replacement for discord
My phone firmware
I wish there were more Open Source games.
You may have heard of them, but I love Shattered Pixel Dungeon and unCiv
Recently discovered Veloren, maybe you haven’t heard of it
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"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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.
If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.
Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.
I tried Saber (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.adilhanney.saber/) for a while with my fat fingers and it worked good enough for my use case, idk if it fits your needs
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll give it a try sometime.
Yes yes yes 🙏 I swear I go around at least once or twice a month looking for this. I’m not sure if it is a huge technical feat to approach this type of program or not, but like you said there are tons of options for typing but I haven’t found even one that solely focuses on handwriting.
Have you heard of Rnote? It is only available for linux, windows and mac tho
Yeah, I’m currently using an old version (2018!) Of AutoDesk sketchbook, since it seems like every other option tries to force me into a subscription or cloud service. I just want to take notes!
This is a totally wild card guess, but I imagine obsidian probably has a community hand writing extension
Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.
- Digital wallets (for things like cc, ID, coupons)
- Map apps (like google maps)
- Dating apps
Catima for a digital wallet
That doesn’t seem to support credit cards
“Maps”: as others have suggested: OsmAnd and OrganicMaps (I use OsmAnd as it covers my needs better than Google Maps or other apps)
“Dating Apps”: There is Alovoa
but the problem is who you will find on there, as everyone is on other apps
I know them all but they can’t hold up with their proprietary counterparts both by userbase and features.
Haven’t tried Alovoa, but think of it differently; if someone is on Alovoa, they maybe are more similar-minded to you, because they too probably like open source stuff.
I like your “the glass is half full” attitude, however their signup seems to be broken.
Ah, rip, that may be an issue😆
Full on Transit app that works well. Most that do are closed sourced and the ones that are open do not work well. A traffic app would be good but that would be very resource intensive. So not holding my breath.
I don’t see anyone talking about it here but I’d dream of an open source alternative to AndroidTV/Apple Tv. Firstly because ATV is ultra-dependent on Google, and secondly because the interface is unclear and not really pretty.
Today I’ve switched to Apple TV, which is much better in terms of UX, but the OS is too closed and sideloading isn’t possible…
So I hope to see some sort of CalyxOS / LineageOS for Tv arrive one day!
And I wish the same for the combo AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay. (But I have no hopes for this one haha)
Beeper
Fusion360
Tried out FreeCad/Ondsel, and just couldn’t get it to cooperate. Trying to do even basic changes would constantly result in errors/crashes. I spent maybe two weeks trying to make a single model. Then I tried making the same model in Fusion360 and was done in an half an hour. Granted, there is a huge difference in experience level here between these pieces of software, but still.
So I think my best bet for now is a jailbroken copy of Fusion360.
Universal Paperclip
Dating websites
- Parallel Desktop
- Arc Browser
- X
- Discord
- Copilot
- Vivaldi Browser
- Unread RSS Reader
For X/Twittwr there are many options but Mastodon(mastodon.social instance specifically) it’s my favorite, it also works as an alternative to Facebook.
I just feel a lot better with Mastodon rather than X/Twitter
For RSS I recommend twine—not sure if it’s available on Mac os though. That’s always going to be a struggle with foss stuff, support for Mac is lacking because the people making them tend not to use macs
Suicide booth
