My list:
- A privacy respecting Dating platform.
- A good 2D CAD program capable of dealing with DWG files.
Please don’t post a huge list of games. That would belong in another post. since there are many good ones already.
A truly open source mobile OS. Fuck Google’s Android. /e/ foundation is quite good and postmarketOS seems promising but it needs proper development.
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Lineage OS works great!
One problem is that Google is still the upstream source provider, and they have a strict “we make all the decisions and won’t accept contributions” attitude.
ReplicantOS
I’m hopeful for GNU+Linux to start being a competitor to Android.
My understanding is true completely open mobile OS can’t happen, at least not with anything that has a cellular antenna. IIRC the F/OSS phones handle this by having anything related to cell access handled via a sandbox, but there’s still closed-source software and opaque hardware on the device.
Replicant?
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Agreed on the beautiful software. I often feel like in order to use FOSS, I just have to accept that some things are gonna look ugly. Ricing is sometimes a solution, but can often require an unbearable amount of time and effort.
I use KDE and it’s frustrating when I find a good Plasma theme with no equivalent GTK version. I tried to use a WM but it simply requires a lot of time to get a good result, and even then it doesn’t cover all my needs when it comes to using a PC.
“beautiful” software
I really hate this argument. Beautiful has become a synonym with simple and simple is an anti-pattern in software. These programs are great for house moms but they’re quite useless for advanced users. Why would you want a program that you use exact the same way after a year of daily usage?
“If ease of use was the only requirement, everybody would still be riding tricycles”
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Yes but the implication is that “complex” is ugly, especially when you mention elementaryOS. You could have probably said “good looking” instead which is really up personal preference, isn’t it?
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The default customisation for any software must never require any user to be advanced user in any sense of the word. Advanced users can find their preferred customisations themselves.
Customization is irrelevant. When you sit down to play a piano you don’t expect to compose songs immediately. With software users expectations should be the same - start with a tutorial and work your way up.
We ruined our user culture - now everyone expects a self driving tricycle and that’s why our software never performs like a bicycle.
Not necessarily “beautiful” software for me, but just visually consistent software. If I can make GTK and Qt GUIs look the same, I will be so happy.
LOL @ reddit thread
Firmwares! Firmwares evrywhere!
D: D: D:My dream is to see coreboot on all devices I own
- Photoshop is certainly one - as much as I like Gimp, it is simply not as good as Photoshop, and that’s a reality. My friend does Architecture and her work would be an absolute chore on Gimp.
- Maybe even Adobe InDesign, Scribus just is not as good
- An actual good open source alternative to Premiere (I believe DaVinci Resolve is proprietary but correct me if I am wrong, but there is a free version that’s great)
- More towards the low level/firmware side, there still aren’t enough bootloaders and wireless cards drivers However, this is growing really quickly and are free in terms of free but not in terms of freedom!
- Obviously, actual competitors to Android/iOS which aren’t simply forks - I have hope for Ubuntu Touch. Again Android is technically free as far as I can tell, but I am talking about free in terms of freedom.
- Email clients and Calendar apps for Linux - Mailspring does not work with Protonmail and everything else looks as if it’s from the 1990s or doesn’t work well. I’m sticking with Thunderbird for now
- A good front-end wrapper or Facebook Messenger or - for example, I don’t use the Twitter or Reddit app, I use Twidere and Infinity, respectively , so something along those lines which isn’t simply the web page version in a container
I’ll probably add more as I think of them. Maybe I a non-electron code editor that can compete with VSCode/VSCodium that doesn’t require 10 days to configure and a lifetime to get used to (…vim/nvim)
Also, have you tried Draftsight for a dwg CAD?
I’m so sick of electron based software. The thing is everywhere.
Isn’t Frost a good Facebook wrapper? It’s not exactly a Messenger-only wrapper, but it does cover the messaging functionality.
Seriously, fk Electron apps. They look out of place in every system because it’s basically impossible for it to look native, which is a small complaint compared to the sheer amount of resource usage. I don’t need Chromium running just to edit some text.
Also, pretty sure Chromium still phones home to Google. The de-googled Chromium browser project works hard AF to remove all the spyware and still are never completely sure they’ve removed everything.
It’s not even that easy to code in (I know because I do single page web app development) compared to a mid-level compiled language like Java/Kotlin while having the final app be more resource intensive. Node.js is one of my least favorite frameworks.
Also, pretty sure Chromium still phones home to Google. The de-googled Chromium browser project works hard AF to remove all the spyware and still are never completely sure they’ve removed everything.
I remind myself about this every single time I consider using an electron-based app, whether because the offer is actually attractive, or just because there’s nothing else out there.
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I find its interface really clunky and like a far cry from the Windows Vista era
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Email clients and Calendar apps for Linux
Your points apply to Windows as well.
Thunderbird?
I agree with the sentiment of the original comment:
everything else looks as if it’s from the 1990s or doesn’t work well
Thunderbird is certainly the best of the bunch, but I’d argue we need more/better FOSS email clients.
Yeah, I was gonna say. That seems like a software category that people will always complain about.
Maybe a non-electron code editor that can compete with VSCode/VSCodium that doesn’t require 10 days to configure and a lifetime to get used to (…vim/nvim)
I don’t know what you’re specifically looking for in VS Code, but Kate is a rather powerful editor.
In more recent versions (I think since 19.12), there’s the “LSP Client” plugin, which if you activate it and have the respective LSP server installed, will give you inline linter warnings, show documentation etc. That particular feature could definitely still need some polish, but quite powerful nonetheless.
Of course, this is the KDE editor, so if you’re not on KDE, this may potentially pull in more dependencies than you’d like.
Have you tried Photopea? Though I suppose that is more browser based than a dedicated Photoshop replacement app on Linux.
Unfortunately as far as I can tell it’s non-free, so off-topic for this thread (“What software is missing in the free software world?”)
VSCodium
Is there anything actively wrong with VSCodium aside from its Microsoft origins?
privacy respecting Dating platform
That’s difficult. You need to put information out there, in order for others to know if it could work out for them.
Obviously, things could be done a lot better than current dating platforms, but the concept will always require a compromise.
A good design would make impossible to relate that information to a real person, only require a Matrix handle and then take the whole communication into matrix (a federated service) so you can’t tell who is talking to whom and nor what they are saying, it would send likes and other stuff through matrix only.
I like the thinking, but I’ve got a big problem in that theory: Pictures.
Us pesky, superficial humans want to know what the other person looks like, pretty much as the first criteria. And it’s pretty much impossible to anonymize those. Reverse image search and facial recognition already make that hard, and they’re only going to become better at that.
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It’s just about control over your data and who sees it, transparency about “algorithms” etc. and getting rid of disgusting paid “features” which have no place in people’s personal lives.
I want a libre OneNote competitor. Yes, there are libre notes apps out there but none that beat OneNote in letting you put whatever you damn well please in your notebook – formatted text (on par with a word document, not just simple things like bold and italics), drawings, pictures, even files and web embeds. Especially when taking notes during lecture at university, flexibility is important because you have very little time to write everything down. I need to be able to switch from writing well-formatted text to drawing a diagram or hand writing a formula (I don’t have time to figure out how to type some obsecure math symbol). I need something that will just let me frantically throw the lecture material onto a single document.
OneNote is the only reason I still keep Windows on my laptop. I simply don’t have time to fight with my notes app during lecture.
I just realized over the past months how life-changing good note-taking apps could be. However, everybody has different needs there, meaning that people require note-taking apps to do everything: Store text, photos, documents, hand-writing, do search, OCR, use tags, hierarchy, backlinks, etc. OneNote really seems like one of the most powerful options.
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Keep an eye out for https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo - it is under development but looks really great
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Dating platform - look at https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
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An ultra-lightweight viewer for ods/xlsx and odt/docx? Maybe its there but couldn’t find one. Have used pandoc to pdf on docs and excel2table on spreadsheets.
Libre office is quite light-weight and I think it can be used as converted for anything as well. You can pipe docx > pdf > pdf viewer
It would be great if there was an equivalent to mupdf/zathura, netsurf that flashs open and disappears with control-q etc.
I think you could actually write an extension for zathura that would convert docx to pdf on launch or just display docx. See this great stackoverflow answer; I’m not a C dev but it seems like Zathura could totally support that :)
here is my quick and dirty working bash example. might try for a csv/ods solution which is a bigger need for me.
#!/bin/sh pandoc -i $1 -o $1.pdf --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf mupdf $1.pdf rm $1.pdfThanks for the link, actually come to think of it I could write a bash script with pandoc and pass the output to mu for the docx odt part.
Personally I dream of a distributed ecs library, in the vein of spatialos
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It almost seems easier to copyright some music, then make sure that music is playing in the background of your videos. Nothing seems to get taken down faster and more effectively than potential copyright strikes for unlicensed use of songs.
