Daeraxa
I was using LibreOffice on everything but for some unknown reason it just flat out stopped working on my machine so I installed OnlyOffice and honestly I much prefer it.
I find this a very odd take… You are free to say whatever you want, however people are also free to not listen to you. Why is the freedom to not listen seen as a “lesser” freedom than the freedom to say what you want?
The main benefit of federation like Mastodon and Lemmy is that if you and like-minded people in your community don’t wish to listen to vitriol being spewed then you don’t have to. Don’t like it? Go and find an instance that does tolerate it and does want to listen.
You knocked the nail on the head with the first sentence.
The thing is that instances are not the individuals themselves but spaces for individuals
With federation you can join like minded spaces, nobody is forcing anybody to join a particular instance. The whole thing is about freedom and choice yet you seem to want to limit that choice for people?
I’ve been keeping a list of alternatives for a while now that I really like:
- Pulsar - An actively developed fork of Atom once Microsoft killed it off. Disclosure: I’m on the Pulsar team so I’m more than a little biased here but if you want to get involved we are always after people who want to contribute and we have a very friendly and active Discord server. First thing we did was re-implement the package backend and migrate it so we were able to keep the thousands and thousands of community packages for download.
- Lite-XL - A really lightweight and fast editor written in C and Lua that is very actively developed. I use this on some less powerful systems.
- Lapce - Another lightweight and very fast editor written in Rust and is in the middle of moving to their own UI framework. Not that extensible at the moment but supports LSP plugins.
Then for terminal based editors I really like Helix which is vim-like but uses a selection -> action model (like Kakoune). I really like it because it requires almost no configuration.
I made a similar post a while ago if you want to see some more answers - https://lemmy.ml/post/1990593
At least for the moment I’m doing it because it is fun. The main project I’m involved with is a fork of something that was pushed to the side and killed off by the big corporation developing it. Are there other tools that do the same job? Yes. But the fact that a small community came together to save the application they liked and is having fun working on it is the only justification I need.
Entirely accidental. I’m not a developer and at most I had dabbled with a Linux in the past but nothing beyond a couple of VirtualBox VMs, I just didn’t see or have a need for it.
Around late 2020 the note taking app Evernote changed a bunch of stuff. I had been using Evernote for years and suddenly they updated to a new feature-poor app and placed a bunch of restrictions on the free accounts. That prompted me to look at “free” (free as in money, not as in freedom) alternatives. I stumbled upon Joplin and really liked it. I noticed a few things I thought could be improved as well as a few bugs so I joined and started hanging around on the forums. At some point I realised I could probably fix one of these small issues myself (without any programming knowledge beyond some SQL) and, with some help and encouragement from some of the maintainers, was able to build the app from source, fix the issue and create a PR. I then got more involved with the community and started to improve the documentation.
That is when the open source bug bit me. I installed Linux as it just seemed (and was) easier than doing this kind of thing on Windows. I was invited to the Joplin team, got involved with Google Summer of Code as a mentor for Joplin and otherwise really got into it.
Then it all stepped up massively last year when GitHub announced they were killing off the Atom text editor. Whilst looking for alternatives I got involved with atom-community which then split off to create a fork of Atom, Pulsar which was a mad rush to get everything together. Not only save what we could of Atom (the package repository wasn’t open source) but also to keep momentum going and make sure that those people using Atom still had somewhere to go and try to gather some sort of community whilst it was still somewhat relevant.
And yeah, otherwise now almost exclusively use open source stuff and try to get involved with the communities of other open source projects.
Non fiction: Physical all the way Fiction: Whilst I like physical books I rarely make myself time to read them so I mostly consume them in audiobook format.
I’ve never really got on well with ebooks, I had a cheap kindle about 8 years ago and I think I maybe read about 3 or 4 books on it - in fact I think it was Hugh Howey’s Silo series and nothing else.