With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.
To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.
Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.
If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.
I want to say the Natron compositing software, but I could be misremembering.
I seem to recall it losing it’s only maintainer and therefore being updated or maintained anymore. I want to say this was back in 2018, but since it’s not a piece of kit I use often, I don’t really think about it enough for it to stick in my head. Anyway…point being. It posted a fairly large update in 2022 and has been doing updates since then.
Thunderbird for sure. It had a major ui overhaul and now it’s going through a rennisance
I happen to use it after the last year’s UI update but UX still needed a lot of work. Did that improved too?
came out of nowhere?
I don’t think anyone expected MS-DOS 4.0 (1986) to release under the MIT license in 2024
Florisboard (Android keyboard) was recently updated for the first time in two years. Literally one day after I had given up on it and uninstalled it.
Wire’s new app just got pushed to fdroid. It was all but broken for a few years with no new updates on fdroid
Update: Wire is probably the best encrypted messaging app. Its free, has no phone number requirement, has Foss apps on all platforms, messages sync on all platforms seamlessly, and all messages are encrypted (its not possible to send unencrypted).
Interesting. Since the CEO of Telegram was arrested in France last month, I’ve read countless threads on c/privacy about which messaging app is best for privacy, and the two names that seem to come up the most are Signal and any Matrix client (e.g. Element); however, some commenters point out Signal’s phone number requirement and I forget what the other caveats are.
I don’t recall reading about Wire in any of those threads, but at a glance it seems to check all the boxes (open source, always-on encryption, etc).
Am I missing something? Any ideas why this app wouldn’t come up in such discussions?
EDIT: Hmm, I just went back and re-read a thread from last week, and Wire is actually mentioned. Maybe I’ve just always mentally skipped over it until now.
Some people don’t like them because the fdroid app wasn’t updated for years. I actually started migrating to Matrix because if this, but I really don’t like that matrix sends a lot of data unencrypted.
Now that Wire is pushing updates to fdroid again, I don’t see much valid criticism
Gotcha. So is Wire like, the privacy seeker’s dream messaging app? No phone number, always-on encryption, zero-knowledge servers, open source… any caveats?
Caveat…only some of your friends will actually install it?
But, yeah, its been my app of choice for years. Its definitely the best imo
Ghidra. Boom, here is 90% of ida pro. Enjoy.
Ghidra the code reverse engineering tool for analyzing code?
Yes
Note for any new comments:
It helps if you add an explanation of what it does, or link to read more. The name often isn’t descriptive enough, and people love to find new things to use.
Finamp’s current alpha was a huge surprise to me. I stopped looking at development for a few months and in that time they completely reworked it
Wow the UI is nice
https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Finamp is a Jellyfin music player for Android and iOS. It’s meant to give you a similar listening experience as traditional streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, but for the music that you already own. It’s free, open-source software, just like Jellyfin itself.
I dunno… Jellyfin does great as a Video media player/streaming platform. I prefer to not have everything in the same basket.
Also, this is better for Dev, so they only have to concentrate to one type of thing. I would rather suggest navidrome as a music server and Tempo as a music client for android !!
Tempo doesn’t get updated so much (every few months) but he/she takes his time to make his player functional and very pleasing to the eyes.
I agree limiting application scope is useful for multiple reasons, however Jellyfin started as a fork of Emby which already had music support. I have yet to find a standalone application that has enough features to sway me from just utilizing the existing media server functionality.
Nextcloud has had some amazing updates recently. Adding Nextcloud Hub comes to mind.
Is it an app for android or just the webpage that integrates all the cloud features like notes, files, etc. Sorry for noob question.
Hub is their core set of groupware apps for Nextcloud. They’re all tightly integrated. It came out with Nextcloud 18.
https://nextcloud.com/blog/the-new-standard-in-on-premises-team-collaboration-nextcloud-hub/
Hub integrates the four key Nextcloud products Files, Talk, Groupware and Office into a single platform, optimizing the flow of collaboration. Eliminate the confusing hodgepodge of different SaaS tools and the compliance, security, cost and productivity issues that come with it and standardize on a single solution with Nextcloud Hub.
Cool!
MuseScore had a big UI rework with MuseScore 4, with an excellent video about the behind the scenes by Tentacruel (https://youtu.be/XGo4PJd1lng).
Although not sure if it caught people off guard as I’m not a user of it.
Because of this video I regretnot being a composer
Is that open source?
Yes, but… IIRC dubious connections and motives. Cf the Audacity debacle
yup
Can I have a link?
I do enjoy his videos. Apparently he working on the audacity overhaul too. Haven’t heard (or looked) at it a few years. Last I head was the freakout when the dared to add some basic telemetry to figure how people actually used the software.
