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?
YouTube, and one technically exists in the form of PeerTube, with PlasmaTube being a good client for PeerTube.
YouTube really isn’t anything without the content and I’m not sure how open source will solve that.
In the case of PeerTube, not worrying about Google age-gating or straight-up yanking your content if you tick them off is a good start, basically, you’d actually own your content posting on PeerTube instead of YT.
That is a good thing but at the end of the day that makes someone money how? The platform has to work for everyone even the professional creators.
YT’s ad revenue only pays out fractions of a penny, if you want to make money on content creation, you’re better off doing that through crowdfunding eg. with BuyMeACoffee, and that revenue stream is platform-agnostic.
Also, PeerTube’s design basically allowing you to own your content can work out well for hobbyists which already have some other income source as well, better than being at the mercy of Google.
Tiktok
Let’s see if Loops can fill the gap. Not sure if an open source alternative could generate enough hype to be viable - maybe if TikTok is banned in the US or something.
Holy smokes! I was an avid TikTok person for music before they enshittified it with ads and the shop features. Can’t wait for Loops!
OSMAND, since they started tracking users a while ago on the f-droid version.
As far as I understand the app menue, tracking is an opt in.
they did? totally slipped past me…
Is OrganicMaps not a good alternative to OSMAND?
Just don’t check the box?
Not happy with OrganicMaps? It’s my personal favourite at least, and completely open source. Probably depends what your needs are. :)
Im late to the party I know but, google wallet/gpay
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.
Good news, Apple has the solution for you. You don’t need iTunes anymore.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k?hl=en-US&gl=US
Yeah but I’d still need an Apple program and a Windows VM, so it wouldn’t change a thing 😅
It’s a long shot, but a viable alternative to Google Maps or other proprietary mapping websites (and no, OpenStreetMap is not a viable Google Maps alternative).
EDIT: Not sure why downvotes, OpenStreetMap doesn’t even have directions as far as I can tell.
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
How do I get directions with OSM?
There are many APPs build on top of OSM that can do directions in a user friendly way. Personally I use MagicEarth, which uses OSM but isn’t itself open source. They include live traffic from some other nav provider.
My goal was to degoogle my phone and MagicEarth was the app which came closest, but I bet you can find all sorts of webapps or fully open source ways to get directions if you don’t care for live traffic.
Is there no browser version? Do I have to get the app?
MagicEarth is only an app.
If you want web based OSM routing you have to look at other services which there are many of. Here are some examples:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions
https://routing.openstreetmap.de/
https://maps.openrouteservice.org
On the wiki you can find a lot more:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routing_software
Gotta look at that. Live traffic info is one of those things, that OSM lacks…
You have to use an app for that. OSM is mostly a big database with an API access to it. There are a lot of them out there with a lot of different focusses. For navigating with a car OSMand is pretty good. They are on fdroid.
Visit openstreetmap.org or osm.org for short and where you can search for a place there’s an icon with arrows beside it. Hit that and then you can put in the From and To. You can pick car routing or bike routing or walking.
But no public transit?
AFAIK someone is working on it. But the problem is the high dynamics of public transport. Routes and schedules get changed quite often, schedules might be quite irregular (think only Sunday at 3:14). And all that data has to be stored offline. Stops might be changed do to construction work for a week. And that is in the optimal case: In some countries the bus comes when it comes, and stops if it wants to stop.
Currently you can see where the lines of a bus or the metro go, but that’s about it, I think.
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
Is Organic Maps only on the mobile apps? Is there no way to view it in a desktop browser? The website seems to just lead me to the apps.
It’s just an app, yeah.
OpenStreetMaps is amazing, but it is a map, not a whole ecosystem like Google Maps is. As a map I find it’s often better than Google Maps, but what is still lacking are good front-ends implementing a wide range of functionality in a user friendly way.
On desktop I often use GNOME Maps, but it leaves a lot to be desired still and is obviously intended for Linux users running GNOME.
I don’t know why it isn’t mentioned anywhere on their website. But Organic Maps does have a desktop app. At least on Linux there is the Flatpak. I don’t know about other platforms.
I use Organic Maps to find places by name and OSMand to find places by address. Both can only the do one of the two things good, but it is doable.
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.
The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps.
I mean… Yes that’s literally what I said. I don’t know if there is any of these apps that really provide all that Google Maps provides. But I’d be interested if they do.
They will never do, because they are not trying to. AFAIK no one is trying to build FOSS reviews of restaurants/stores, no one is building street view and no one is saving where you live to make the one click from work to home route planning. For me, those are not functions that I need (or want). I need a map that works offline, does route planning (offline) and allows me to display multiple GPX files at the same time.
Does OSMAnd have all that? It does, so for me it’s an alternative. What use case do you have?
Discord. It’s extremely popular and has no direct alternatives (Matrix spaces thing isn’t ready at all yet)
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
Yeah signal is amazing for one to one or small groups, but not for what discord servers are used for.
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.
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
Lol
Mumble needs a server, iirc
I let you in on a secret: Discord also needs a server 🙃
… Ok I’ll let you have that ‘technical correct’ smug satisfaction, you bastard.
But for real, if you can’t / don’t want to host your own server, just use any server from hundreds of available servers.
Oh I’s been a while. My clan hosted our own mumble server, back in the day. Didn’t know there was a lot of public ones nowadays…
https://zulip.com/ is likely your best alternative. It’s more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there
Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to Discord
The privacy policy of their app’s captcha solution is horrendous so no thank you
I recently ran into that very issue, leading to me downloading (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
Didn’t know those existed.
Aliucord looks like a modified client tho, so not really open source.
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).
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
Adoption is always the main issue, as we can see here on the Fediverse. It’s crazy how even technically-inclined people flock to discord. So many 3d printing communities are on there, people who install custom debian distros on raspberry pis, solder wires, crimp connectors and assemble open source machines, still fall into the trap.
I think what’s even worse than ads is many channels now require verification through a phone number if you want to write something. Not sure when that became a thing but I just recently ran into this roadblock and noped tf out.
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.
There are instances that are not very hard to sign up for. The main issue with Matrix is instability and performance, especially when communicating with users/groups on different instances. It’s really not a great experience. And the inability to properly delete messages can be a big deal too
@SorteKanin I’d like to see that. I have already onboarded about 35 students and my whole family to matrix, nobody had any problems with signup. Bigger problem is later if they get the infamous “Unable to decrypt message” error.
Can’t relate. It’s not harder to get your hands on a matrix account in comparison to a mail account. And for those that want it even easier, just download Element and you are guided through the default registration at matrix.org
Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but think of it as an assurance that you’re not locked in with one app.
That said, I completely agree that Matrix and Element need to work on UX, particularly making it easy for new users to adopt it as well as verification/device switching.
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.
I guess they take any criticism of open source as if you are against the whole movement. I don’t understand either.
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.
@ClearCutCoconut WhatsApp
:blobfoxsignyes:I Don’t have WhatsApp anymore. Though I just deleted my WhatsApp account and said that I am no longer reachable via that crap. If you want to contact me use Signal. Most of my friends just installed Signal (a few took some time), but if you don’t do it that way you will never get away from WhatsApp just because of the network effect… And yes, you will miss out on some groups
I appreciate this mindset. Sometimes you just have to go cold turkey
did the same but with Threema
The fragmentation is really shit. I wish more such APPs would be interoperable.
I’ve had Threema for a while even before that, because my family group migrated there. Though I do not have a lot of contacts on there :D
What about Signal?? I know it’s not perfect but it seems like more people are using it each year. Whatsapp really has the majority of the market though, and it is so difficult to get people to change messaging apps (in the US at least, where I swear 95% of people have an iPhone and a superiority complex)
@ClearCutCoconut Yes, exactly.
Signal is nice but there is a lot of communication in Whatsapp.It’s still relevant to this question, but I don’t think the problem is the app itself. A new app likely won’t help solve this problem
Cloud backups are on the way and I imagine that will help give Signal a boost
Completely agree. At this point it seems like it just needs time for the momentum to build (more and more users vouching for it). I didn’t know they were adding cloud backups, that’s great. Usernames have been helping too, I think!
s/one/thing/
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.
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.
You know why the person themselves is the important part of this equation?
Because they know what tools to use for which purpose.
For example, GIMP is only now getting non-destructive editing through adjustment layers, which is such an indispensable feature for important projects
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.
Based. Just curious, what do you use for vector editing software? (For Illustrator-type work)
Not much, honestly. Fortunately I was never very reliant on vector graphics.
Inkscape IMO never really matured to a working solution, certainly not comparable to Illustrator, but I know others have better experiences.
It’s a groupthink issue anyways. 3DSmax/Maya was the same for a long time, and “everyone” was saying Blender is not an alternative. And then some big companies switched to Blender and suddenly people stopped complaining about it. And while Blender did improve during that time, it did not improve so substantially that it really made all the difference.
It’s absolutely that, like the office admin workers who swear by Microsoft Office over open alternatives no matter how insidious Windows becomes. “I know this one tool and you will have to wring it from my cold dead hands”…
“I find your conditions… acceptable”
I agree that it depends on your use case. If you’re an artist or illustrator you can make do with a number of alternatives and just go elsewhere for photo editing, and if you’re just doing basic adjustments to photos rather than detailed edits you can figure it out as well.
Photohop is harder to bypass if you’re a jack-of-all-trades user mostly doing image editing but also dabbling in the other options from time to time. That’s not to say you can’t do it if you try, but it’s going to be less convenient and add friction to your workflow.
Yeah, Jack-of-all-trades here as well. For sure it’s less convenient to have to switch programs for different purposes but there is also the added convenience of not having to find pirated and cracked Adobe warez.
It does seem like a hopeless situation sometimes. I used to be a graphic designer and honestly it is very difficult to switch to any other program that is cohesive. Especially with the addition of AI features in Photoshop (keyword, I know, but generative fill can be extremely helpful in some cases). The Affinity suite is barely even able to keep up, and they have employees that are paid. Cross-compatibility and file type standards are a massive issue too, let alone the functionality itself
Photopea. Not foss, but a free clone of photoshop.
Also would be nice to have open source ecosystem with blender ,then open source pro level video editing like da vinci and open source photoshop.
I’m happy to give Black Magic Design my money.
I literally wouldn’t piss on Adobe if it was on fire.
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 :(
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.
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.
That’s my position as well. But there are certain features that I do require for work and other integrations with other MS products that you can’t get elsewhere.
As you said if one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows/Office licenses are “cheap” and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but for most people they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive FOSS-only experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things and dealing with small compatibility issues that simply work out of the box under MS for a minimal fee. For most people paying for MS and doing their job right away delivers a better ROI than going FOSS and then doing their job while dealing with the small details.
I object to that “work out of the box” comment. I have lost more work hours to OneDrive being terrible than to any single other technical reason. Office has at least as many quirks and inefficiencies as any of its alternatives.
It’s a bit of a standard and it doesn’t… not… work? So yeah, it’s the go-to you have to have as a fallback for things to not get annoying when you work with multiple other people outside your same organization on something. Alternatives are as good or better, though, especially if you consider commercial ones as well as FOSS ones.
But yeah, it’s priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Windows is a different story. Quirky and annoying yes, but not more so than the alternatives and definitely the standard for big chunks of things in ways that it’s not trivial to replace.
Teams is also the meeting system furthest from “just works” in my experience. Not sure where all the Microsoft apologists get those ideas that stuff made by Microsoft “just works”.
But yeah, it’s priced just so that it makes sense to pay for it and not use it over not having it ready to go when you need it. On purpose. Which sucks.
Yes, marketing. Microsoft is good at it.
I don’t even know if I give them that. I guess pricing things just at the edge of you begrudgingly buying them instead of going elsewhere is “marketing” if you squint. I mean, by all accounts they’re worse at branding than Apple and worse at PR than literally everybody else in their competing markets. After a certain critical mass it probably doesn’t matter much, I suppose. At least not short term.
MobaLiveCD its freeware but as far as I can tell it does not have a foss license.
YouTube
Odysee?
My biggest gripe with Odysee is the fact a lot of the people I like to watch aren’t on there. Otherwise, if they’d just set up an account and have it linked to their yt account, I’d be on there a lot more.
Anyone who is trying to make money from their videos isn’t likely to have any incentive to be on Odysee, unless thay start paying for views with something other than their useless in-house crypto.
Plus, the audience on Odysee is miniscule compared to pretty much any other video platform.
A service that provides sheet music. I am learning the piano and I find it difficult to find accurate and reasonable sheet music for much I want to play. Some of it is obscurity, but even when it’s findable, the service is monetized to make it unpleasant
The ultimate goal of the IMSLP is to gather all public domain music scores, in addition to the music scores of all contemporary composers (or their estates) who wish to release them to the public free of charge
IMSLP currently has 231,406 works, 755,950 scores, 83,070 recordings, 27,907 composers, and 2,027 performers.
Scrivener!
The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.
Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn’t have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.
Probably the best OSS novel writing software I’ve used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it’s based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it’s a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.
Check out https://novelwriter.io/
I’m not familiar with such softwares (I use pandoc for technical writing), but might help you…
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.
