#30DayFOSSChallenge - Week 2

2023-04-18

This post is a little bit overdue, apologies for that. However, I'm still going strong in my efforts and excited to share what I've been up to.

Successes

At the beginning of this week I was stuck in a bit of a rut. As I'll mention in the next section, I got stuck trying (and failing) to find youtube alternatives. Then I spent way too long looking for Todoist alternatives. Luckily, that one has a happy ending as you'll see next.

Todos (Vikunja)

This one has blown me away so far. I did it, I've replaced Todoist. I loved Todoist. My partner and I used it to share a grocery list. I used it to organize all the things I need to do on all of my various projects. I am the kind of person that cannot function without a very organized brain dump, and Todoist was that for me. At one point I even paid for the premium.

I thought for sure I'd find no replacement nearly good enough, or have to use some cobbled together solutions. But I found Vikunja. I was pretty hesitant at first, because it's clearly very much still under active development. The app isn't even available in Google Play or F-Droid, you need to grab the .apk directly from their repository.

But to my extremely pleasant surprise, it works amazingly. It does all the things I use todoist for - shared lists, kanbans, repeating tasks with strange periodicity. It even does more that I haven't messed around with (something called a Gantt Chart, for instance). Setting up a docker compose for it was simple thanks to the documents on the website and my previous weeks of experimenting.

The web interface so far seems to run perfectly. The app (at least, the android one) is definitely unpolished and missing some features. Sometimes it's a little quirky. But it works well enough to use daily.

I can't sing this project's praises enough.

Games (OpenTTD, Xonotic, Pioneers)

This is a sillier portion, but an important one to myself and many other people. We all like to stay entertained. What a better way than finding some FOSS games.

I'm already very familiar with OpenTTD, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in a chill logistics game. I think it scratches a similar itch to Factorio. I haven't actually been playing it lately, because I played a round of it a couple months ago (as I do about once a year). I just wanted to give it a shout-out here.

What I have been playing recently is Xonotic. I grew up in the age of Quake and Unreal Tournament. This is very much a fully realized arena shooter in the same vein as those. It's wonderfully nostalgic. There's enough games going on at any time that I have a few choices of game mode to jump into. The only issue I'm having is that all the active players are way better than me. Please play with me so I have someone who hasn't been playing this every day for years.

Another thing I've played recently is Pioneers, a Catan clone. I don't want to mislead you, I would not put this on the same level as OpenTTD or Xonotic. I would say both those games are as worthy of playing as anything you can find on steam. Pioneers is a little rougher and simpler. It's a full Catan clone, expansions and all, and it's great at that. The devs have obviously put a lot of love into it. But it's not the greatest looking or most friendly UI. I might play this if I'm really looking to play some Catan with distant friends, but otherwise it's more of a novelty for me.

Go play OpenTTD and Xonotic right now. Play them with me sometime.

Struggles

Video

I'm going to be super honest here. I don't think I get PeerTube. I think I understand federation, and I love mastodon. But what's going on with PeerTube? It seems like the few major instances that exist are discouraging people from making accounts directly on them unless they're posting videos? Doesn't that hurt discovery, because then the instances aren't federating?

I looked for quite a while for good PeerTube content. And I found some! But it was a struggle, and I had to look very actively. Looking at PeerTube instances was not very helpful, despite that being the obvious place to look. Instead, I ended up going finding a great mastodon account, Fedi.Video that links to many. My favorite so far is Veronica Explains. Originally I intended to post a list, but I just haven't found others I'm as enthusiastic about. Maybe another day.

Please, please, let me know if you know some good PeerTube channels or another good FOSS source of videos.

What Others Are Up To

Looks like a very android-heavy week for others. If you've got an Android phone, check out the F-Droid store, which lists only FOSS software, including many that aren't on Google Play.

F00FC7C8 has done some very thorough Spring Cleaning on Android.
Chris Frisen installed F-Droid and has been playing a minesweeper clone called Antimine. Nice topical coincidence. He also is getting used to OpenOffice.

Other Thoughts

I think I'm actually approaching the limit on what I can do on a personal level to use less proprietary things. Outside of work, I'm not using very many proprietary things at all now. My next goal is to look into hosting some services for friends and organizations I'm in, to make it easier for them to use more FOSS. One possibility is setting up Mailman 3 for Agora, which is currently running purely in Mailman 2 mailing lists - 3 also has a web interface, which makes it much more modern and approachable.

PS: Have thoughts about this post? Email me at nix@nullarch.com or message me on mastodon at @nix@social.stlouis.com.