I know some of you have gone complies FOSS, but I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical. So what are your favorite non-foss apps?
Steam. It is one of the few company’s that still has principles
Because they are not publicly traded, i hope it stays that way
Yeah. Not being legally required to abandon principles in favor of short-term profits for shareholders is tight.
Wow, wow, wow
Wow, wow, wow
I fear the day Gaben isn’t around anymore. Hopefully there is a succession plan for the company to be handed over to someone with similar values.
Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as “it” by her manager.
It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.
I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that’s always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token “competitors” that they completely control to exist.
Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:
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EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)
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Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)
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Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren’t steam)
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GOG (storefront only, I’m pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)
Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don’t have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.
Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I’m not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your “ownership” of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.
If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn’t really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.
GOG does not give out steam keys, you can download all games as ‘stand alone installers’ and don’t need a launcher. You forgot the humble store (which now also comes with a launcher).
Generally agree, but your point about GOG is wrong. Not only can you install games from their platform, its also (to my knowledge) the only storefront where you can get games completely DRM-Free, since you dont need GOG Galaxy to download or install their games
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Steam.
A linux client that works, and actually gets fixes, improvements, and features, that is a lot.
Davinci Resolve
Really good video editor, and also, has Linux client.
???Really? In front of my communist manifesto?!
Obsidian for my journaling and note-taking needs, The Storygraph for tracking my reading.
I think you’ve got a bit of a misconception about FOSS software - you’re allowed to make money selling it, you just also have to provide the source code to any customers! A fair few FOSS apps have free versions on F-Droid but paid versions on the Play store, for example.
Like what?
For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They’re FOSS but they charge money for support.
My fave is Anki, free on Android and 25 USD on i0S for the exact same product.
OSMand
Simple Mobile Tools (Simple Contacts etc.) cost money for the full version on Play but you can get it for free on F-Droid or GitHub!
Steam and Discord. They are the only non-foss apps that I use basically every single day. I’m trying to wean myself off Discord specifically, but I have so many communities on there that aren’t on FOSS alternatives, and the FOSS alternatives like Matrix chat and such just don’t cut it for me yet.
Plus literally all my friends I game with and chat with are on Discord and almost none of them are even slightly interested in migrating anywhere else.
People have mentioned most of the good ones (Scrivener, Resolve, Steam, Discord), but I must grudgingly nod to OneNote.
There are competitors in the note-taking space, yes, but none of them get handwriting down like OneNote has for 15+ years, now.
Spotify is the only subscription I ever pay, even though I’m an avid pirate and I don’t have any qualms about pirating music, I love the Spotify algorithm so much, it introduces me to new music all the time which is something I love
Paying for it helps me pirate even more efficiently. I often leave 20+ hour playlists on ripping the music I want whilst off doing other things.
I have compared the 320 mp3s I get from it with 320’s that I have bought using spek and they were literally identical and whilst having a flac is nice having money to pay my bills is nicer and the difference in sound quality really isn’t that noticeable without a proper system to play them through.
Well, then you could just use xManager to get pirated Spotify premium. It just doesn’t let you download stuff but if you pirate them separately anyways, then this should work for you. Or are you literally directly ripping the music from Spotify??
I pay for premium for my sister and niece on a family plan thing anyway so it isn’t like I would save any money by not using it as it is there and paid for regardless. I’m literally ripping the music from Spotify using soggfy.
I use soulseek as well which is fine but a lot of idiots on there lock their files away which goes against the very nature of piracy imo, using this Spotify method is often easier to get some of the things I want and then I can tag them using my desired naming convention too rather than having to clean up other peoples messy as fuck tags.
Ah OK, interesting! Well, if you have access to a family subscription this seems like the way to go :)
I mostly use bandcamp + yt-dl to get music (or I actually buy it as well). But it is a bit tedious to import the files into my library…
I am also an avid band camp user and will buy as much as I can afford times being what they are though that is less and less so I have to prioritise what I want to pay for.
The music I am into also releases a lot of things as vinyl only which is utter bullshit IMO so I will pirate the shit out of any of that I can get my hands on as I won’t pay for a giant piece of obsolete media that I then have no way to actually use xD
Bandcamp is really my favorite site to buy or download music. I love just what you said about it, that I can prioritize what I want to pay for :)
I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.
Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn’t have a problem with that.
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Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.
On a bigger scale (although they’re not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.
Wanting to make money from your app doesn’t prevent you from making it foss, therefore I have no favourite proprietary apps
Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support
I would be really interested in more information about this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention to look into!
Workflowy and Teuxdeux are two web apps where I spend an embarrassingly large amount of my time online. I wish there were FOSS alternatives because I would happily contribute features and fixes to the issues I bump into in my daily usage.
- Sesame Shortcuts. I know there are launcher with similar tools included, but I also use Nova Launcher and paid for it. I’ve been thinking to migrate to alternatives, but I haven’t done it yet.
- Microsoft To Do. The alternatives are incomplete, ugly or don’t have the same capabilities. I’d gladly pay for any FOSS and Privacy respectful To Do app, but I guess setting up sync servers may be hard. I’ll give a try for tasks.org again in some days.
I’m glad I don’t get to say Notion anymore, Anytype.io is missing some features, but I can manage to live without them and Notion was getting worse with time.
Have you tried Obsidian? It’s not FOSS either unfortunately, but the sync service is astoundingly good and E2EE. Also, plenty of community plugins :)
Yeah, I use it for course notes and so, but it’s kind of expensive for where I live, so I use it in pair with pCloud and a backup in other cloud.
Btw, if you say it for the to do apps, I’ve tried, but it just doesn’t work for me as a to do hehe
Davinci Resolve is mind bogglingly good video editing software and the free (beer) version is all 90% of people need.
I really love PowerPoint. I feel like the automatic snapping features and general polish allow me to make very pretty slides
with a high level of control, and it feels way better to use than e.g. web-based alternatives. Admittedly, I haven’t tried a foss alternative in years.
