At the very least most of the recommendations are not run my multi billion/million companies like Google keep, notion, and evernote who are always suspicious in what they do on the side.
Looking at that list, no option seems particularly good at the moment.
opensource.builders looks nice, but has the code on github and the DB is a single JSON file. Editing requires running the thing locally and then creating a PR.
switching.software is a single page that lists all the software. Upside is that the code is codeberg, not github.
prism-break.org/en/ is focused on privacy, very out of date and code is on github.
Privacy Guides is also all about privacy, so it won’t be a generic alternative finder.
I stopped looking after that.
Up to the mods which one they want to pick, but honestly, a link to alternatives might cut down on the “I’m looking for a recommendation for an alternative” posts.
directory.fsf.org seems pretty good, actually. I’ve been lurking at electronics modeling software for a few years now and just found ones I’ve never heard of there but also the usual suspects. Maybe a better FOSS browsing tool, but still pretty cool.
Of course it matters.We dont want to support or contribute content to a service that could go down one day and all the data is lost because we can’t fork it.
Very good suggestion. Alternativeto.net is a great resource that I return to often. Eased the transition greatly when I originally left the “mainstream apps”.
Came here to say exactly this. I might move to EMacs org mode, but I’m still reliant on devices that offer better gui experiences with Obsidian than a command line based solution using EMacs
These are my thoughts regarding FOSS for a long time. The sense of facilitating the development and freedom of the project has been distorted years ago, when large corporations put their hands on this project, controlling it. Just look at the amount of “OpenSource” soft and services controlled by Google, M$, Amazon, FB … Yes, they are free to distribute and modifiable by devs, but mostly full of APIs from these corporations, not controllable by the user, subtracting their sovereignty and only modifiable with effort by people capable of understanding the scripts and redirects they contain. For a normal user it is increasingly irrelevant whether the project is FOSS or proprietary, while these products and the internet in general are in the hands of these companies.
A simple question is enough, which one do you prefer to use? FOSS projects from large corporations, or Freeware from small independent startups, if you don’t have the knowledge to review the script anyway, almost impossible in millions of lines, with external references from large apps and services? It becomes decisions of mere trust, perhaps with the help of external services, such as WebKoll, Blacklight, Unfurl and similar, where in the end the license that the product has is irrelevant, with respect to security and privacy, often in question or not, in some like others. In the end only the intentions and ethics of the developer matter.
Yes, of course, the concept of OSS, FOSS and FLOSS requires a profound review and update, so that it does not become a destroyer of what it aims to protect and promote, a free internet.
what an idiot. the eval process is funny stupid and costly. the consequences will be companies both avoiding to use foss and also be less secure for using closed source. and then there is ai. code written with ai is not copyright-able and i bet anyone will prefer ai dumb code over costly foss code. may that dev rott in hell for this egomaniac idea of a free world.
IMO, FOSS doesn’t do well with cross platform note taking and task tracking. I find it best to have two separate, but complimentary, workflows for mobile and desktop note taking.
My mobile notes are things like door combinations or pill counts/dosages/spellings, or travel info for longer/complex trips. Things I need at hand and that I can check quickly. I just use the default android app. Or very often just a piece of paper.
I use org roam with git for my computers. These are mostly code snippets, articles, journaling, etc. Things that are involved to the point I would rather wait for a keyboard than work on them with a phone. Same is true for writing on a desk rather than a pad.
I do have a few ways to go between devices:
I can read my computer notes on gitlab if needed
I use Signal Note to Self to keep or send one offs and images. (SUPER handy!)
Firefox syncs tabs
Probably a few others, but I don’t take pictures of my computer screen because I’m not an animal.
My workflows are pretty orthogonal, so this works well for me. Your mileage may vary.
Desktop: Qownnotes and/or vim (or any texteditor of choice)
Mobile: Nextcloud Notes
Main advantage of this software stack over other solutions like joplin is the handling of the notes. Everthing is stored in a simple folder structure in plain markdown text files (*.md). This means if anything breaks, you are always able to read and edit with any text editor on any system! I switched away from joplin because it stores the notes in a database and notes file names are a cryptic string, so if you are not able to load joplin it’s very hard to find anything.
Overly-teleological modernist framing has hopelessly fucked up tech discourse. Too much declaring things the future and hoping people will just believe you.
Most of these problems are literally just capitalism. This solution is just a band aid, and even then is unlikely to be implemented in a way that will help the problem.
people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.
this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the “common person” (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves… only devs.
Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary… Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.
All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of “open source” was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn’t to reinvent the wheel, it’s to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they’ll only use it if it’s square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it’s defanged cousin.
The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest
That’s a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn’t be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don’t want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn’t have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.
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