Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I’m not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don’t know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.
Projects that do not exist:
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there’s something as good as it.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It’s a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books.Here is an alternative. -
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It’s a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It’s a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications.Here is an alternative. -
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It’s an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it
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Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It’s a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.
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Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and
radial menuto an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy andCompassMenubut in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu. -
Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.
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Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.
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Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It’s an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it’s liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.
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Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.
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Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don’t know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone’s alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I’m looking for, but they haven’t launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.
Projects that exist but have some issues:
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A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.
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Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven’t been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG’s in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn’t use it otherwise if it looks like something really “primitive”.
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Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.
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Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don’t want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it’ll be able to achieve this, but it’s not there yet.
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Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.
Wow, so after all is said, the list is really long for me. I’ll also try to take from other posts other ideas that interest me and put them here. Turns out it’s too long for Lemmy (lol) so i’ll post as subcomments of this one.
Education
Hardware
There’s also a lot of stuff that needs reverse-engineering/hacking:
Other cool stuff
If you’re not confined to Scratch, there are other block-based coding platforms such as Edublocks.
That looks great thanks for the link :)
Isn’t Scratch already open source? I know before 2.0 it was made in Java and so there were cool forks of it like BYOB and Panther. A nice feature of online scratch, however, is the ability to “remix” (fork) projects, which teaches kids the benefits of open source.
It’s a bloated JavaScript app. The version 2 even required Adobe AIR. Also it’s not packaged for GNU/Linux.
Yes the old desktop version was portable, but that’s no longer the case with newer releases. scratch packaged in debian is v1.4 :)
Games
I really appreciate emulators, but what i would really like to see is free-software, hackable reimplementations for really cool old-school multiplayer games:
Why reimplementations not emulators? Because then you can extend the game and make new games from it! You’re not stuck with a binary ROM dictating all the fun you should have.
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Thanks i just added FreeCS to the original post. The others appear to be just clones not reimplementations, and SuperTuxParty would be a clone of Mario Party, not Super Smash Bros.
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It’s different. Many people are familiar with historic games and like the quirks of them. But yes i appreciate original free-software games as well :)
Rust
I really love the Rust programming language. It’s at the same time very approachable (unlike Haskell), very strict in the no-footgun policy (unlike C) and very performant (unlike Python). However, in the little time i’ve been doing Rusty things, i’ve longed for some libraries:
---for YAML)Rust is a language with interesting properties. Here’s a few ideas for actual programs i’d like to see in Rust:
Decentralized/Federated networks
We may use all the free-software we like, as long as we’re stuck on centralized servers we’re never gonna win the battle against Silicon Valley startups.
Web
OS / Desktop
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Sysadmin