Free and Open Source Software

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.

Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite... how different those are.

And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can't easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.

Forums and Wikis vs. Discord

Yes I know, they shouldn't serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays ~~people~~ communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.

You forgot the biggest most originalist one of all. Email.

I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS' map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.

Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

It's hard to beat GIMP.

RSS was absolutely the shit

XMPP is very underappreciated.

Agree on RSS.

Don't have enough experience with XMPP.

IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)

Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it's what old school forums lacked.

i3wm

It's now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same since its initial launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when it launched. I don't need "new" features because the existing features are more than enough.

USENET. Replacements aren't distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don't have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.

audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.

Usenet use to be great. Predated forums and Reddit. Frankly the threadiverse is just now going a bit back to that concept.

The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I've ever seen.

IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.

vi, lynx, mutt, and of course X11 > wayland

though also controversially, I'll take systemD over sysVinit

Not much. That's the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.

Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.

Emacs. Still the best way to edit any kind of text in any context.

Apache. I get why nginx is the new hotness, but apache/mod_event still slaps.

Emacs vs. VS Code

I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.

Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.