This thread is ONLY to talk about Keyboards, Notes, Maps and Music Players. I add video Music Players because probably some people want to know about good FOSS alternatives.
Little context
spoiler
Why not build a megathread with the best and most reliable FOSS apps too help someone who want to join on the bright side of open source?
We (because this is not from me, this is from us) need to share thoughts, ideas and all things you want to say. Dont be shy. Upvote the comments you like and agree; disagree and tell why you disagree. This is will be different from others threads because this need a proper user opinion, and your opinions will be VERY important to build this. In short, your opinions and thoughts will be the fundamental source to build this.
I will read ALL comments to build this. Even if this has a million comments, I’m going to waste time reading it. Whatever it takes.
Your opinions about it are CRUCIAL and FUNDAMENTAL, because your opinions is the main-base to build the megathread.
Please, consider share your ideas and thoughts about apps on previous threads. Your opinions are really important to build final megathread. You can upvote or downvote posts so that comments gain strength and agreement between the community.
I do not believe privacy guides is a friend to the free software movement. I have criticized them (and adjacent projects in the privacy space) for this in the past, but I’ll just try to summarize briefly why I believe so currently.
Their criteria prioritizes security over freedom and allows for recommending proprietary software if it has been sufficiently audited. They recommend at least two proprietary applications (a password manager and an email client) at the moment but I’m sure they’ve recommended others before.
They have made it part of their mission to debunk the misconception that free software is more secure than proprietary software. While this is indeed a common misconception, it is always associated with another misconception - that the purpose of the free software movement is to provide security and privacy. The free software movement has never promised security, only freedom. This message is unfortunately a casualty of the conflation of the free software and privacy communities.
They are complicit in spreading security FUD about F-Droid. Because it’s common to conflate the free software movement and the privacy community in so many “FOSS” or “open source” spaces, this means any time Android or F-Droid is even mentioned you immediately get hordes of people recommending Obtainium or posting that well-known FUD article, with only someone like me even willing to push back.
They praise the security of proprietary operating systems. In the free software movement, we recognize that security features such as secure or verified boot are useful if the user holds the keys, if not then they are a form of control over the user. For proprietary operating systems, “security” often means you cannot change the system to do something you want, or to stop it from doing something you don’t want. In other words, in the proprietary software world, the “threat model” includes the user themselves.
To their credit, I do not believe they are evil, malicious, corrupt, sold-out, or even wrong a lot of the time. I just don’t think they’re aligned with this particular movement. In essence my complaint is that they prioritize security over freedom, to the degree they even mention freedom at all (it gets a brief mention in their GNU/Linux recommendation list I think) they make sure to remind us that proprietary software can be as good or better.
In a wider view, the fact that people conflate these two communities isn’t really privacy guides’ fault, so I can’t really blame them alone for it.
Thank you for your comment.
Those recommendations are strange and I can not comprehend their decision to include them. Most importantly, the email client is recommended because there is nothing else which should just be no recommendation at all. Recommending one password is nuts. I haven’t been on their site for a while. There must’ve been a paradigm shift. Such recommendations wouldn’t have been there one or two years ago thank you for clarifying that.
Imo, privacyguides used to be a good source because they gave a reason why something is listed. The why is ver important to a lot of readers, especially newcomers.
In the future, hopefully, devs will publish mostly reproducible builds which makes any concerns invalid https://f-droid.org/2023/01/15/towards-a-reproducible-fdroid.html