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

[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 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.

OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

[–] weirdwriter@tweesecake.social 17 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] hunte@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (6 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.

[–] Skooshjones@vlemmy.net 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it's pretty great.

But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.

I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Isn't that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.

We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (5 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

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (8 replies)

[–] Black616Angel@feddit.de 37 points 1 year 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.

[–] crius@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] Nyoelle@beehaw.org 34 points 1 year ago (7 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.

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] JTR@lemmings.basic-domain.com 9 points 1 year 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)

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] Hexorg@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You forgot the biggest most originalist one of all. Email.

[–] privsecfoss@feddit.dk 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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".

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 year 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.

[–] mjgood91@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have a degree in CS... actually spent some time implementing email protocol as part of a class to send test messages through I think websockets in Java or something. It was really interesting and kind of a cool project.

Yeah, I ain't touching that shit. I'll more than happily let my domain name provider manage that for me so I can focus on ~~bigger and better things~~ going through yet another Civilization 5 Vox Populi campaign.

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] patchymoose@rammy.site 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's hard to beat GIMP.

[–] Lost_Wanderer@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Hard to do anything with GIMP.

Jk

Kinda.

[–] DrWeevilJammer@lm.rdbt.no 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've found that Krita is pretty easy to use and does most of the things I would otherwise have to use Photoshop for.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 since its initial 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 it launched. I don't need "new" features because the existing features are more than enough.

[–] Panamanap@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago

This. After the initial learning for i3wm I never looked back.

And I dread the times where I have to use something else (work environment...)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] Pilirin@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] totallynotsocsa@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

XMPP is very underappreciated.

load more comments (8 replies)

[–] king_dead@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

RSS was absolutely the shit

[–] Sordid@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (9 replies)

[–] BrikoX@vlemmy.net 8 points 1 year ago

Still is.

[–] cybersandwich@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (3 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).

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] Kodachrome@kbin.social 13 points 1 year 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.

[–] slartibartfast42@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

It's also a great feed reader.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] ScrumblesPAbernathy@readit.buzz 12 points 1 year 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.

[–] gabereal451@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year 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?

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 10 points 1 year ago (1 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.

[–] EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because clients can present very different interfaces, it's difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn't carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.

As for which client, I use Pan, but that's Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven't a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.

Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.

90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.

If you're interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I'm not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] l3mming@lemmy.fmhy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Emacs vs. VS Code

load more comments (4 replies)

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] tvblb@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] cyd@vlemmy.net 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

[–] freeman@lemmy.pub 18 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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

[–] laird_dave@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No.

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

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (7 replies)

[–] navDend0@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

though also controversially, I'll take systemD over sysVinit

load more comments (9 replies)

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

Free and Open Source Software