uBlock Origin, it’s not even close!
the web would be miserable without it.
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My vote was for Godot but this one is a very close second. I even have it installed on my mobile Firefox instance.
Firefox. It is the only thing keeping Google from total internet domination
im worried about Mozillas ability to keep growing Firefox. They laid off a lot of their firefox team a few years ago and have been dipping into more commercial interests… we really need Mozilla to be the FOSS counter to big tech.
Isn’t most of the Firefox revenue coming from Google ?
Yes, they need Firefox to avoid monopoly.
Gonna go with Firefox as both my most-used piece of open-source software, and the software I see as most important to its ecosystem. If Firefox fails then we’ve just got Chromium-based browsers and, I guess, Safari.
Signal, Thunderbird and Bitwarden
Signal, Firefox and Eclipse.
Too bad Signal are dropping support for Windows 7 ;(
Kind of odd to use Signal (a privacy and security focused messenger) on Windows 7 (an EOL and thus highly unsecure operating system).
it is a development machine with highly specialised tools - Altium Designer, SolidWorks, IDA Pro, Altera Quartus, etc.
Upgrading the OS is not a trivial thing as would be on a phone or tablet. Also when upgrading the OS it would make sense to upgrade the HW as well, and that is a major investment. And Signal is just not important really to warrant that.
I would still use it on my phone though, but on the PC is just Viber unfortunately (whatsapp dropped as well).
I wouldn’t say upgrading the OS on a phone or tablet is trivial… Especially when compared to a PC. Upgrading the OS on a PC is much easier.
Both is trivial in my opinion. The problem is OP using ancient software that only runs on an ancient OS. In this case upgrading is not trivial. Even though upgrading is a major investment in this case, it only gets worse the later its done. Typical case of technical debt
I didn’t know thunderbird was open source!
Yup, it’s the nephew, so to speak, of Firefox!
I love and use Bitwarden daily.
There something I don’t understand. How does one use Bitwarden daily? It generates, remembers and autofill passwords, right? I rarely enter a password anywhere. What am I missing? Please educate me.
There are certain sites which terminate your sessions after a while. For example, banking sites or most government portals. In such situations, the auto fill function is very handy.
Also the fact that if you use a shared machine at all to login, it’s best practice to intentionally log out of everything, and clear cookies/cache when you’re done.
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I knew about Bitwarden, but I thought how could a cloud based thing be truly open source, but they actually do have their backend on GitHub 🤯
Firefox and its derivatives. They’re the last free bastion preventing a Chromium monopoly on the browser market, which is hugely important - especially these days with Google’s push for Mv3.
Shout out to Firefox and Librewolf
Shout-out to Vivaldi for forking before mv3 happens. It is chromium based but they are very openly anti-google. It’s the OG Chrome devs as far as I understand.
OG Opera devs.
Unfortunately vivaldi is proprietary and actively hostile to the software freedom movement, but if it weren’t I’d consider it as a daily driver.
Vivaldi is 95% open source, and I understand that may not be enough for some but I think that’s a lot better than most alternatives. It also works great.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
The “only 5%” is what distinguishes it from Chromium, so it very much matters. And, that blog post is what I meant when I said they are actively hostile to the FS movement. Basically, they say users do not deserve the freedom to fork because competitors and Bad Guys can use it - very ironic for a product that is itself supposedly “95% based” on a competitor!
The argument that users should not have the freedom to fork because bad guys can use it is very similar to the idea that users should not have privacy or anonymity on the internet because it will be abused by bad guys (the so-called four horsemen of the infopocalypse).
That’s definitely not what the article said about the bad guys. They said they’re trying to protect the look and feel because their business model relies on their brand staying consistent so they can keep business partnerships in place to pay the bills.
They also provide nearly as much code back to the community open-source as they do closed.
If 95% isn’t better than Chrome (which I switched from) idk what to tell ya. And Vivaldi is also the reason I know about the fediverse – they openly advertise it. So it got me off reddit too. I call that by FAR a net win.
If i had to go with just one the linux
uBlock Origin - the chaddest AdBlock of them all!
Blender by a huge mile. Yes, there’s tons of other software like Linux, of course, but Blender is such a powerful, well managed, economically viable and healthy (community) project that it should be shown as an example of how Open Source should be.
My biggest hurdle with other projects is the fanboys, because many times they’re quite toxic, insulting everybody who doesn’t adore the project and don’t accept constructive criticism.
Blender is the model open source project :P
GNU+Linux
I’d go with either Firefox or Thunderbird. Both are immensely useful pieces of software that I use on a daily basis, and have evolved (mostly) nicely over time.
Not to give Mozilla too much credit, Nextcloud is also pretty slick!
I forgot Firefox was even open source
Wait for real? I feel like that’s their only marketing point sometimes 😂
These days, being an open-source browser that isn’t part of the Chromium monopoly is pretty much the only good thing they have left…
That is a good point, and in my experience Firefox has just kinda sucked less in the last couple of years. But of course that’s anecdotal so doesn’t really mean much lol
Ill throw in some obscure ones I use daily.
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StemRoller. It’s an AI-powered toolthat takes an mp3 and separates each instrument into its own file. Im a musician, and having access to stems like this is a game changer.
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Carla is a tool for hosting VST plugins without the need for a full DAW. I primarily use Amp Simulators, and this has become a mandatory tool on any computer I use. It’s also maintained by the creator of KXStudio.
omg, stemroller sounds amazing!
Just downloaded and tried StemRoller. Definitely impressed, I’d say it works marginally better than any of the “free” (aka trial version, need to pay for full features) stem separators I’ve tried online, so very happy to find this!
These two links might single handedly change my life. Many thanks!!
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LibreOffice is equal to any office software out there, and has been much more stable than OpenOffice, and works without an internet connection unlike Google Docs.
Everyone should use LibreOffice … unless you work in a very specific office or school environment that specifically requires it, go install Microsoft Office, and even then, get your school or business to pay for it
Otherwise, for day to day document writing, letter writing or anything you have to do for yourself at home … LibreOffice is more than enough.
About five or six years ago, I was buying a new laptop at Bestbuy and I found myself a great deal and specifically asked for a system that didn’t have an OS with it or any software … they got an old returned unit, wiped the drive and sold it to me for about $200 at the time. While I waited, I listened as a salesman sold a new laptop to a clueless mother buying a unit for her son in high school … they got her to buy a $600 laptop, all sots of extras and MS Office and topped her off at about $1000 for a shitty laptop that was no more powerful than what I was getting
I recently read an article about how the “Open XML” M$ format was artificially made super cumbersome and complex so that it makes open source software support it almost impossible.
The article was written by one of the Libre office collaborator who was saying that they are intentionally introduced bugs so that we never see a better adoption of it in open source tools.
The whole standardisation process was a sham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
Linux, Firefox based browsers, vs code, KDE, and the fediverse.
I didn’t realize vscode is open source. Good to know!
Wait are you joking or serious, sarcasm doesn’t carry over too well over text. There are proprietary add ons from ms that aren’t open source, but vscode itself is oss.
Serious. I installed VSCodium today.
So many to choose from…Linux, Syncthing, Vim, Firefox and Thunderbird/K-9 Mail, Keepass and derivatives, GrapheneOS, Inkscape, VLC/mpv, yt-dlp…there are just too many daily drivers to name them all.
Vim wouldn’t even have occurred to me if you hadn’t said it. I use Vim more than I talk to my family.
Exactly, text editors are such everyday staples and yet it’s easy to take for granted that they are open source. Vim is often the first package I install on new systems when not already present and, outside of my web browser, is certainly the program I use most.
On that note, I’ll add Markor to my favourites list. It’s absolutely the best Android markdown editor/viewer I’ve found to date, and it works beautifully with Syncthing folders.
