On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

I mean, those services do exist. You have that middle ground. Services like Proton exist. And you can use PixelFed instead of Instagram. The issue with trying to use a FOSS frontend to a proprietary backend… well, it’s already a broken system at that point. And Linux lands on a spectrum of building your own car from scratch and dealing with those problems yourself all the way to someone else maintaining it but you’re limited in scope to what it can technically do unless you go under the hood yourself, and that all depends on the distro.

Computers are technological wonders. Making everything simple and easy actually takes a ridiculous amount of work. So doing stuff yourself is absolutely going to be more difficult than paying for a mainstream turnkey solution where they offset the cost by selling your data or showing you ads. Anything that’s proprietary and private will always cost a significant amount more.

I feel you, but looking at it in perspective the foss world has come a long way and I hope it will get better and better. I try to carry on because I feel it is the right thing to do and I’m encouraged to actually do more with less, but I don’t have any critical task to perform on foss stuff either.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

I am pro-opensource when possible. I use linux on desktop and laptop, I use foss android apps where available, and am happy to keep that trend alive.

That said, I am not a foss purist. There are things in my life where you gotta do what you gotta do. I have google’d android(a pixel even), I make use of steam and other proprietary game stores, I of course bank using bank things. Sometimes I waste time looking for an alternative only to find I’ve wasted my pre-bed time and Ive stayed up late chasing my tail. It’s just easier to live well.

One thing about FOSS ui is that as frustrating as it is to be forced into someone’s esoteric workflow, it isnt always counter intuitive, just different from how the mainstream does it. There have been a few foss programs where once it clicks I kinda get where they were coming from(and of course many others where I feel the devs are intentionally out there spreading chaos)

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Please let us know if you figure this out. There are at least a few talented, detail-oriented developers who dislike both ads corporate life.

There is no ethical way to monetize software because the unethical thing is capitalism itself.

Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Yes it’s called taxation and public funding.

Governments should prioritize floss projects when running their infrastructure and other projects. Our money is paying for these projects. We should have access to all the products of that labor.

Furthermore they should give out money for non-business cases like games and other stuff just like arts funding.

We have private corps stepping in to do this sort of thing with “google summer of code”. But it would be better through some nominally democratic structure.

In all cases governments and their agents should be good floss community members. “Free like puppies”

Like another user said, take as much as you can comfortable handle at one time, as FOSS cold-turkey can be exhausting.

It’s a bit like trying to stop using Nestle or another multinational’s shit, once you realize how many brands and sub-brands are owned by the big bad, it can make one feel pointless doing it (like just switching from one to another big bad). Replace one thing at a time to make it easier on yourself.

Think of it this way. If FOSS is a rebel movement in the eyes of a world oligopolized by Big Tech, you can’t just expect to overturn the core in a day. You take it slow and let the open-source movement and your desire to try out promising FOSS software one at a time drive you to become a knowledgeable power user, rather than trying to force upon yourself a lifestyle you might not necessarily want at this moment.

Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…

Sometimes you just wanna do a simple thing and you cannot do it and that really undermines your self esteem.

You try to find little working solutions when big techs with armies of engeneers and programmers are working against you.

Sometimes you find half of your software stops working and you need to go and understand why, fixing or checking for alternatives…

All of those issues are also present in proprietary software. Not sure why you think free and open source software is unique in that regard.

In my experience, FOSS generally works better than the proprietary alternative. It tends to have fewer features, but the features it does have are designed to be useful to the user rather than to collect more money from the user, and tend to be much more thoroughly debugged. My favorite example of this right now is Thunderbird versus Microsoft Outlook; the latter has plenty of bells and whistles, but trying to use it is an utterly infuriating experience.

Also, FOSS alternatives tend to be sparse in topics that most programmers don’t personally care about or don’t have access to. For example, there are a great many FOSS text editors, because every programmer needs one, whereas FOSS business accounting software is not so common, because most programmers don’t own businesses.

Aurora store stopping to work, apps getting blocked on lineage os or rooted phones, Reddit cleaning out all those amazing third party apps, Linux that wanna make you destroy your pc at times, Firefox remaining the only real alternative to chromium (only god knows for how long yet), google wanting to DRM everything, ig blocking my account because i was using barinsta (i cannot even delete it), Newpipe getting stuck after 1/4 of the video.

That’s a problem with proprietary software (i.e. proprietary apps and websites), not free and open source software (i.e. your browser, operating system, and Reddit client).

When a business refuses to do business with me because I use FOSS, I take that as an insult, and take my business elsewhere if I can. I suggest you do the same.

Can’t we just find a new way of monetize stuff without ads?

Not as long as we practice capitalism, no. As long as investors demand that businesses grow faster than inflation, those businesses will look for ways to take more and more of your money, forever, until they finally collapse, and then the cycle of enshittification starts anew. What you want is stability and equality, but stability and equality are anathema to someone who wants to be richer than everyone else.

So, regarding convenience, sadly my apps are mostly non-FOSS. These non-FOSS devs have the advantage that they can see the source code of their FOSS alternatives. They also have FAR more workforce. So, we’ll probably never reach the point where general FOSS is superior to closed source software.

The area that’s primarily FOSS to me is coding. With ChatGPT it’s got damn easy to build daily productivity tools that meet one’s specific needs.

Security is also generally better with FOSS, but, yeah, I admit that the UI is less convenient than the proprietary ones…

So, regarding convenience, sadly my apps are mostly non-FOSS. These non-FOSS devs have the advantage that they can see the source code of their FOSS alternatives. They also have FAR more workforce. So, we’ll probably never reach the point where general FOSS is superior to closed source software.

The area that’s primarily FOSS to me is coding. With ChatGPT it’s got damn easy to build daily productivity tools that meet one’s specific needs.

Security is also generally better with FOSS, but, yeah, I admit that the UI is less convenient than the proprietary ones…

There is one good example of a good FOSS project with reliable funding and a thriving community, which is blender.

You know why blender is a success unlike other projects . Because it a very complicated piece of software that most of the community can’t just fork or start another project. so for FOSS projects to thrive they need more convergence of developpers to the same project . rather than divergence of efforts into multiple of projects. I know that this is not how FOSS works. but the reality is that without an urge to devellop projects in rivalary with the commercial ones. the resulting quality will always be mediocre.

another problem is the lack of proper documentation, It it very hard and time consuming to get familiarised with complex project codes. many of them are lacking proper documentation to encouraged newer devs to join in. the reality is that this takes time away from coding into documentation, but its an important ressource to encourage growth and participtation.

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