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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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! :)
Go for it, Ironfox is brilliant.
Can second IronFox, it’s my daily.
Go for it. It’s really good in terms of privacy
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 😅
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.I don’t understand why you’re trying to steer the conversation toward mozilla sync for the second time, ignoring the original saving password problem. If I needed mozilla sync, I would use it. But I don’t need it. I don’t want it.
So that you don’t make any assumptions, I’ll just show you what the folks at librewolf have patched out in their struggle against suitable UI:
There is no way I know to have it back into the browser except to find and revert the patches and compile librewolf yourself.
But it’s based on a browser that’s not made to be secure, but instead to have the most features and comply to all these standards. So removing them will make it a bit more secure, but it will never be good. The best browsers are the ones that aren’t made to support javascript and all these other standards. A private browser would be something like w3m or links. Ideally, it wouldn’t be HTML but gemini’s gemtext or just markdown.
Honestly, soft forks of either Firefox or Chrome by a small team are a stop-gap hack and not anything truly effective at fixing the issues because they are entirely dependent on the large teams developing the upstream browsers. As hard as they work, they simply don’t have the in-house expertise to develop the browser, and can even make mistakes when ripping things out. It’s certainly a trade-off for better privacy now, but with other risks.
Some of the more clean-slate browsers out there seem more interesting, even if they lack features, because the developers can actually make design decisions and develop codebase expertise.
XMPP. It replaced WhatsApp in my family that signal failed to do.
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 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?
I have signal installer direct using obtanium, with the background connector enabled. I’ve not yet had an issue with it.
Yeah thats the reason.
Im running grapheneos with molly foss (signal fork). I tried both notification deamons, Websocket and Selfhosted UnifiedPush. Both dont drain my battery at all.
Then all messenger services would do that on their phone
Not necessarily. Some of them are able to use UnifiedPush so no need in a background service, and some of them (like Conversations) have background services whose battery use is negligeable.
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
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.
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
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.
Why the fuck is signal using Google maps
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
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,
Similarly, there’s Signal-Cli. Normally, Signal only allows signups from smartphones, which is weird, because not all smartphones can run privacy-preserving OSes while pretty much anything can run Linux. This one is the only client I’ve seen that allows desktop signup. IDK if they broke it now, but worked a while ago.
Immich!
Keeping personal photos off someone else’s server and stopping google and apple from training their AI on your nudes.
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”.
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.
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 😅
GNU Jami, when I can get it to work and not jank up the sound too much. https://jami.net/
Matrix is good for communication.
Any Linux distro
OnionShare
deleted by creator
I recommend my python script, Tonto2.
What does Tonto2 do?
It keeps lists.
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
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You can use an address list to keep track of contacts’ phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
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You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
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You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
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You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
Tell me more about these cow orks.
Tell me more about these cow orks.
The correct term is cow-orker (n. sing. masc.). See also, http://www.fact-index.com/c/co/cow_orker.html
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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.
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.
Makes sense, thank you for clarifying error of my desire
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.
Thing is, I already have a standalone, whole network, pFsense firewall in place. I already run DNSCrypt as well as PIA VPN, & Tailscale on my servers. I run Windows Firewall Control on my Windows PC, which was bought out by MalwareBytes, for a couple things I like to have precise control of but only at certain times as needed. I really was just interested in someone’s personal perspective. I do have Portmaster bookmarked, as I’m not one to dismiss useful software off hand. Never know when I might just have a use case for it.
Multi-Level Tunneling Sounds interesting. Is that like choosing which layer you want to use in the OSI stack? I’d be all in if Portmaster could generate network noise for obfuscation. That’s what I’m trying to educate myself on currently.
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?
Touche but dropping kids in the deep end of the pool… Some of them drown 🥲
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 or any of it’s other services or AIs, I see only this (and in change it’s pixel or any other tracker or logger, embedded in any website, my middle finger)
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. No problems to recommend, because it’s save to use and relativ easy to handle, even for newbies
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.
As said, Portmaster by default already has a good setting, a newbe don’t have to do nothing to improve a lot his privacy, more than download, installing (run on boot) and forget about it. Grandmother safe.
