What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?

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.

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

Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to 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

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

https://zulip.com/ is likely your best alternative. It's more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there

Revolt Chat

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

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.

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.

i learned about GNU Taler the other day from one of the OS communities

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.....

god i fucking hate android, i await the day linux on mobile actually functions with great anticipation.

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.

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 would love a FOSS version of Rhino3D.

Just wanted to shout out https://osgameclones.com/. It has a pretty decent list of them and source ports.

You may have heard of them, but I love Shattered Pixel Dungeon and unCiv

Recently discovered Veloren, maybe you haven't heard of it

I wish we had an opensource game store to sell or donate to opensource games.

::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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

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 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

I use spicetify just to get an improved shuffle function.

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

I use Ymusic it is android, but shouldn't be hard to run on Linux

Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?

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.

Holy shit the most painful and miserable experience is using this god forsaken site, let alone the fucking mobile app. Actually rage inducing.

they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.

To be fair, that was forced by the music industry.

If they didn't licence the tabs and come up with a payment system they were going to be sued into oblivion.

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.

Actually, I'd much prefer a FOSS alternative of Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop.

Just like MS Office.

Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.

idk honestly i just don't think i really believe this take.

The only really objective aspect of it is going to be user complacency. It's possible you've been using PS for 10-20 years now. And switching seems like an impossibility. But honestly, given the feature set, or the non existing feature set, i don't think it really matters.

Ultimately you can still do graphics editing in GIMP, and you can still do graphics editing in PS, it's more about your adaptability and flexibility, rather than skill set, and software. I've used both photoshop, gimp, and photopea. They all do the same thing, photopea is worse than either. GIMP is more featured, and doesn't come with adobe, PS has AI editing, and probably like 2 other features, and also the copyrighted color pack that you have to pay ransom for.

They all work fine, stop complaining, you'll live. Maybe that's just the doomerism peaking through or something, but honestly, it's such a vapid complaint IMO.

Exactly. Like when can I be a foss hoe

A defederated grindr

Do you like your men like you like your software?

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

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

Butterfly

Try this. Still under active development, but I like it so far.

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.

For maps, there is already OpenStreetMap and its ecosystem. I particularly like OrganicMaps which is available for Android, iOS and Linux (beta).

"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

Catima for a digital wallet

Matrix/Element isn’t an alternative.

Why not?

And, what about Revolt?

Its not really Foss but Vencord is a nice discord client mod that blocks some analytic stuff and is super cute to boot!

mumble does incredible VOIP. super minimal, pretty trivial to set up, and just works:tm: plus it has a lot of old school cool features since it's been around the game for decades. It's like discord but if it were old and cool.

Matrix i hear a lot of good things about, specifically the interoperability of it. That's pretty slick. One of these days i will get around to setting it up. Revolt exists, it's a discord clone, it can be self hosted, it's pretty fresh. Cool if you liked the 2015 era of discord i suppose.

I've used mirotalk for p2p screensharing, both the p2p and sfu version seem to be alright, the p2p version is significantly more performant in my experience though.

It will be soon. Voice and video calls are in beta

https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/

Without wishing to give too much away, I know a group of people who work at a public transport agency in the UK. They recently had a meeting with Google about "opening up our data" which amounted to Google wanting the agency to sign a contract that would give Google exclusive rights to realtime and scheduling data in perpetuity, then Google would decide if/when/how it would be made public. The agency didn't say "fuck off", but something to that effect.

Now, instead, they're working with a group of students to create a public API with a permissable licence and a framework for other agencies to do the same.

So... maybe do hold your breath? Transit is one of those areas that attracts nerds and nerds love open source.

• https://github.com/stargatedaw/stargate

• https://qtractor.org

• https://www.bespokesynth.com

• https://github.com/hydrogen-music/hydrogen/

• https://www.zrythm.org/en/

• https://lmms.io

• https://www.rosegardenmusic.com

• All above FOSS

• https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/ (paid OpenSource)

At least Reaper has Linux ports, better than nothing.

Live production stuff as well.

So much of the available "industry standard" software is fully proprietary and Apple only.

HeliBoard. Swype library must be downloaded and currently only working ones are closed source but the keyboard itself is open source and amazing.

FlorisBoard (at least the beta) is getting there (swiped on FlorisBoard), though it's not quite there yet

KDE BigScreen had some ambition to be that

And I wish the same for the combo AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay. (But I have no hopes for this one haha)

...Kodi?

heads up, for you and anybody wondering, there is a community version of razer driver support under linux. IDK if it works under windows, but that shit slaps under linux i tell you. IDK about logitech, but i assume something similar exists.

Works better than synapse and doesn't try and reinstall itself everytime i update windows (thanks microsoft, that's not like malware at all)

Joplin? Can basically do all this.

Notesnook is OSS, e2ee, and cloud synced, with the ability to share notes. See if it fits your requirements.

Certainly not as powerful as common office suites, but https://cryptpad.fr/ is not only open-source but also has already running instance (and has end to end encryption for your documents)

https://syncthing.net/ is a good general file synchronizer. Requires devices too be online simultaneously to sync, but gives you transport encryption with forward secrecy.

Are there cloud providers of OnlyOffice? That's the best FOSS option IMO. LibreOffice and OpenOffice were OK, but not nearly as good.

I can relate with trusting yourself with data 😂😅 would love to self host Immich, but I have continued to make silly mistakes and would 100% screw myself over if I had all my eggs in one basket with just a home server for files. At the moment I managed to completely degoogle and settle on Proton Drive, which although far from perfect, has been significantly improving (no Linux client yet though 😐). Syncthing has been looking more promising too. Maybe one of those could work for you?

I think Facebook is interesting as it's such a wide range of apps. From groups, to marketplace to traditional social, it has a lot of potential to be spread across multiple FOSS alternatives

Friendi.ca

Um. There is one. It's federated too, so you can just run your own thing and have it link up to the collective. It's on my list but not high enough that I remember the name. Search it out and it'll pop right up

I've thought about this for a while actually. I think the hardest thing to balance would be privacy. With a FOSS-oriented platform like this, and a broad amount of features like Facebook, you would have to have the users sacrifice a certain amount of real-world data to have these all be linked, and convenient. It could be encrypted in some way, so at least the instance's server wouldn't be able to read the data, but across users you would. I think a new line or definition would have to be made for people who want to use something like this. Most people, though, probably wouldn't care. And a FOSS version would 100% be better than Facebook's servers, where the data is mined and sold.

Technically this exists, right? It's just matrix with a bunch of bridges?

The app is closed source, deprived from element.

Revealjs is a pretty great replacement for PowerPoint, but it does require rudimentary HTML skills.

OnlyOffice works well for pptx. Reference: Used to do animated PPT in advertising.

Every few years I reinvent a script for this lol

You can try out Odoo, it's heavily customizable so you can add in the parts you don't find existing modules for - and customize existing modules too.

I (my little company) employ a bloke to support https://www.uzerp.com/ - we use it ourselves and ditched Sage (yay!)

If you fancy it then give us a shout - it is open source - you get it for free but our time is costed if you need assistance.

That is the Open Source Covenant

You might like Swarmism!

found this the other day, not sure if its what you're looking for https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa-expo :P

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

Parallel Desktop

There are several FOSS alternatives. All of them are more popular that Parallels.

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

For Copilot, Codeium might have potentional?

For macOS, I recommend UTM.

What's missing from the existing ones?

I miss Timely oohhh soo much

Nextcloud with OnlyOffice?

Openchange.

It's been out for a while. I think their client is tbird with a gaggle of add-ons to bring it close to outlook pain.

OnlyOffice

True, I caved for Proton Drive for lack of a better option right now. Even then it is not feature complete. However I'm happy enough with Google not mining my data anymore

That sounds like awk.

Hostile? The FreeCAD community is great

like Remmina?

appflowy.io is getting really good as a notion replacement

Have you seen anytype? Its a nice alternative to Notion

Check out https://novelwriter.io/

I'm not familiar with such softwares (I use pandoc for technical writing), but might help you..

Organic Maps honestly hasn't been that bad for me, but searching addresses is appalling and I do need to rely on Google Maps in many instances still. However, it has made it much easier for me to contribute to OSM and have a better user experience. A step in the right direction at least

OSM is not that user friendly as Google Maps for sure, but if you really want you really can replace GMaps. It probably heavily depends on your country and if the OSM community is active there, but for example here in Germany the mapping information is basically on par with GMaps

The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps. OSM is just a (gigantic) database and is in many cases way more complete than GoogleMaps. What people usually associate with OSM is a rendered version of the database focused on what ever the renderer decided: bike lanes, waterways, hiking trails, etc. Many other apps actually use their database: OrganicMaps, Komoot, etc. And even more their rendered tiles. Now there are so many functionalities that this database doesn't do like geocoding (searching for adresses), reverse geocoding (getting the adress of a point) or route planning, but there are tools for it build on OSM data. e.g. Nominatim does geocoding and graphhopper does routing.

And to be honest, if you're travelling by bike graphhopper does a way better job at routing than google. An other plus, you can download the complete data for offline usage. All of Europe is only around 60GB.