It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?
Discord. It’s extremely popular and has no direct alternatives (Matrix spaces thing isn’t ready at all yet)
EDIT: I didn’t know Revolt and Zulip existed. I’m doing a research on them now
Matrix is also extremely complicated to sign up for. I tried getting some tech savvy friends to sign up for Matrix the other day. Even for someone tech-savvy it is waaaaaaaay too complicated. Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
Yeah…for many of these programs the onboarding is so daunting, even for those who are tech savvy. Laymen don’t stand a chance with something that is that complicated. It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
It doesn’t often seem to be a technical issue either, more-so a user experience or design problem
Oh 100%. The problem is that there’s a lack of UX designers and such in the Open Source community. There’s technical people building stuff but they often don’t know how to make a good user experience (or in some cases they don’t care to).
IDK why this always gets downvoted. UI/UX some of the biggest issues with FOSS software, and is a massive barrier to entry to someone who isn’t a massive computer nerd willing to put up with that shit.
I guess they take any criticism of open source as if you are against the whole movement. I don’t understand either.
honestly i don’t even think it’s a FOSS problem, this is a problem with every UI ever made in the last three years essentially.
Unless it’s literally making money off of you having an account, there is no incentive to design a good UI from the ground up. The solution here ironically, is simply don’t skill issue, or document it very well.
personally when it comes to the onboarding im more on the side of “self host your own onboarding, for friends and family and shit, and then federate out from there if needed.”
Theoretically doing a clean onboarding shouldn’t be very difficult. More involved i suppose, but if you don’t have the time to figure out how a federated instance works, (or to properly document it) you shouldn’t be on the internet, you have more pressing matters to attend to.
There are instances that are not very hard to sign up for. The main issue with Matrix is instability and performance, especially when communicating with users/groups on different instances. It’s really not a great experience. And the inability to properly delete messages can be a big deal too
Many of the clients don’t even have a sign up option, you need to sign up elsewhere first.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but think of it as an assurance that you’re not locked in with one app.
That said, I completely agree that Matrix and Element need to work on UX, particularly making it easy for new users to adopt it as well as verification/device switching.
@SorteKanin I’d like to see that. I have already onboarded about 35 students and my whole family to matrix, nobody had any problems with signup. Bigger problem is later if they get the infamous “Unable to decrypt message” error.
Yeah. I still don’t understand all the encryption stuff. I lost all my encrypted texts even after I used my recovery pass phrase on a new session.
Can’t relate. It’s not harder to get your hands on a matrix account in comparison to a mail account. And for those that want it even easier, just download Element and you are guided through the default registration at matrix.org
I keep hearing people recommend signal messenger as an alternative to discord, and honestly that’s the most obvious sign you don’t actually use discord
Yeah signal is amazing for one to one or small groups, but not for what discord servers are used for.
But to be honest, many discord servers are used for things they really shouldn’t be used for… Like code documentation and bug tracking
Well some people use Discord as a messenger for some reason and for them Signal is probably the best but yea it’s not a Discord alternative at all
Revolt is very promising, not ready yet but already feels very similar to Discord
The privacy policy of their app’s captcha solution is horrendous so no thank you
Doesn’t seem that bad, when you go to log in it checks your IP, length of time on the site and mouse movements.
hCaptcha
This section has been adapted from hCaptcha’s documentation.
We use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (hereinafter “hCaptcha”) on our website. This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation (“IMI”). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behavior of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled.
When using the Revolt App, hCaptcha will only begin analysis when you:
Submit a login request. Submit a registration request. Submit a password reset / email resend request.For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Data processing is based on Art. 6(1)(f) of the GDPR (DSGVO): the website or mobile app operator has a legitimate interest in protecting its site from abusive automated crawling and spam. IMI acts as a “data processor” acting on behalf of its customers as defined under the GDPR, and a “service provider” for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For more information about hCaptcha and IMI’s privacy policy and terms of use, please visit the following links: https://hcaptcha.com/privacy/ and https://hcaptcha.com/terms.
The Revolt’s policy is not that bad. Look at the hCaptcha’s one
That’s the part of hCaptchas policy that’s relevant to Revolt.
For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.
Did you miss these parts or are they inapplicable?
How We Use Information We use the information we collect for the following purposes: To administer Integrator and Customer accounts and provide the Service. We use Personal Information in order to associate specific accounts with Integrators and Customers and to provide them the Service, to respond to requests or inquiries, to provide support or technical assistance, and to facilitate payments. To improve to Site and the Service. We use Analytics Information to improve our existing and develop new services and offerings and to customize existing and future product offerings. To derive market insights. We use Analytics Information to analyze the market and conduct business analyses related to the Site and our Services, and for other research purposes. To provide a market for Labeled Data. Our Service enables high volume data labeling and human review for machine learning systems as a service to website owners and companies who need help getting their data labeled. To that end, we disclose Labeled Data to our Customers interested in acquiring Labeled Data. To secure our services and systems. We use Analytics Information to secure our systems by identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities, and to otherwise protect the information we collect. For any legitimate business purpose, provided that the information is de-identified or aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
How We Share Information We share or disclose personal information in the following cases: Upon direct request from an Integrator to identify the fraud risk of a specific CAPTCHA challenge request or IP address, or otherwise where specific consent was given. With vendors we engage to provide essential aspects of the Sites and the Service, such as data storage, hosting, and Analytics, and only for those purposes. As necessary to comply with applicable law, including governmental requests, law enforcement requests, and otherwise to public and private entities in order to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of you, us, or others. With others for any legitimate business purpose, provided the information is de-identifiedor aggregated such that it cannot be reasonably tied to an individual.
Disclosure Regarding “Sales” of Personal Information under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not “sold” any Personal Information (as defined by the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any “sale” of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age (so they do sell information of people over 16). Disclosure Regarding “Sharing” for “Cross-Context Behavioral Advertising” under the CCPA. In the preceding twelve months, IMI has not “shared” any Personal Information for “cross-context behavioral advertising” (as such terms are defined in the CCPA), nor does IMI have actual knowledge of any “sharing” of Personal Information of minors under 16 years of age for “cross-context behavioral advertising”.
I based my assumptions on the parts in Revolts privacy policy, since reading the privacy policy of hCatpcha it alludes that each ‘vendor’ can select how much data they’d like to collect I assumed that Revolt only allowed them to collect IP, length of time on site and mouse movements. While they do sell information, they claim it to be anonymised and I contacted support to see how they did that for IP addresses.
Which is why I don’t really mind. The information they have of me is at most how my cursor moved, how long I took to Submit a login request, Submit a registration request, Submit a password reset / email resend request and an obfuscated IP. Seems OK to me.
Honestly i never enjoyed discord It is messy and difficult to find information once its a few days old
Id much rather use a decent forum really
This is more of a hammer as a screwdriver problem, where everyone decided to use chat software as a forum.
almost every hobby has moved to facebook and it’s the same damn thing. utterly useless for the purpose people try to use it for.
i don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people, but this is definitely one of the pinnacles.
They want to use a single account for everything and have the most people possible.
That is it really. They don’t want to have to make 50 new accounts where every account has to deal with getting past the spam policies and filters only to find that their potential base is 1/10 of that on other platforms
That’s why reddit became the de-facto forum for many things also. 1 interface, 1 account, people can trace your account across different “forums” and it was searchable (on search engines, not shit reddit search).
There are currently a wave of people moving certain activities to Band of all fucking things (using it side by side with facebook due to facebook policies). It’s basically a shitty korean clone of facebook but slower and with less stability and even less features.
They could have picked ANY of the platforms actually designed for the intended purpose. But Band? It’s the OPPOSITE of useful.
People don’t make sense.
Especially with the upcoming implementation of ads. Really sucks that many communities and software support (who should have just had forums) are deeply embedded into it and will have to start from scratch and lose any and all helpful content. Its hard to see big communities moving to anything else anytime soon, even of there was a great Foss alternative. It would indeed be amazing to have one in the first place
I think what’s even worse than ads is many channels now require verification through a phone number if you want to write something. Not sure when that became a thing but I just recently ran into this roadblock and noped tf out.
I thought the Discord ads drama was an April Fools joke?
You had me for a second, lol. Unfortunately it is not an April fools joke :/ luckily for us though, the worse the application gets, the higher a chance a Foss alternative will emerge from a madlad who was sick of discord’s shit
https://adguard.com/en/blog/ads-discord-blocking-adguard.html
Adoption is always the main issue, as we can see here on the Fediverse. It’s crazy how even technically-inclined people flock to discord. So many 3d printing communities are on there, people who install custom debian distros on raspberry pis, solder wires, crimp connectors and assemble open source machines, still fall into the trap.
Hmm I really hope so
https://zulip.com/ is likely your best alternative. It’s more a Slack copy than Discord but the features are there
If you’re talking about voice channels specifically, then there is Mumble.
If you’re talking about chat rooms, old school solution is IRC and we have XMPP that works fine for most people.
Mumble needs a server, iirc
Edit to be more precise, it needs you to host a server of your own
I let you in on a secret: Discord also needs a server 🙃
… Ok I’ll let you have that ‘technical correct’ smug satisfaction, you bastard.
But for real, if you can’t / don’t want to host your own server, just use any server from hundreds of available servers.
Oh I’s been a while. My clan hosted our own mumble server, back in the day. Didn’t know there was a lot of public ones nowadays…
There are even services that give you free temporary servers. I don’t know why anyone would use that instead of just finding any server and use a free room if you just want to talk with friends, but well, it exists.
You go to a service like that, press a button, it generates you some random port number and password, then you connect to that server with mumble and become an admin of it. The server is temporary and gets automatically destroyed after some fixed period (usually something like 24 hours).
Also what I tried to do with my friends is run Yggdrasil and connect directly via IPv6 (so I run Yggdrasil and launch a mumble server, and all my friends enter my IPv6 address) and that works too, so no need to have public IPs or domain names to use Mumble anymore.
Yggdrasil is such a cool thing, loving it.
yeah, host one. It’s not expensive. Certainly cheaper than paying for discord nitro (which you don’t have to do if you want shitty audio/video streaming quality and no emojus features)
No I meant an app that looks similar and contains most of the features (servers specifically) so it’s easier for not tech savvy users to get into. Someone suggested Revolt but its privacy (as in sending the data to not privacy respecting third parties) is questionable so idk if I can consider it a good enough alternative
Something like Revolt could maybe be a replacement for discord
Lol
There is a project, but it’s really early in it’s development. It’s called Cabal. Has a nice desktop client, looks kinda like Discord. It’s p2p, so no server required. BUT AGAIN, VERY EARLY IN DEVELOPMENT.
Not something you should use, but look out for how the development is going.
There seem to be quite a few projects. It’s slowing the development down. It would be better if everyone focused on one. But peer to peer is interesting. I’m wondering how much disk space it will use a day if I’m in a group with like 100k people though
I recently ran into that very issue, leading to me downloading (one foss) third party clients for discord which are privacy focused. As long as discord is still the place to be I have to be there too, but I can certainly limit the data they can gather about me. I found
- goofcord for desktop (supports plugins too)
- aliucord for android
Perhaps they are an option for you too
Didn’t know those existed.
Aliucord looks like a modified client tho, so not really open source.Fair enough
I couldn’t get goofcord to work on Wayland but webcord works great
Plain banking apps for smartphones. Having those developed in the open would hopefully make it possible to have forks that work on rooted devices without hiding magisk and whatnot.
My phone firmware
god i fucking hate android, i await the day linux on mobile actually functions with great anticipation.
I’ve been so excited anytime I see updates from gnome-mobile. It’s looks much cleaner than phosh
i’m just waiting until someone inevitably ports something like i3wm or sway over and it’s actually pretty usable. That’s all i need to be happy in life.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
Android may be ‘meh’ to you. I like it, but only because it’s good enough for what I need. Fair. But it’s got something the green Linux phone never had: massive presence.
Droid is a bad Linux with a huge ecosystem, and that’s why this may be the best we can hope for. We could have a perfect phone, but without that massive presence to get the apps and the dedicated devs, anything with less presence will suffer.
Think about it. It’s a sad fact, but you know it’s a fact.
That’s like how Xz didn’t get trojanned because it was a nothing project: it is a crucial part of everything. It lost its presence and when the sole Dev was deep in burnout he was hoodwinked. Ya need the eyeballs, and that’s a popularity game for foss.
My 2c.
That was 2004. They made a Linux phone not was troll tech or something.
No one bought it.
unsure what you’re trying to say, but they make linux phones now, people do buy them, not very many. But for me, a linux user, it’s exactly what i want.
IDK where you got me “thinking android was meh” It’s fucking awful. I said as much. I don’t understand why people keep bringing up market saturation like linux isn’t an enthusiast OS to begin with. It doesn’t need it, perhaps some day it’ll grow beyond that. But for the time being, there is no need for it to do so. It works perfectly fine as is. The only issue right now is app support, and UI compat.
Linux already has the apps you would need, all you need to do is port them, or make a fork. Most apps these days can be used on a web browser, which solves like 90% of everything significant. Literally just build it with arm compat and give it a mobile UI.
no idea what you’re trying to say about XZ, it got backdoored most likely as a result of state actors, and like you said, the dev being burnt out. That’s just part of the game when it comes to open source, unfortunately for that team that was working on it. That’s going to be a highly scrutinized path of action going forward, and much more difficult. Also it never lost it’s presence? That’s literally WHY it was backdoored. It was a prime target for being infiltrated due to basically every linux distro using XZ on a fundamental level, and basically every machine shipping it.
FOSS CAD softwares. I know FreeCAD exists but it’s very unintuitive compared to the proprietary ones. I am thankful that it exists but it’s a long way apart to become a household name like Blender.
I wish I could start writing one but I don’t have a clear picture of requirements to plan and start writing one. If anyone is expert in this field please link some research papers and guidelines for someone to start fresh.
Check out Ondsel. They’re working on improving FreeCAD and making the workflow not suck.
Still definitely a work in progress, but the dimension/constraint tools and 3D feature naming are already lightyears better in their version.
Thank you. I’ll check it out.
I think FreeCAD is still the best bet, it does.seem to be making a few strides recently. Topo naming and sketcher workbench are both getting updates. For me personally it’s definitely usable for personal projects. I want better FreeCAD rather than an alternative new thing.
Yeah I should look up some tutorials for it. I jumped in thinking I could figure it out after working with Creo, Solidworks and AutoCAD but I should have RTFM.
Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.
I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).
Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.
100%
I put together a list of open source CAD software a couple of years ago, but none of the options are quite there yet.
Blender is not CAD software though, it’s 3D modelling software. They’re not quite the same thing, and they’re intended for (and excel at) different things.
I know. I’m just comparing the reputation and how polished they are wrt to each other. Given they have similar scopes with modeling and graphics and everything.
But they don’t really have similar scopes… One is for technical models, based on extruded 2D drawings, the other is for abstract 3D modelling. Sure in both if them the end product is a 3D model, but they’re achieved in vastly different ways with completely different skillsets and different use cases.
I think you’re missing their point, they weren’t saying that Blender is cad, it’s just a good comparison, as a successful piece of software in the the same broad, general category (3D modeling)
We want what Blender is to mesh modeling, rendering, etc, but for parametric cad, manufacturing, etc. Basically Fusion 360 but open source, without any of Autodesk’s bs. Ideally it would even work together with Blender for rendering.
The comment I originally commented on compared them as if they were similar tool, (before it was edited), which I simply pointed out it is not. It’s like saying a plane and a helicopter are the same, sure they both are able to lift off the ground, but the similarities kind of stop there.
Because the purpose/function of the software isn’t exactly the point of this particular discussion.
A lot of FOSS applications have what I’d call GIMP syndrome. The software is functional and powerful, but it’s got the UX of a urinary tract infection, and the developers seem to have an outright religious need to KEEP the software in a perfectly capable but unusable state. GIMP is the example of this behavior, the developers have outright said terribleness is their vision and it shall not be altered. So GIMP is the technically correct yet permanently non-valid answer to “What’s a FOSS alternative to Adobe Photoshop?”
Blender is one of the rare examples of a FOSS application that overcame GIMP syndrome. Blender is not only powerful and capable, but though a UI overhaul became decent to use as well. As a result it is seeing genuine adoption because it actually is the best answer to the question “what software will do this task?”
That’s what this thread right now is talking about, wishing that FreeCAD would similarly reach that level of “not just surprisingly okay for free software, but actually objectively good” that Blender has.
You’re right, not sure why all the down votes. I think people don’t get how big a difference 3d modeling is from technical drawings.
Most definitely - Especially for woodworking FreeCAD is horrible and inefficient - even a friend who has been a contributor takes longer for some things than I do in Fusion360 as an occasional user. As a maker I love the idea of FreeCAD and the implications it has for third world countries, the amateur maker scene,etc. But I hate it for what it is. Which is so sad.
I use FreeCAD for woodworking, and…yeah. It works, it has its limitations, and I figured I know some Python, maybe I can code up some tools for woodworking specific tasks that would speed the process up.
Almost none of FreeCAD is documented and what documentation exists is wrong. You can’t learn how to contribute to FreeCAD, you have to be born knowing how. It makes no goddamn sense. “You know the chamfer and fillet tools in the Part Design workbench? I want one that makes Rabbets” is a bigger R&D problem than the Manhattan Project.
My understanding is that there are long-term developers who have left, and new blood is starting to appear, which is why the next version is going to have a lot of improvements to the sketcher among other things.
I would love a FOSS version of Rhino3D.
softwares
Software, like traffic and sheep and e-mail, don’t get an S when talking about a lot.
I wish there were more Open Source games.
Spotify.
An open source music streaming service where I can financially support artists but where I’m not forced to put up with annoying advertisements (even when paying membership fees!), and which allows me to use whatever app I want to play the music I listen to. It is annoying AF that I need to switch between apps to listen to music because Spotify’s shitty native app is inferior in every possible way with the single exception of offering more content.
Photoshop.
And yeah, no, please, don’t come over and mention Gimp and Kryta and all the others. I get it, they’re cool for the stuff they do. They just aren’t the all in one package that Photoshop is or have as powerful tools specifically for photo editing. Photoshop would require a Blender-style major effort to replicate and Gimp just isn’t up to it. I wish it were. Photoshop is at the perfect intersection of being uniquely capable and walled off behind the single crappiest ecosystem in software.
Nobody likes Adobe, nobody wants to work with Adobe. Nobody can avoid Photoshop. That’s just the world we live in and I don’t like it.
Ultimate Guitar Tabs. After spending years getting a community to contribute to one of the best music resources on the web, they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.
Holy shit the most painful and miserable experience is using this god forsaken site, let alone the fucking mobile app. Actually rage inducing.
they turn around and lock all but the most basic features behind a pay wall.
To be fair, that was forced by the music industry.
If they didn’t licence the tabs and come up with a payment system they were going to be sued into oblivion.
Is that really the case? Because you can still see all the songs and a basic set of chords without an account/payment.
A decent language learning type app, like dulingo
grindr
Exactly. Like when can I be a foss hoe
A defederated grindr
Do you like your men like you like your software?
open seems like a pretty good starting point all things considered.
Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.
If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.
Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.
An alternative to iTunes so that I don’t need a Windows VM to backup my company iPhone. But I know it’s never gonna happen because Apple is the devil.
Just so you know, libimobiledevice can backup iPhones with their idevicebackup utility. It’s CLI only, so maybe not as easy to get into as iTunes but it has worked pretty well for years on my end.
Yeah thanks I’ve read about it but the terminal part is probably above my really modest Linux knowledge for now.
honestly terminal isn’t that complicated, if you’re surviving using a VM at the moment, you could probably manage to comprehend a terminal for long enough to figure out how that software works (and as a benefit, also figure out how basically every other CLI application works)
Thanks for the advice, but, for now, I can’t picture myself managing a professional phone backup without a GUI.
Had it been just a tinkering phone maybe, but not my professional one😇
honestly it’s no different than using a GUI, unless your place of work mandates a specific piece of software or something. It’s not like you can’t fuck shit up, but you can also do that with GUI apps too. I’ve fucked up more shit using a GUI than using CLI. That could change some day, but that’s what backups are for.
That’s fair enough! I can tell you it’s not that difficult but having a nice iDevice suite desktop application would certainly be a big improvement!
Good news, Apple has the solution for you. You don’t need iTunes anymore.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k?hl=en-US&gl=US
Yeah but I’d still need an Apple program and a Windows VM, so it wouldn’t change a thing 😅
Discord. And no, Matrix/Element isn’t an alternative.
It’s missing voice channels.
I didn’t know about Revolt. It sounds awesome and does indeed look like a Discord clone, but while you can self host it, instances can’t communicate with each other. The devs of Revolt actually recommend NOT to self host.
Signed up for Revolt, but still waiting for the email confirmation…
mumble does incredible VOIP. super minimal, pretty trivial to set up, and just works:tm: plus it has a lot of old school cool features since it’s been around the game for decades. It’s like discord but if it were old and cool.
Matrix i hear a lot of good things about, specifically the interoperability of it. That’s pretty slick. One of these days i will get around to setting it up. Revolt exists, it’s a discord clone, it can be self hosted, it’s pretty fresh. Cool if you liked the 2015 era of discord i suppose.
I’ve used mirotalk for p2p screensharing, both the p2p and sfu version seem to be alright, the p2p version is significantly more performant in my experience though.
Its not really Foss but Vencord is a nice discord client mod that blocks some analytic stuff and is super cute to boot!
It will be soon. Voice and video calls are in beta
https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/
That doesn’t look like voice channels to me, like in Discord?
It’s a long shot, but a viable alternative to Google Maps or other proprietary mapping websites (and no, OpenStreetMap is not a viable Google Maps alternative).
EDIT: Not sure why downvotes, OpenStreetMap doesn’t even have directions as far as I can tell.
Organic Maps honestly hasn’t been that bad for me, but searching addresses is appalling and I do need to rely on Google Maps in many instances still. However, it has made it much easier for me to contribute to OSM and have a better user experience. A step in the right direction at least
I use Organic Maps to find places by name and OSMand to find places by address. Both can only the do one of the two things good, but it is doable.
Is Organic Maps only on the mobile apps? Is there no way to view it in a desktop browser? The website seems to just lead me to the apps.
It’s just an app, yeah.
OpenStreetMaps is amazing, but it is a map, not a whole ecosystem like Google Maps is. As a map I find it’s often better than Google Maps, but what is still lacking are good front-ends implementing a wide range of functionality in a user friendly way.
On desktop I often use GNOME Maps, but it leaves a lot to be desired still and is obviously intended for Linux users running GNOME.
I don’t know why it isn’t mentioned anywhere on their website. But Organic Maps does have a desktop app. At least on Linux there is the Flatpak. I don’t know about other platforms.
OSM is not that user friendly as Google Maps for sure, but if you really want you really can replace GMaps. It probably heavily depends on your country and if the OSM community is active there, but for example here in Germany the mapping information is basically on par with GMaps
How do I get directions with OSM?
There are many APPs build on top of OSM that can do directions in a user friendly way. Personally I use MagicEarth, which uses OSM but isn’t itself open source. They include live traffic from some other nav provider.
My goal was to degoogle my phone and MagicEarth was the app which came closest, but I bet you can find all sorts of webapps or fully open source ways to get directions if you don’t care for live traffic.
Gotta look at that. Live traffic info is one of those things, that OSM lacks…
Is there no browser version? Do I have to get the app?
MagicEarth is only an app.
If you want web based OSM routing you have to look at other services which there are many of. Here are some examples:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions
https://routing.openstreetmap.de/
https://maps.openrouteservice.org
On the wiki you can find a lot more:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routing_software
Visit openstreetmap.org or osm.org for short and where you can search for a place there’s an icon with arrows beside it. Hit that and then you can put in the From and To. You can pick car routing or bike routing or walking.
But no public transit?
AFAIK someone is working on it. But the problem is the high dynamics of public transport. Routes and schedules get changed quite often, schedules might be quite irregular (think only Sunday at 3:14). And all that data has to be stored offline. Stops might be changed do to construction work for a week. And that is in the optimal case: In some countries the bus comes when it comes, and stops if it wants to stop.
Currently you can see where the lines of a bus or the metro go, but that’s about it, I think.
You have to use an app for that. OSM is mostly a big database with an API access to it. There are a lot of them out there with a lot of different focusses. For navigating with a car OSMand is pretty good. They are on fdroid.
I use brouter to route on OSM.
The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps. OSM is just a (gigantic) database and is in many cases way more complete than GoogleMaps. What people usually associate with OSM is a rendered version of the database focused on what ever the renderer decided: bike lanes, waterways, hiking trails, etc. Many other apps actually use their database: OrganicMaps, Komoot, etc. And even more their rendered tiles. Now there are so many functionalities that this database doesn’t do like geocoding (searching for adresses), reverse geocoding (getting the adress of a point) or route planning, but there are tools for it build on OSM data. e.g. Nominatim does geocoding and graphhopper does routing.
And to be honest, if you’re travelling by bike graphhopper does a way better job at routing than google. An other plus, you can download the complete data for offline usage. All of Europe is only around 60GB.
The thing is, OSM is not comparable with GoogleMaps.
I mean… Yes that’s literally what I said. I don’t know if there is any of these apps that really provide all that Google Maps provides. But I’d be interested if they do.
They will never do, because they are not trying to. AFAIK no one is trying to build FOSS reviews of restaurants/stores, no one is building street view and no one is saving where you live to make the one click from work to home route planning. For me, those are not functions that I need (or want). I need a map that works offline, does route planning (offline) and allows me to display multiple GPX files at the same time.
Does OSMAnd have all that? It does, so for me it’s an alternative. What use case do you have?
Osmand does have a plugin for open reviews or something and I think I saw there were plans to use another source too. I guess, on top of photos from Wikimedia and mapillary it is trying to become a bit like Google Maps in a way…
There is also a plugin for mapillary street view that doesn’t work too bad.
Only missing a Web app for desktop.
Directions using public transit for instance.
Public transit navigation is possible in Osmand but there will not times just the routes and only if the data is present in Openstreetmap and that pretty rare, really depends where you live.
You are supposed to use an app and not the website for navigation and generally looking 1t the map.
On android the best two IMHO are Osmand and Organic Maps but depending on what you what there are others. Many on F-Droid. Osmand also has an ios app.
What if I want to look at the map in my browser though? I like to plan ahead on my desktop before leaving.
As far as I know there is unfortunately no good webapp using OSM.
I guess graphopper is probably the best but I don’t personally like it that much. You can create a route with it 1nd send the gpx file to your phone and open it Osmand and then follow that. It’s nothing like using the Google maps feature send to phone or email because you can’t really modify it then.
That sounds much too complicated yea
- Digital wallets (for things like cc, ID, coupons)
- Map apps (like google maps)
- Dating apps
