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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
OSMAND, since they started tracking users a while ago on the f-droid version.
