cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/47032660
Discover Hidden Gems: Open-Source Software You Should Know About
We all love open-source software, but there are so many amazing projects out there that often go unnoticed. Let’s change that! Share your favorite open-source software that you think more people should know about. Here’s how you can contribute:
- Single Option Per Comment: Mention one open-source software per comment to be able to easily find the most popular software.
- No Duplicates: Avoid duplicating software that has already been mentioned to ensure a wide variety of options.
- Upvote What You Love: If you see a software that you also appreciate, upvote it to help others discover it more easily.
Check out last year’s post for more inspiration: Last Year’s Post
Let’s create a comprehensive list of open-source software that everyone should know about!
I advise you to post any recommendations to the original post, I was just sharing it here so others can find it! I also wanna see those recs myself so that’s the motive for posting this 😅
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(Simple) DNSCrypt: https://www.dnscrypt.org/
LibreWolf is what FireFox was supposed to be: no VPN ads, no telemetry, no AI, uBlockOrigin built in. It’s literally the latest FF release, but with the crap ripped out and decent privacy installed.
I’m still looking for a Librewolf or similar Android fork, has that ever made it close? I know the original project devs dont seem interested.
Have you checked IronFox?
I haven’t, but I will now! :)
Ironfox is pretty great for privacy, and tries to not break things, but they do have some configs you really have to dig for and already know about if something breaks.
I had the displeasure of finding out that the loopback and localhost was listed as a blocked domain for extensions, which is why an extension of mine couldn’t connect to an app running on my phone. It was hard to find help for my issue, and I had to get lucky to find a solution for it (literally one person has my issue). Honesty, this extension gets broken every few months due to IronFox configs, due to JavaScript, WASM, SCP, or now this… I almost gave up on IronFox and went to Fennec 😅
Can second IronFox, it’s my daily.
Go for it, Ironfox is brilliant.
Go for it. It’s really good in terms of privacy
They went too far in pursuing their foolish dogma and castrated a decent browser to the point where you don’t want to work with it at all. For example, they removed the interface element that allows you to save passwords, even though the password manager is still there.
What are you even talking about? I use LibreWolf with the Mozilla password manager. It’s a one click enable
Do you even read the bullshit you linked? That’s three lines of selfish nonsense telling me what’s best for me. But if I missed something, I would love to hear from you how to enable password saving the old good firefox way.
On that page it gives the setting to enable Mozilla Sync
If you were remotely nontoxic, I’d copy and paste the setting for you
Instead of gaslighting me, you could share your great wisdom in this thread.
I honestly wonder if the OP in that thread is in good faith or has some other problem screwing up his config. No, neither FF nor LW randomly change settings on you; you have some process, somewhere, that is either corrupting the sqlite db or straight up changing the config.
Anyway, if you literally did a web search
how to enable mozilla sync in librewolfyou would get the correct answer, which works for 99.99% of people 99.99% of the time:
To enable Mozilla Sync in LibreWolf, go to the about:config page and set the option "identity.fxaccounts.enabled" to true. After that, you should be able to log in to your Firefox account and use the sync features.
Picocrypt, which is an encryption tool for files and folders. It’s a 3MB application that utilizes XChaCha20 as its encryption algorithm. It isn’t developed anymore, but it’s well worth it regardless.
Neigsendoig, my producer, just started using it, learning how it works.
VeraCrypt, Clonezilla, Joplin, Futo voice and Futo keyboard, Sentry, Wasted, Untracker, WTMP app, Fossify app suite.
Futo Voice and Futo Keyboard are rad and getting better (Swipe needs more time in the oven). Ive used VeraCrypt for a while and dig it
I haven’t ever found a better open source keyboard or voice type than futo. It really is that good. With so many languages. I’m unsure why some of them got downvoted but oh well. I’m sure there’s a ton more to add that are privacy focused open source apps but those were off my head.
Unfortunately those tools are not open source, they are under some source-available proprietary license. That may be why they (rightfully) get downvoted.
You can use them if you like of course, but they should not be advertised as open source.
XMPP. It replaced WhatsApp in my family that signal failed to do.
Conversations is a good client for mobile. Pretty much on par with Whatsapp in ease of use.
Yep pretty lightweight and simple with no extra bloat
I’m curious, I’ve never had the chance to really use Signal much, and I’ve never used an XMPP client before. What made you dislike Signal and use XMPP instead? I wish I could convince my iMessage loving mom to jump to anything else.
I prefer it because of resilience. A centralized service can be weakened, geoblocked or shut down by proposals like Chat Control. Decentralized protocols are much safer in such an environment, especially if there is variety in clients and servers.
I had no issue with signal (except phone number verification) but according to my family members signal uses a lot of ram and battery. Non of them have Google play services. XMPP doesn’t use that much resources and it’s simple, no unnecessary bloat.
Sure all family members dont have play services…
Also bullshit that Signals drains ram or battery, i wouldnt notice and never heard this before.
Maybe Signal drains battery when it can’t use Google Play Services for notifications and falls back to keeping a connection alive to Signal servers instead?
Im running grapheneos with molly foss (signal fork). I tried both notification deamons, Websocket and Selfhosted UnifiedPush. Both dont drain my battery at all.
I have signal installed direct using obtanium, with the background connector enabled. I’ve not yet had an issue with it.
Then all messenger services would do that on their phone
Yeah thats the reason.
I heard that before too. On calls, especially video calls
Yeah because video calls just use battery.
Its like saying my car is draining gas when i use it heavily. It just uses more when you use it heavily.
You mean when streaming video bandwidth, bidirectionally across the radio?
And encrypted. Im not surprised just heard it as a complaint
Oh shit, I’m doing this with my granddaughter! She’s not 2 yet so I need to wait a bit but I’m doing it!
GNU Jami, when I can get it to work and not jank up the sound too much. https://jami.net/
open keychain - foss to to track pgp keys and generate them
Okay, just curious, does anyone else have a bug preventing them from using Openkeychain? Whenever I try to confirm a key, it simply gets stuck at the “My Key:” selection drop-down. There’s a 8 year old GitHub issue that was started and it never got solved…
And like, there’s no alternatives for this app are there? It seems Thunderbird defaults to them.
EDIT: I’ve been trying to create a keypair from Open keychain and simply export the pair to my laptop to use it there but any key it generates is unable to be imported by both gpg and Thunderbird. It seems I’m not the only one having this issue, meanwhile the project seems to be no longer maintained. What do I do? Give up on using Thunderbird on mobile?
There is also signal-FOSS as an alternative to signal and Molly
Signal-FOSS
https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/
A fork of Signal for Android with proprietary Google binary blobs removed. Uses OpenStreetMap for maps and a websocket server connection, instead of Google Maps and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
add the repo to your app store to F-droid basic
https://fdroid.twinhelix.com/fdroid/repo/
The twinhelix repo is in the droidify and neostore repo list.
It’s not letting me register. When I have my VPN turned off it can’t conbect to servers, and when I have it turned on I get swamped with recaptchas and the veriification code doesn’t send
Why the fuck is signal using Google maps
I’m a bit confused. It says it connects to Signal’s servers. Does this mean if I use Molly, I can still talk to people who are only using Signal?
yes, you can still use signal, molly and signal-foss. I have signal on my desktop and some of my family have molly and some signal-Foss.
The signal servers are primarily hosted on AWS with redundancies on Azure or Google Cloud. Molly and Siganl-FOSS use these too.
The official Android app generally uses the proprietary Google Play Services, although it is designed to be able to work without them.
Hence we use the signal-FOSS and Molly on our phones that do not have any google services.
Like any AOSP rom, Lineage, there are no google play services.
Its the google firebase that manages push notifications that seems to be the main privacy issue.
MollySocket allows getting signal notifications via UnifiedPush, not google firebase,
CoMaps, formerly known as Organic Maps.
Not formerly known. CoMaps is different from Organic Maps. This is the same as saying “Librewolf, formerly known as Firefox”.
I advise you to post any recommendations to the original post, I was just sharing it here so others can find it! I also wanna see those recs myself so that’s the motive for posting this 😅
OnionShare
Any Linux distro
The best Portmaster (Windows, Linux) and InVizible Pro for Android and forks (LinageOS, /e/OS…), apart common sense (PEBCAK license)
I wish I could put portmaster on muhh router 🐸
Portmaster works from the OS, because this way you can selective allow or block the traffic of every app and even from the OS itself, which with Pi Hole, needed for router level isn’t possible, there you can only monitor the global traffic.
Do you find Portmaster to be viable? I’ve seen it around and read a couple brief articles about it. I’ve just never found anyone who uses it. I use MalwareBytes Firewall Control from Binsoft (Alexandru Dicu - https://www.binisoft.org/). It’s fairly bare bones but it does the trick. I’m always looking for something better. I do have the whole network behind a standalone pFsense box. I just needed something local on the machine to silence chatty programs and services.
Malwarebyte may be also valid, better than nothing, but Malwarebyte is proprietary soft, not OpenSource like Portmaster, which also include DNS crypt and custimizable dynamic filters, Optional also an SPN service (paid), something like an VPN on steroids, which permits multilevel tunneling, individual for every app.
Portmaster is the most powerful GUI firewall out there.
The learning curve is steep and it is not a good fit for the filthy casual.
It has very good block lists… Too good.
For example, if you want to play a vidiya game esp online it will likely block half the connections so you need to go in manually unblock what’s needed.
Ain’t no normie ever gonna figure that out lol so I stopped telling people to get it.
It needs to have normie config IMHO
Ain’t no normie ever gonna figure that out
We were all ‘normies’, to use your vernacular, at one point or another. Could it possibly be more complicated than building an Altair with less than supportive instruction manuals of the time?
Yes, the filters are deadly eeficient, you can block global all tracking from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ms, but than you need to set what you will block exactly, if you block eg,Google globaly, forget to be capable to access any of its services, including YouTube. Globally I blocked only Facebook, because I don’t use any of the Zuckerbot services and clicking on a Facebook link, I see only this.
Anyway, Portmaster is not so difficult in its settings or the learning curve, well, at least not for someone with minimal basic nocions, I found it pretty intuitive, way more complicated is to set up Pi-Hole, which is certainly nothing for noobs. Portmaster is installing as is and maybe selecting the DNS server you want use from the list, because it has good default settings which guarantee a reasonable privacy. Everything you block is easy restaurable if the result isn’t what you want.
All true but vast majority of people will never be bothered to be blocking/unblocking per connection, at best they will do per app and even that is a very small minority.
Immich!
Keeping personal photos off someone else’s server and stopping google and apple from training their AI on your nudes.
