Amarok 1.4. Loved that thing. Everything that came afterwards in both terms of version and other similar apps even the mainstream ones do not get close to how good Amarok used to be.

In light of recent IBM/RH activity those keeping the old ways, and user choice, alive are more important than ever.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:NeddySeagoon/YeOldeGentoo_2021_Edition

Alsa may be a bit awkward but the other stuff is just more chaos on top of it, it's not an alternative.

I try wayland once a year or so, maybe one year I will manage more than a few hours or days.

lvm/luks/ext4 is still better than btrfs which still hasn't gotten round to addressing encryption, big hopes for bcachefs.

Sftp. At work we are switching to api and it sucks in comparison. Even it works its great but when it doesn't its harder to fix than sftp.

I've tried replacing closed-source feed reader apps, but it's hard when most of the focus is in self-hosted webapps, paid services or the UI is very uncomfortable. Also, mobile apps for this are counted and I just can't with their UIs.

Those are protocols, not software.