F-droid. This is the thin line between FOSS Android apps and a Google-only world. As I recall, (one of?) the core maintainer(s) had to drop out a couple years back, and it was a bit of a scramble...
F-droid. This is the thin line between FOSS Android apps and a Google-only world. As I recall, (one of?) the core maintainer(s) had to drop out a couple years back, and it was a bit of a scramble whether it would survive. I think they're doing okay now, but it's always hard to tell until someone publishes one of those "we're about to shut down if we don't get some money" posts ...
ETA: I consider this to be one of the core, foundational projects of the FOSS world, right up there with Firefox, and only a notch or two below Ubuntu and LineageOS. Mobile FOSS would still exist w/o these guys, but it would be a dark and scary realm. They absolutely deserve a lot more attention than they get.
If I want an open-source app, it's the place I check because they also prevent anti-features from being built into the apps, or at least warn you about them.
If I want an open-source app, it's the place I check because they also prevent anti-features from being built into the apps, or at least warn you about them.
F-Droid only has app that does not depend on any google play services and which are open source! This is really useful when you have a device with only AOSP and without google services. This is...
F-Droid only has app that does not depend on any google play services and which are open source!
This is really useful when you have a device with only AOSP and without google services. This is the primary use-case for me!
(There are other options like playmaker, gplayweb, yalp store, etc as alternatives to the google store as well, but they all still depend on the F-Droid framework)
For example NewPipe is an awesome Youtube player, but it cannot be hosted on Play Store because it circumvents restrictions like background play. Some free software apps also host a paid version...
Can't people publish the same apps on Google Play too?
For example NewPipe is an awesome Youtube player, but it cannot be hosted on Play Store because it circumvents restrictions like background play. Some free software apps also host a paid version on Play, but you can get it for free on F-Droid.
Indeed, it's not youtube-dl since that's coded in Python. You can read more about NewPipe though: https://teamnewpipe.github.io/documentation/, https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor.
To add to @pvik, F-droid not only provides a FOSS-only mobile app "store", they proactively audit every app to ensure each one is Google-, malware- and spyware-free, and give detailed analyses and...
To add to @pvik, F-droid not only provides a FOSS-only mobile app "store", they proactively audit every app to ensure each one is Google-, malware- and spyware-free, and give detailed analyses and warnings of lesser offenses (like "promotes paid services"). Almost every app in F-droid is built/compiled by F-droid, directly from the open-source source code ...
Above and beyond the app store, the F-droid software used to make the app store is itself a FOSS project which provides a readily-copyable/extensible framework for others to set up their own FOSS app stores, which F-droid also catalogues and shares (alternative/additional repos).
One of the reasons I almost always use F-Droid instead of Play Store: I trust the F-Droid people a lot more than Google not to inject anything extra into the code that gets onto my devices.
One of the reasons I almost always use F-Droid instead of Play Store: I trust the F-Droid people a lot more than Google not to inject anything extra into the code that gets onto my devices.
Serenity OS ( BSD-2-Clause License ) The primary dev (Andreas Kling) on this project also posts youtube videos of his coding sessions which are pretty fun! (His channel here) Also a shout out to...
SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.
Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.
The primary dev (Andreas Kling) on this project also posts youtube videos of his coding sessions which are pretty fun! (His channel here)
Nyxt is a keyboard-oriented, extensible web-browser designed for power users. It has familiar key-bindings (Emacs, VI, CUA), is fully configurable and extensible in Lisp, and has powerful features for productive professionals.
I have been using it for several months now, and I really love it! The extensibility and control I get (as an emacs user and a Lisp developer) is just great!
This may not be browser for all, but I think it has a lot of potential still!
SerenityOS is great, the code is structured really nicely and it’s very well put together. It’s been a great source of inspiration while building my own hobby OS!
SerenityOS is great, the code is structured really nicely and it’s very well put together. It’s been a great source of inspiration while building my own hobby OS!
I'd say Minetest. It's been at the stage of "almost complete, just needs more polish" for years now. If you download a somewhat polished game[1], like MineClone, it can be really enjoyable, but...
It's been at the stage of "almost complete, just needs more polish" for years now. If you download a somewhat polished game[1], like MineClone, it can be really enjoyable, but still not at the level of something like Minecraft.
The graphics (more than just the textures) are lacking as the game's built on very old technology, the movement feels "stiff" (just my opinion), the core devs don't have enough manpower to keep up with issues and PRs, causing some good changes to rot in "rebase needed" hell, and most importantly, not enough people are playing it!
The upsides are that it's free (duh), has very good "modding" support (see [1]), will run on any potato you come across because of the outdated tech, and you can connect to modded servers without having to mess with your client at all, it just werks.
So, why not try it out? Even if not as a game, as a 3d voxel engine to make your own mods and games on top of.
[1]: (technically, Minetest is only an engine, it just comes with a game called "Minetest Game" by default, there is an in-game browser for new content)
Milton would be my pick. I wrote an article about it (from the point of view of a programmer): Using a graphics tablet as a programming tool. But it's great for artists too.
Tauon Music Box - GPL v3+ For this the attention should be more from users than contributors. The main dev is extremely active and responsive, and the project moves fast. I'm not sure how...
For this the attention should be more from users than contributors. The main dev is extremely active and responsive, and the project moves fast. I'm not sure how approachable it would be for other contributors, but that doesn't seem to be a priority atm.
The coolest recent features for me are the ability to play from Airsonic servers and Spotify, along with your local library, like Clementine used to. For big album art lovers and music nerd-tailored features and integrations (Genius search! Open in Musicbrainz Picard! Bandcamp search! RYM search! Wikipedia search! Subsonic! PLEX! Spotify! Internet radio! Folder-structure sorts instead of metadata ones!)
Anyone who works on these alternate Discord clients which ease the hell of being stuck on that platform is a hero:
https://kdenlive.org/ In my opinion, kdenlive is the best, most feature-rich FLOSS video editor available [on Linux]. (If anyone thinks otherwise, I'm interested to know any contenders; please...
In my opinion, kdenlive is the best, most feature-rich FLOSS video editor available [on Linux]. (If anyone thinks otherwise, I'm interested to know any contenders; please reply and share URLs.)
It provides all the basics that you would expect, and has an intuitive UI and UX. It can leverage many video and audio effects and transitions, some third-party some built-in.
I forgot about that. Of course, Blender is an incredibly mature application. I haven't really used Blender's video features in depth. The full breadth of Blender's feature set is quite wide, though.
I forgot about that. Of course, Blender is an incredibly mature application. I haven't really used Blender's video features in depth. The full breadth of Blender's feature set is quite wide, though.
I can concur that there are probably superior non-FLOSS offerings out there. But I'm content with kdenlive as the best we've got, as far as FLOSS goes. On the bright side, development has been...
I can concur that there are probably superior non-FLOSS offerings out there. But I'm content with kdenlive as the best we've got, as far as FLOSS goes. On the bright side, development has been ongoing and steady for several years in a row now, as far as I can tell. The devs have been responsive on Issues that I've submitted.
I agree that it's had its problems (in fact, downright bugs and crashes), but things have steadily improved. What was the last version number that you've tried? It was bad in version 17.x, improved in 18.x, got bad in the early 19.x versions, but have stabilized again in the later 19.x and earlier 20.x versions.
Re: long render times: that is definitely true, but things have gotten better for me after I threw hardware at the problem. You can also impact render times by changing things like output resolution, frame rate, input resolution and video quality, and, I think, parallel jobs/threads.
Yabai is an excellent tiling window manager for MacOS. Despite needing all of the Adobe stuff, I've been in love with Linux for as long as I can remember because of i3. Between brew and this,...
Yabai is an excellent tiling window manager for MacOS. Despite needing all of the Adobe stuff, I've been in love with Linux for as long as I can remember because of i3.
Between brew and this, pretty much everything I want to do is covered.
The setup is fairly easy and the default configs are pretty close to what most people would use. I do wish MacOS had a dedicated SUPER that wasn't used for everything else -- but instead, I use combinations of ctrl+shift+alt to cover the bases.
Box86 is an interpretation level that runs x86 code on an ARM chip, and if ARM continues to evolve, and one day overtake x86 as the chip things are built upon, this project is likely going to be...
Box86 is an interpretation level that runs x86 code on an ARM chip, and if ARM continues to evolve, and one day overtake x86 as the chip things are built upon, this project is likely going to be the reason why.
Marble marcher community edition. Not nearly as relevant as most of the stuff being posted here, but it's a good game and it looks pretty good if your pc can handle it. Tldr: you're a ball who...
Not nearly as relevant as most of the stuff being posted here, but it's a good game and it looks pretty good if your pc can handle it.
Tldr: you're a ball who needs to get to the goal, as if it was a simplistic flash game, but you are in a fractal with detailed rendering. You can also take screenshots and submit your own levels, which is always amazing.
F-droid. This is the thin line between FOSS Android apps and a Google-only world. As I recall, (one of?) the core maintainer(s) had to drop out a couple years back, and it was a bit of a scramble whether it would survive. I think they're doing okay now, but it's always hard to tell until someone publishes one of those "we're about to shut down if we don't get some money" posts ...
ETA: I consider this to be one of the core, foundational projects of the FOSS world, right up there with Firefox, and only a notch or two below Ubuntu and LineageOS. Mobile FOSS would still exist w/o these guys, but it would be a dark and scary realm. They absolutely deserve a lot more attention than they get.
If I want an open-source app, it's the place I check because they also prevent anti-features from being built into the apps, or at least warn you about them.
F-Droid only has app that does not depend on any google play services and which are open source!
This is really useful when you have a device with only AOSP and without google services. This is the primary use-case for me!
(There are other options like playmaker, gplayweb, yalp store, etc as alternatives to the google store as well, but they all still depend on the F-Droid framework)
(I'll also add AuroraDroid and AuroraStore as alternate F-Droid and Google Play clients, respectively)
For example NewPipe is an awesome Youtube player, but it cannot be hosted on Play Store because it circumvents restrictions like background play. Some free software apps also host a paid version on Play, but you can get it for free on F-Droid.
Doesn't NewPipe use its own NewPipeExtractor and not youtube-dl?
Indeed, it's not youtube-dl since that's coded in Python. You can read more about NewPipe though: https://teamnewpipe.github.io/documentation/, https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor.
To add to @pvik, F-droid not only provides a FOSS-only mobile app "store", they proactively audit every app to ensure each one is Google-, malware- and spyware-free, and give detailed analyses and warnings of lesser offenses (like "promotes paid services"). Almost every app in F-droid is built/compiled by F-droid, directly from the open-source source code ...
Above and beyond the app store, the F-droid software used to make the app store is itself a FOSS project which provides a readily-copyable/extensible framework for others to set up their own FOSS app stores, which F-droid also catalogues and shares (alternative/additional repos).
One of the reasons I almost always use F-Droid instead of Play Store: I trust the F-Droid people a lot more than Google not to inject anything extra into the code that gets onto my devices.
They do, and have. I've also seen people publish an ad-based version on Google Play, and an ad-free version on F-Droid.
Serenity OS
( BSD-2-Clause License )
The primary dev (Andreas Kling) on this project also posts youtube videos of his coding sessions which are pretty fun! (His channel here)
Also a shout out to HaikuOS
Nyxt Web Browser
( BSD-3-Clause License )
I have been using it for several months now, and I really love it! The extensibility and control I get (as an emacs user and a Lisp developer) is just great!
This may not be browser for all, but I think it has a lot of potential still!
SerenityOS is great, the code is structured really nicely and it’s very well put together. It’s been a great source of inspiration while building my own hobby OS!
I'd say Minetest.
It's been at the stage of "almost complete, just needs more polish" for years now. If you download a somewhat polished game[1], like MineClone, it can be really enjoyable, but still not at the level of something like Minecraft.
The graphics (more than just the textures) are lacking as the game's built on very old technology, the movement feels "stiff" (just my opinion), the core devs don't have enough manpower to keep up with issues and PRs, causing some good changes to rot in "rebase needed" hell, and most importantly, not enough people are playing it!
The upsides are that it's free (duh), has very good "modding" support (see [1]), will run on any potato you come across because of the outdated tech, and you can connect to modded servers without having to mess with your client at all, it just werks.
So, why not try it out? Even if not as a game, as a 3d voxel engine to make your own mods and games on top of.
[1]: (technically, Minetest is only an engine, it just comes with a game called "Minetest Game" by default, there is an in-game browser for new content)
Milton would be my pick. I wrote an article about it (from the point of view of a programmer): Using a graphics tablet as a programming tool. But it's great for artists too.
Tauon Music Box - GPL v3+
For this the attention should be more from users than contributors. The main dev is extremely active and responsive, and the project moves fast. I'm not sure how approachable it would be for other contributors, but that doesn't seem to be a priority atm.
The coolest recent features for me are the ability to play from Airsonic servers and Spotify, along with your local library, like Clementine used to. For big album art lovers and music nerd-tailored features and integrations (Genius search! Open in Musicbrainz Picard! Bandcamp search! RYM search! Wikipedia search! Subsonic! PLEX! Spotify! Internet radio! Folder-structure sorts instead of metadata ones!)
Anyone who works on these alternate Discord clients which ease the hell of being stuck on that platform is a hero:
discordIRCd - Apache 2.0
gtkcord - GPL v3
cordless - BSD 3-Clause
It's not officially supported, but some people are doing it with mixed results.
https://kdenlive.org/
In my opinion, kdenlive is the best, most feature-rich FLOSS video editor available [on Linux]. (If anyone thinks otherwise, I'm interested to know any contenders; please reply and share URLs.)
It provides all the basics that you would expect, and has an intuitive UI and UX. It can leverage many video and audio effects and transitions, some third-party some built-in.
I forgot about that. Of course, Blender is an incredibly mature application. I haven't really used Blender's video features in depth. The full breadth of Blender's feature set is quite wide, though.
I've never used either, but heard good things about Olive.
Looks promising, but it seems like a young project.
One video editor that I like is Shotcut.
I tried that, but it seemed unsatisfactory. I forget why. Perhaps I found it underpowered compared to kdenlive.
I can concur that there are probably superior non-FLOSS offerings out there. But I'm content with kdenlive as the best we've got, as far as FLOSS goes. On the bright side, development has been ongoing and steady for several years in a row now, as far as I can tell. The devs have been responsive on Issues that I've submitted.
I agree that it's had its problems (in fact, downright bugs and crashes), but things have steadily improved. What was the last version number that you've tried? It was bad in version 17.x, improved in 18.x, got bad in the early 19.x versions, but have stabilized again in the later 19.x and earlier 20.x versions.
Re: long render times: that is definitely true, but things have gotten better for me after I threw hardware at the problem. You can also impact render times by changing things like output resolution, frame rate, input resolution and video quality, and, I think, parallel jobs/threads.
Yabai is an excellent tiling window manager for MacOS. Despite needing all of the Adobe stuff, I've been in love with Linux for as long as I can remember because of i3.
Between brew and this, pretty much everything I want to do is covered.
The setup is fairly easy and the default configs are pretty close to what most people would use. I do wish MacOS had a dedicated SUPER that wasn't used for everything else -- but instead, I use combinations of ctrl+shift+alt to cover the bases.
quick add -- Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection is a killer puzzle collection that is available for every OS. Between this and Ordinary Puzzles, this sums up my mobile gaming experience.
Box86 is an interpretation level that runs x86 code on an ARM chip, and if ARM continues to evolve, and one day overtake x86 as the chip things are built upon, this project is likely going to be the reason why.
Marble marcher community edition.
Not nearly as relevant as most of the stuff being posted here, but it's a good game and it looks pretty good if your pc can handle it.
Tldr: you're a ball who needs to get to the goal, as if it was a simplistic flash game, but you are in a fractal with detailed rendering. You can also take screenshots and submit your own levels, which is always amazing.