• 17 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2022

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  • Project: Joplin joplinapp.org !joplinapp@sopuli.xyz

    What it does right: Focus on user experience by aligning aims of product with aim of users.

    Everything it does is foss, however its main revenue achieving product (cloud sync target) is focused on convenience rather than vendor lock-in. So it incentivizes the project to cater to its users.

    What’s so unique about it: due to lack of monetary incentive a lot of oss projects simply forget about the user and serve mostly to themselves. They fail to listen to feedback because listening to feedback means loss of resources rather than gaining them. As a result many critical bugs are unfixed for decades and UI is so dated no new users want to use the product.

    TLDR: don’t forget to create revenue generating module along with the main foss product





  • I think many people coming to Linux having experienced some significant problems. Something didn’t work for them and they started to look for alternatives

    Let’s call typical user David, he maybe has an older PC or laptop. He tried to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and now everything runs much slower. He cannot understand why and answers online are unhelpful. Meanwhile he cannot come back to Windows 7 because it’s support is over. What to do now?

    All David’s data (calendar, mail, contacts, chats, documents etc etc) is locked in proprietary systems and now it’s difficult to get out of there. He tries to move to another platform but can’t because he’s restricted by little quirks and lack of support for features he needs.

    Still believing that he could unbloat his system David comes across community of an open source app cloud platform – nextcloud. Surprisingly this platform doesn’t want his money or tries to lock him in. It works on any system, it’s got amazing support and community constantly creates new exciting home made modules to do some small but very welcome adjustments.

    He realizes that such community is there for operating system as well. A year later he “runs Arch, btw”

    This is just one path of a person who wanted his laptop to run as fast as it used to. Other people may dislike overreliance on big tech or would like to support the underdog – independent devs.


    Bonus:
    First thing I ever gotten from Linux was KDE connect: it didn’t work on Windows but it’s amazing on Linux. It connects devices between each other and let’s you sync the clipboard, use PC keyboard on your phone, send files locally (real fast), switch music tracks on other devices, change volume and a lot more.