Lemmy seems like the right place to ask this. Personally I’ve really enjoyed Gurgle, which is a FOSS Wordle clone app.
Ublock Origin. The amount of people going through life exposing themselves to ads is tragic. It’s so unhealthy and most people aren’t aware that there is a simple and free way of protecting yourself from the psychological warfare that corpos use against society
I don’t understand how people do not get blood red angry at advertising more often. Its the root of a lot of our problems with censorship and they flat out just exploit what little free time we all get.
By the time I get home I got 3 hours to chill. Then these ads take up 1/3 of that selling me shit I never asked for. They indirectly forced every platform I ever enjoyed to become these homogenous boring vanilla time sinks. That’s because they pay one content safe creator and then the rest start to copy them. Now if I want to avoid ads, I have to pay extra fees which fuck it, the content creators circumvent by putting ads directly into the media.
We should all be more hostile to any encroachment of ads into our lives. Its weird that instead I see people embracing it like it isn’t a cancer. We’ve lost the freedoms we had on thr internet to these ads and nobody seems to care.
PC:
- Libreoffice – the best, most customisable and powerful office software available
- Onlyoffice – alternative for less-advanced users who are used to the UI of contemporary MSO
- Zotero – great bibliography manager useful when writing scientific papers: lets you collect books, journal articles and all other types of sources, automatically finds full text PDFs online, fills in metadata and then inserts dynamic citations in thousands of different, customisable styles. Also generates bibliographies. Works with LO, MSO and GDocs
- Caprine – clean Facebook Messenger client (web wrapper based)
- TeXStudio – my LATeX editor of choice; integral (ha!) when formatting maths-heavy documents
Android:
- Cloudstream — free streaming app, works with SFlix, Sodastream, PH and other legally dubious streaming providers. Takes some trickery to set up though.
- Osmand — OpenStreetMap client with offline (optional online) navigation and plenty of plugins; loads of customisation
- Material Files — nicest file manager, especially for rooted devices
- Showly — freemium open-source TV and film tracker. Syncs with Trakt.tv
- Simple Gallery — out of all Simple Apps by this developer, this is the only one which is in fact superior to its alternatives. Highly customisable, powerful, lightweight gallery app
Libre office, a great office option. I’ve been using it for 15 years. Foreshadowing
VLC, Plays media. It’s a tank. Also Highways use VLC to mark many winter potholes.
Linux, It’s not that hard to use anymore.( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
WINE, not just for one night stands! it’s great for running Windows Stuff on Linux.
Also, and my personal favorite, your mom is free and open source. Mic Drop going to bed. With your mom. Wasn’t expecting that twice were you? Well, neither was your mom. Got 'em.
This app isn’t fully ready yet but Accrescent is a secure and private app store for Android. It aims to be a better alternative app store on Android rather than using the Google Play Store. It currently has 11 apps right now and more to come soon.
Highly recommend to check out and support this project cuz this appstore is the best out there right now security and privacy wise.
Try F-Droid instead.
F-Droid has many security vulnerabilities and has many issues such as:
- Hosting an outdated APK client.
- Utilizes an obsolete installation method.
- Does not take advantage of modern appstore features.
- Has no moderation.
- Has no old app deletion.
- Has an arbitrary FOSS only rule.
- Does all building and signing themselves.
If you want more details about these issues read this:
#2 can be solved by using one of several alternative clients with root permissions. Yes, manual APK install is tedious but not inherently insecure, and the only option for nonroot devices without an ADB host.
#4 is not really true. They are just very lenient, mostly just flagging apps with problems (known vulnerabilities, telemetry, non-FOSS services/assets/libs, ads).
#5, #6 and #7 are actually advantages. It’s nice to know that all apps are FOSS and correspond to source, and I can install old apps / earlier versions on old phones – as opposed to Google Play, which denies an app’s existence if your device is incompatible, resulting in shady alternatives and adware typosquatters topping search results.
2 - Manual installation methods can be insecure because a lot of people don’t update their apps all the time. Obviously rooting a phone is insecure, but having no auto updates in 2023 is crazy.
4 - It is very true, having zero quality control on new apps. The flagging of apps with problems is just following the FOSS philosophy. Any FOSS app can be added to F-Droid.
5 - Not sure why you would want to install abandoned apps on F-Droid, let alone use an EOL device. A lot of people don’t check if apps are maintained because they trust their app store.
6 - FOSS doesn’t automatically mean its secure or private. Also, why is it that I have to install proprietary apps only on the Google Play Store?
7 - FDroid signing keys isn’t an advantage because it requires an extra layer of trust. I’m already trusting the developer by installing their app, so the developer should be signing the keys. This is a reason why Signal is not on F-Droid.
The point of free software isn’t security, but freedom. For people who want control of their computing, this is not an “arbitrary restriction” but rather a basic requirement. Just because you don’t particularly care about a concern doesn’t make it “arbitrary.” I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but I don’t complain about the “arbitrary restriction” of a plant-based diet.
I think your thinking im against FOSS but you’re not understanding. Many people in the FOSS community only care about privacy and ignore security. A developer can implement security benefits to FOSS but many people don’t care to do it.
Accrescent is FOSS and it has much higher security benefits than F-Droid. Accrescent allows both open and closed sourced apps because there’s no benefit being exclusive to having FOSS apps in their catalog.
If the user chooses to not use proprietary apps on Accrescent, they don’t have to install them.
It’s a misconception to say that free software is “about privacy.” Many people in the free software community care about having the four freedoms (the freedom to use, share, modify, and share modified copies). We don’t like free software because we think it’s more secure, we like it because it’s free software. Freedom doesn’t need a justification other than freedom itself.
For us, a catalogue offering only free software isn’t an “arbitrary rule” that’s the whole point. If F-Droid carries an app I know I have the four freedoms with that app, because they put in the work to verify that, by building the app according to their (relatively strict, not strict enough IMO) standards. Accrescent and Obtainium fans have different priorities, which is okay, but I don’t understand why they spend so much time shitting on F-Droid and the free software movement.
Security is important in free software, but security in proprietary software is often user-hostile (for example, DRM and WEI). Often times the only way to regain freedom in a proprietary environment is to exploit a security hole, so sometimes we prefer that proprietary software actually not be very secure.
As for F-Droid’s and the free software’s community towards “old” apps, we understand that software does not lose value simply by being unmaintained. Of course, if something is particularly security-critical and/or has a large attack surface (for example an operating system or a web browser). I would stay away from anything unmaintained. That doesn’t apply to all software, though.
