Hi everyone! For… I guess over a year now? I’ve been observing and trying out lots of software recommended by the privacy community and internet as a whole. With that time, I’ve been able to slowly put together a list of all the software I personally believe to be the best for their own various reasons. I finally have enough to be able to share it with all of you!
I’m also looking for feedback. I haven’t tried all the software on that list, and I’m sure there’s software I’ve never heard of that needs added. I’m looking for your feedback on what you think should be added, removed, or changed. That includes the list itself, if you think there are any design improvements.
Do note: Any software marked with a ⭐️ I am not looking for feedback on. This is software that I firmly believe is the best of the best in its category, and likely will not be changed. However, if there is a major issue with the software that you can provide direct proof of, then there is a chance it will be changed in the next release. There are no grantees.
The sections marked with ℹ️ are lacking, and can use your help! Some software there may not be the best one, or may have many software or sections missing. I am absolutely looking for help and feedback here, and would love your help!
My goal with this project is to help people find the best software from many standpoints, and to prove that there really are good open source alternatives for almost anything! I hope this helps someone, and I look forward to your feedback!
Thank you all for reading and taking the time to look through my list!
‘Open source’ is deliberately vague, a strategy designed to attack libre software to, led us astray, away from software freedom.
“Open source” simply means the source code is available to the public. Not all software on my list is Libre.
Open source is generally understood as libre, and an OSI approved license.
I think you’re thinking of source-available.
Additional reading: https://news.itsfoss.com/open-source-source-available/
Anyway, thanks for the list!
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Banning us from control over our own computing 🚩, why would I ever begin to trust them with my privacy.
Because you can look through the source code yourself to ensure that it respects your privacy, and make changes if there is something you don’t like. You don’t have to trust anyone with your own computing, because you can run it yourself.
So, it’s libre software?
All Libre software is open source, not all open source software is Libre.
As I already said, why would I ever begin to trust anti-libre software which already bans us from control of our own computing 🚩
You don’t have to. I encourage you to make your own list of preferred software, and share it with the community.
Now plz do hardware
For instant messengers, I would also add Wire and Matrix/Element (Matrix is the protocol, Element is the messenger that uses the protocol).
https://matrix.org/ - https://element.io/
Both good open source secure messengers. Matrix is made by a type of non-profit foundation made to guide the development of the core protocol, and Wire is a Swiss company staking their future on how secure their messenger is for Enterprise applications. They both have different philosophies on how their operations are ran, but they’re both open source and secure.
They’re not as privacy respecting as Briar or SimpleX, but they’re also more aimed at organizations and groups that plan on self-hosting and potentially not federating with the rest of the network to help silo their organizational data. Wire obviously aims towards Enterprise customers, but Matrix does as well, despite a different approach. Matrix has had growth with both German and French governments for various secure communications systems within their government bodies based on the matrix protocol. So good messengers, just aimed at a different group of people as Briar/SimpleX.
So maybe they could have their own “Enterprise Chat” section? I dunno, just my thoughts.
Thank you. Was going to suggest matrix/elements. But you explained it better ;)
It has really improved the last years. Especially the e2e encryption key sharing, and verfication system vs what was before.Hi! Thanks for the feedback!
The “Video Conferencing Tools” section is my aim at enterprise applications. My goal there was to find an app that is available for Online, Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and iOS that supports group chats, video calls, and screen sharing. I was only able to find Infomaniak kMeet, which I’m not even sure fits the bill. If you have any suggestions that meet these requirements, I would be happy to add them!
In the meantime, feel free to make an issue on the repo suggesting these services!
There is BigBlueButton. It’s more focused in educational usecases (online classes and the like) but it works just fine for everything else. You need to host it yourself, but there are hosted instances out there. I for example use senfcall.
But I think we are talking about different things here. What Chanuk was talking about (I think) is a ms-teams or slack alternative, not a zoom or oracle WebEx alternative. Basically Discord but for business. Sidenote: there is a open source Discord clone called revolt
Element meets all of that criteria
To my knowledge, Element has no way to share the desktop/screen. If I am wrong about this, please let me know!
Email : tutanota (mail.tutanota.com) Notes : quillpad (https://quillpad.github.io/) Distro : mint
Hi! I appreciate the suggestions! However, this list is not designed to be comprehensive. It is designed to present the best and nothing less. While those are great pieces of software, there are already better alternatives available on the list. The Linux Distros section will be overhauled soon though, so maybe Linux Mint will be added!
My bad, I saw multiple app store listed, so I assumed you listed at least a couple options.
Imo tutanota ils still better than proton since they’ve never been compromises by sharing user data with the authorities.
As for Quillpad, I never tried Joplin but Quillpad is pretty awesome, deserves more recognition. Also it’s les than 5Mo whereas Joplin is nearly 100Mo and asking for permissions like geoloc. I get that it’s open source but this sub is about privacy, and Quillpad seems more adequate on that matter.
man i wish there was a more powerful alternative to gimp hope gimp 3.0 solves it and currently am using the affinity photo 6 month free trial
How about not hosting this list in Microsoft’s GitHub?
lemmy hosts their source code on github and alot of floss sites uses github also i agree with you not to use github dont understand why people use github for markdown
A lot of others do it, that’s your argument?
Creating mirrors on other platforms such as GitLab and Codeberg is on my to-do list. Thank you!
Nice list. I chuckled at the fact that the bitcoin section does not recommend bitcoin :) We’re also here on lemmy, if you ever need help or just want to say hi
Hi! Thanks for taking a look. I used a template to categorize some of the software early on, and this slipped into the initial release. Thanks for noticing! I’ll rename it accordingly.
Why KeePassXC over Bitwarden or VaultWarden?
One of many reasons is the nonfree nature of Bitwarden. You have to pay for a premium account to use certain methods of 2FA, for example (last I checked).
Yes. That’s true. Not to be argumentative, does KeePass have the features that are paywalled by Bitwarden?
KeePassXC has support for hardware security keys as a form of 2FA, so yes :)
TIL Thank You
I’m no expert, but I think KeePassXC doesn’t need to sign in to a server somewhere.
You can also self-host bitwarden.
This still requires a server setup, focused entirely on passwords. Why do that?
Why not just use KeePass or KeePassXC, and use Syncthing for this and general files, or KeePassXC’s keeshare sync to sync the files without any hosting, server, or other services.
Extremely simplified tldr: both of these are like a authenticated private bittorrent, where the “tracker” only helps you find yourself on another devices, no data is ever sent outside of your authenticaed devices, and all transmissions are encrypted as well.
Few reasons, with the most important being convenience. Syncthing is going to see just a binary blob as the password storage is encrypted. This means it is impossible for syncthing to do proper synchronization of items inside the vault. Generally this is not a problem, but it is if you happen to edit the vault on multiple devices and somehow syncthing didn’t sync yet the changes (this is quite common for me on android, where syncthing would drain the battery quite quickly if it’s always actively working). For bitwarden on the other hand the sync happens within the context of the application, so you can have easy n-way merge of changes because its change is part of a change set with time etc.
Besides that, the moment you use syncthing from a threat model point of view, you are essentially in the same situation: you have a server (in case of syncthing - servers) that sees your encrypted password data. That’s exactly what bitwarden clients do, as the server only has access to encrypted data, the clients do the heavy lifting. If the bitwarden server is too much of a risk, then you should worry also of the (random, public, owned by anybody) servers for syncthing that see your traffic.
Keeshare from my understanding does use hosting, it uses cloud storage as a cloud backend for stateful data (Gdrive, Dropbox etc.), so it’s not very different. The only difference would be if you use your private storage (say, Synology Drive), but then you could use the same device to run the bit/vaultwarden server, so that’s the same once again.
The thing is, from a higher level point of view the security model can only be one of a handful of cases:
- the password data only remains local
- the password data is sync’d with device-to-device (e.g. ssh) connections
- the password data is sync’d using an external connection that acts as a bridge or as a stateful storage, where all the clients connect to.
The more you go down in the list, the more you get convenience but you introduce a bit of risk. Tl;Dr keepass with keyshare/syncthing has the same risks (or more) than a Bitwarden setup with bitwarden server.
In addition to all the above, bitwarden UX is I would say more developed, it has a better browser plugin, nice additional tools and other convenience features that are nice bonuses. It also allows me to have all my family using a password manager (including my tech illiterate mom), without them having to figure out anything, with the ability to share items, perform emergency accesses etc.
There’s often the ‘security vs. convenience’ tradeoff, but for most people you have both sides with Bitwarden over KeePass.
Bitwarden is undoubtedly more convenient. If you can create an account, you can use it. I have a family account, and have both of my parents using it. The love it now, but given the friction to get them there in the first place, it would impossible to get them on KeePass. Especially because they wanted their passwords on all devices.
Regardless of using Vaultwarden or KeePass, you need to have quite a bit of expertise to self host. And you are trusting your own ability to secure your attack surface. I’m sure many if not most in this thread can, but it would take me quite a while to convince myself I have. I would much rather trust security professionals.
Somewhat, although, potentially related. Have you seen Bitwarden’s git repos? It is immaculately organized.
Consistent, clear naming convention. There is literally one called ‘self-host’. If you put that much effort into keeping your code that useable/available/auditable etc. Oh yea. I’m going to trust you to handle security for me
In this circumstance, you can turn on simple versioning for the password vault. It will keep both vault copies and you can merge your changes together manually in the event this happens, no loss of data.
For mobile I just give syncthing full permission to run in the background and have never had issues with the syncing on the folders I designate. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I believe this can be solved.
However KeePassXC’s sync feature does sync the vault.
Syncthing does not have a server. The relay only serves to match your current client (device A) with the IP of your other client (device B). Nothing else passes through it unless you opt into using relaying in case you have NAT issues.
If you are paranoid, the software is open source and you can host your own relays privately, but again, it is similar to a matchmaking service, not data transfer.
Syncthing is a direct device to device transfer. No server in the middle unless you want it.
Agree on the versioning issue. In fact I mentioned that the issue is convenience here. It is also data corruption, but you probably are aware of that if you setup something like this. Manually merging changes is extremely annoying and eventually you end up forgetting it to do it, and you will discover it when you need to login sometime in the future (I used keepass for years in the past, this was constantly an issue for me). With any natively sync’d application this is not a problem at all. Hence +1 for convenience to bitwarden.
However KeePassXC’s sync feature does sync the vault.
How does it work though? From this I see you need to store the database in a cloud storage basically.
For mobile I just give syncthing full permission to run in the background and have never had issues with the syncing on the folders I designate.
I use this method for my notes (logseq). Never had synchronization problem, but a lot of battery drain if I let syncthing running in the background.
Nothing else passes through it unless you opt into using relaying in case you have NAT issues.
I guess this can be very common or even always the case for people using some ISPs. In general though, you are right. There is of course still the overall risk of compromise/CVEs etc. that can lead to your (encrypted) data being sent elsewhere, but if all your devices can establish direct connections between each other, your (encrypted) data is less exposed than using a fixed server.
If you are paranoid, the software is open source and you can host your own relays privately,
This would also defeat basically all the advantages of using keepass (and family) vs bitwarden. You would still have your data in an external server, you still need to manage a service (comparable to vaultwarden), and you don’t get all the extra benefits on bitwarden (like multi-user support etc.).
To be honest I don’t personally think that the disclosure of a password manager encrypted data is a big deal. As long as a proper password is used, and modern ciphers are used, even offline decryption is not going to be feasible, especially for the kind of people going after my passwords. Besides, for most people the risk of their client device(s) being compromised and their vault being accessible (encrypted) is in my opinion way higher than -say- Bitwarden cloud being compromised (the managed one). This means that for me there are no serious reasons to use something like keepass (anymore) and lose all the convenience that bitwarden gives. However, risk perception is personal ultimately.
There’s obviously a zillion open source games you could add, but I’m partial to pixel dungeon and its many variants
I’ll certainly add it, thanks!
My latest favourite is missing: Note Taking Apps:
Joplin is good for organising text-based notes, so I’m not surprised to see that on your list. But xournal is a for mixed drawing / hand-writing / text, etc. So it’s a different use-case to Joplin. (It would be perfect if Joplin supported xournal notes; so that you could write with xournal and then organise with Joplin. … But that hasn’t yet come to pass.)
Thanks for the list! Sharing this with lazy friends.
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Hi! I agree that it is getting cluttered with emojis. I plan to revamp this today to clear it up a bit. Thanks for your feedback!
Edit: Decluttered in version 5.2024.09.15.1
use readme badges.
Thanks! I’ll give it a gander. I was off hiking today, and used some crappy app to track my progress. I know there’s an open source ware that can do it, without invading my privacy; it’s time to start using that ‘ware.
Trail Sense mentioned in my list has options for tracking hiking progress. Unfortunately, open source health apps are few and far between.
Gnome Health and my GNU Health works well. Linux only though
For health apps I like medilog: https://fdroid.gitlab.io/jekyll-fdroid/packages/com.zell_mbc.medilog/
I’ll be sure to check it out, thank you!
Love that you have Joplin on the list! I started using that recently to handle all of my notes and it’s been great.
I’m still on Google Keep. Please, tell me why I should switch.
Your data has monetary value to google. Giving them access, without getting any money from them (or even knowing what ways it will be used) is not something you must do.
If the app provides enough value that is unique to it, then thats OK, but if a data-respecting alternative exists that costs nothing to download or use, and fits the same (or more) needs, then using it just makes sense.
If thats not you, then thats ok.
I also use keep, but thats because I haven’t degoogled my phone yet, so they already have most if not all of that data. Once I am in a position to be able to root and remove google without risking bricking my device (currently unhoused, and just cannot risk it rn), then I plan on never touching the damn thing.
To each their own.
Your data has monetary value to google. Giving them access, without getting any money from them (or even knowing what ways it will be used) is not something you must do.
To be fair, while you may not be getting money in its direct form (cash, bank deposit, etc) from Google, they are providing you a service which costs them money for free. So they are providing something of monetary value.
Only the individual can determine if their data is worth that free (to the individual, not free to Google) service. I’m assuming that most people in a privacy community would be against that, though.
- Joplin has a lot of customization
- Can store your notes wherever you want (Dropbox, WebDAV, OneDrive, Nextcloud, Joplin’s own cloud service, etc)
- Backups can optionally be encrypted (you set a password used to decrypt them and store that somewhere)
- You can make multiple notebooks in the hierarchy structure you want
- Open source
- Markdown (if you’re into that)
- Plugin support
- Tags
