janguv @ janguv @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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121

Joined

2 yr. ago

Let's just turn everything into TikTok, hey.

Well the sync across devices would be the main thing that people would deem worth having, just not at that price.

Yup that's my one issue, otherwise I'd swap in a heartbeat. You can do it through nextcloud servers but not any free one so far as I can see. Wouldn't know where to start with a paid alternative.

Edit: Podverse, also FOSS, has a sync feature as part of their subscription. It's $18/year. Haven't used it to know how well it works, but much cheaper than Pocket Casts anyway (and a 3 month free trial it seems). It's on F-Droid.

Potentially, I suppose. But then most people who want a pirated copy of an article are probably looking for something with at least the right pagination – makes citation easier. So it depends on how much effort you're willing to give to that endeavour haha. Anything is better than nothing in a pinch though.

Considering the version you were given by the author could be watermarked in some way, and they could get into shit from a publisher if you uploaded it for mass retrieval, you ought not to do this without their express permission. It's different if you had downloaded the article from a journal/database yourself, or if it was some other version (like an unformatted manuscript).

I've been learning French on there for awhile now and it's been extremely effective por moi.

I wouldn't normally comment on a spelling issue, however, in this case...

+1 for LT. The guy that runs it certainly has an open source ethos. The German one despite being a "Complete" series is frustratingly very incomplete, but that aside it was a useful way into the language. The word order explanations were particularly good. Everything is always free and the project as a whole is expanding with the help of volunteers and donations. It's a good thing to be a part of.

Just a pointless comparison really, based on very particular use cases and tastes, taking all the objectivity out of "objectively better".

I would never use an iPhone for a daily device. But for some people it clearly makes the most sense.

Me, I have to block ads at the system level (so I root), I like custom ROMs, sideloading, pirating, tweaking, changing how my phone works and how I work with my phone. On any of those grounds, an iPhone makes zero sense. But most people don't care about any of that, and nor should they really.

Is there a paid tier? I always thought it was all free. Unless it's a donation option?

+1 for MiX. It's FOSS and has everything you could want in a file explorer, functionality wise.

Edit: scratch that. God knows how long I thought it was FOSS for!

You've been gluetun-free all this time?

Doesn't look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they're generally not).

You can. Paysafecard bought with cash. Only issue is you have to use your normal IP to sign up with (not behind a VPN), though you could use a mobile one or a public one somewhere probably.

I would say that was the case in the UK generally about 5 years ago. But WhatsApp increasingly took over as the norm because it was clean, quick, relatively well encrypted, and made sending gifs and stickers easy and fun for the average user. Plus, the youth aren't only wedded to iPhones unlike the US increasingly.

Always wondered how good the Remarkable series is. Have been tempted but the hardware isn't that cheap really. Since discovering the PDF reader of Zotero and running it with a night mode plugin, I've found myself mainly just wanting to use that. The annotations are stored separately as well, so you don't get massively inflated PDF filesizes (though if you want the option to export with embedded annotations, you can do that; you can also import embedded annotations to Zotero and then clear the file of them). Very cool.

So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That's so bizarre to me haha.

You're right that it mustn't be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn't also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of "free as in freedom" either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it's not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.

And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.

Oh really? That's surprising. Always been smooth for me and I much prefer the UX

Teams

shudders

Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.

Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.

Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.