74
How FOSS Won and Why It Matters
(www.softwaremaxims.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
74 points (98.7% liked)
Programming
24518 readers
357 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Fortunately, there are plenty of foss projects with nice and intuitive UIs! (Okular, the PDF reader, Lutris, Firefox and its derivatives, Thunderbird, all the various Material You Android apps like Breezy Weather and AntennaPod, all the various SwiftUI Apple apps that are open-source like mLem and NetNewsWire, the bazillion apps that use libadwaita, all the Qt-based apps that fit really well with KDE Plasma, but work well in other DEs, Prism Launcher is nice to use, super easy to install Fabric mods, i could go on...)
NetNewsWire started as a closed source app.
Well it's open-source now! Good for them. If you want more examples, you have a bunch of the self-hosted stuff (particularly Immich and Nextcloud, there's plenty of great Jellyfin clients, loads of neat Navidrome/Subsonic clients, etc), LibreOffice/OnlyOffice (depending on whether you want separate office apps or integrated), you've got the Linux desktop environments (GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.), etc.
NextCloud is pretty meh. Worst cloud storage I have used so far. A hosted NextCloud with just a few users is also surprisingly expensive. Self hosting is only an option for people with too much time.
Linux actually has a couple usable DEs.
Nextcloud works really well for me. You don't need to use all the functions, I just use it for file sync. Of course, you have stuff like Syncthing if you want something simpler (and peer-to-peer!)