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?
My phone firmware
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.
Holy shit the most painful and miserable experience is using this god forsaken site, let alone the fucking mobile app. Actually rage inducing.
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).
IDK why this always gets downvoted. UI/UX some of the biggest issues with FOSS software, and is a massive barrier to entry to someone who isn’t a massive computer nerd willing to put up with that shit.
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.
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
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).
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…
A decent language learning type app, like dulingo
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.
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.
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.
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.
Krita & OpenToonz handle just about everything I need as an animator/artist, but I’m worried about OpenToonz continued development. I worry that there aren’t enough people working on it.
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!
KDE BigScreen had some ambition to be that
Canva.
Their feature set and functionality is great, but their vendor lock-in is really off-putting. Even just within their platform, it’s really difficult to move assets around within workspaces.
Let alone edit graphics that you made on Canva and edit them elsewhere, say Penpot, for example.
Xx
I would love to see a good Lightroom alternative in terms of ease of use.
Darktable is great and the results are good, but it’s pretty complex to use and has a really steep learning curve. And it doesn’t do photo management other than a few basics. Even after months of use I still struggle to replicate what I can do in Lightroom.
Photoshop.
And yeah, no, please, don’t come over and mention Gimp and Kryta and all the others. I get it, they’re cool for the stuff they do. They just aren’t the all in one package that Photoshop is or have as powerful tools specifically for photo editing. Photoshop would require a Blender-style major effort to replicate and Gimp just isn’t up to it. I wish it were. Photoshop is at the perfect intersection of being uniquely capable and walled off behind the single crappiest ecosystem in software.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.
Well, counterpoint: Photoshop tries to be an “everything for everybody” app, and GIMP/Krita don’t need to compare to that, as little as any user needs all the features of Photoshop.
Nobody can avoid Photoshop
Call me nobody, then. I worked with the Adobe suite professionally for 15+ years, haven’t touched it for the past six. You won’t find a single 1:1 replacement. It’s just a matter of quitting and accepting the individual limits of different alternatives.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. You are just too familiar with Photoshop, so using anything else is hard and less efficient.
In photography there is this mantra about “the most important part is right behind the camera”. A good photographer is not a good Nikon user, or good Canon user. A good photographer can deliver decent pictures with a potato camera if needed.
Sure, a potato camera is less efficient for any work that an actual good one. So it’s good to invest in a good brand. But the point is: if you are not capable to make average results with a potato software, the problem is not in the software.
Just like MS Office.
Exactly… easily replaceable but you have an endless whining of users that imagine they might somehow in the future need this one feature that office has but alternatives don’t.
That’s an increasingly small number, if only because now Google is in that market, too.
However, there is a second reason you need Office, and that’s compatibility. I don’t use Office for work normally, but I still have an Office account (which, annoyingly, is how you pay for Office now), because I have clients who want to work on their formats and it doesn’t make sense for me to work around compatibility and have an argument about it instead of just paying for the damn thing and working with whatever software other people want to work.
But if I was by myself and didn’t need to work with anyone else ever? Yeah, I would not miss much from Office, honestly.
Actually, I’d much prefer a FOSS alternative of Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop.
I’d be happy if the Affinity suite worked on Linux :(
Spotify.
An open source music streaming service where I can financially support artists but where I’m not forced to put up with annoying advertisements (even when paying membership fees!), and which allows me to use whatever app I want to play the music I listen to. It is annoying AF that I need to switch between apps to listen to music because Spotify’s shitty native app is inferior in every possible way with the single exception of offering more content.
There seems like a lot of potential for an app like this with the mixture of decentralization/encryption/verification/blockchain/etc. Easily verify artists, get the artists paid with a determined currency or by merch and donations, have it federated or decentralized so artists have more control and a company can’t take percentages… I don’t know. There has to be something there. It seems possible and almost a necessity in the future for artists to make money and corporations to not enshittify each app that is released. For example, spotify adding features to try to be like TikTok, or recently they were trying to add “educational courses” to the app
my personal favorite is the one where the band or artist hosts their own site, and then you can just buy shit from it.
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly. Or if you like me, don’t really care, just finding a way to throw money at them, in their general direction sometimes works. Spotify actually works so little, that the only party that makes money, is the music publishers that spotify allows on their platform, the artists and spotify generally don’t make much money, or make very little money. Gotta love capitalism.
If you’re a music artist, please allow people to just give you money directly, in some way. It’ll incentivize people who don’t pay for it to send you a few dollary doos.
there’s this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly.
Wow, mind blown! I had no idea money could be used to buy things directly! /s
Seriously though, buying music from artists you already know is easy for artists that actually provide this as an option, but it doesn’t help when trying to find new artists and songs to listen to. Spotify is brilliant for discovering new content and can’t be replaced by ‘buying shit directly’.
For desktop there’s ncspot, which is a Spotify TUI client written in Rust. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it does work well
Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?
I wish there were more Open Source games.
Perhaps not Foss, but definitely free (beer) , endless sky, available on steam
Just wanted to shout out https://osgameclones.com/. It has a pretty decent list of them and source ports.
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.
