A direct comparison between the FDroid store and Google's PlayStore isn't possible. When you open the FDroid store, you see all recent apps. You can see everything, and even search in alphabetical order; start to finish. Google will never let you see everything, because of the unfiltered garbage on their platform. They …
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Feature-comparisons always turn into a murky mess when people compare proprietary software to FOSS. The proprietary software tends to try to do everything, while the FOSS-tools try to do everything by doing nothing.

Office 365 vs Libreoffice

Office 365 advertises a chonky list of features:

• Powerpoint
• Word Processing …

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Software licences neatly fall into three categories - open, closed, and the uncertain - a kind of Schrödinger's licence, which must become one of the other two types in time.

Ignorance can only end with knowledge or death. Once someone fixes a mistake in their thinking, by understanding the truth, and how they made …

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The xz fiasco has made fascinating reading, and brought up some real questions about open source development and overall safety. It's also brought up a slightly malformed thoughts on 'open source vs proprietary'.

If comparisons were to juxtapose operating system safety, then it seems misplaced, given that Windows, OSX, …

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I regularly see indie artists posting some great images, and encouraging open-source-adjacent use, but messing up the latter completely.

Just to clarify:

• Professional artists probably understand art licences well enough, and likely don't care about 'open source'. This isn't a post for them.
• Other artists don't care …

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XMPP can be a nightmare to operate, but I still think it provides better long-term benefits than Signal, because XMPP without any encryption gives all the benefits of distribution, which grant better protection than encryption, overall.

XMPP is a Nightmare

My journey with XMPP so far has been:

• Use OTR encryption.
• Ask …

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Every time Adobe does something horrible, hordes of Adobe Photoshop users attempt to migrate - generally to either GIMP or Inkscape.

They arrive and start a standard string of complaints:

• This UI is bad (it should be like Photoshop, but it's not)
• GIMP can't do vector graphics properly.
• Inkscape can't do bitmaps …

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'Organizers', 'wikis', 'note-taking apps', et c. - these apps are mostly Markdown with an attached GUI. Today, I'm trying each of them out for twenty minutes apiece.

AnyType

• Site: anytype.io
• Size: 383 MB
• AnyType comes encrypted, meaning you can't easily grab the raw markdown notes and stick them in a Git, or do much …

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I once met a man who, having talked to some FOSS-enthusiast, felt moved, and told me he was sure to use 'free' software, but not that 'open source', software. His attempts, of course, would be futile, because the words refer to the same software.

The Free Software Foundation (could they not at least have called …

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Shopping

If you ask Google what to buy, it wants to show you the products from companies which have paid it the most, or products that it owns, such as Google's Office suite.

Friends & Activities

Someone posts up an event - skating, clubbing, or gardening - whatever it is, the algorithm correctly detects that this …

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