In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives? : foss

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

@Skooshjones @privsecfoss @foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn't get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren't installing their OS' in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (6 children)

You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.

That rarely happens

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don't extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can't get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think another problem is that since FOSS is not profitable, it mostly attracts people who want to make software “for themselves” - hey I need a tool that can do X and if I make it public maybe the other people will like it”. And that’s good but that means the software isn’t “for people”. And the authors already know programming so they make UI that programmers like but not an average Joe. I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite... how different those are.

And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can't easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those "thirdparty" clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

It's also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they're mostly preserved for eternity.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Forums and Wikis vs. Discord

Yes I know, they shouldn't serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays ~~people~~ communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don't understand the basics on how internet works.

To put it simply:

You can't search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a "chat" search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.

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[+] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because "we block all non big tech e-mail providers".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Probably even with a CS degree.

It's just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.

I wonder if the same won't happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (4 children)

RSS was absolutely the shit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there's some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don't know it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.

Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.

Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It's just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Still is.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS' map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.

Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It's hard to beat GIMP.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Hard to do anything with GIMP.

Jk

Kinda.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

i3wm

It's now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same during launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when I it launched. I don't need "new" features because the existing features are more than enough.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Agree on RSS.

Don't have enough experience with XMPP.

IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)

Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it's what old school forums lacked.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (5 children)

USENET. Replacements aren't distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don't have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (8 children)

XMPP is very underappreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (5 children)

audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (6 children)

The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I've ever seen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

It's also a great feed reader.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

If I learned nothing from the movie 'Hackers', it's that all hackers need to know how to rollerblade. It's like, if you don't know how to rollerblade, are you really a hacker?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Usenet use to be great. Predated forums and Reddit. Frankly the threadiverse is just now going a bit back to that concept.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I came to say vim...Is the debate still a thing?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No.

There is no debate because vim is the superior editor, period.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Not much. That's the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Apache. I get why nginx is the new hotness, but apache/mod_event still slaps.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Emacs vs. VS Code

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (8 children)

vi, lynx, mutt, and of course X11 > wayland

though also controversially, I'll take systemD over sysVinit

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.

Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.

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