Ask HN: in 2025 Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: in 2025 Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

31 pointsMugiballa721 comments

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Printers

- https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

- https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/HP_Inc.

- https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Brother_ink_lockout_%26_...

Ironic that printers were the genesis for the entire open source movement[1]. "Oops! All Operating Systems!"[2]

[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/2/pivotal-moments-history-...

[2] https://www.capncrunch.com/products/cap-n-crunch-s-oops-all-...

# Apple Preview App

There is no such thing that can display, combine, annotate and export images and pdfs in such an elegant drag and drop way. It's just so useful and quick, there is no competition.

This. For me it’s almost 50% of the reasons to stay in Apple’s walled garden

Jira.

For Confluence, Bookstack is close. But for Jira everything else is just so miserably bad in comparison.

Is there a good to do list app?

I'm thinking of forking one to run it through some LLMs (e.g. shopping list), but I haven't found any I'm happy with. I might just open source one myself if that's the case.

You might want to take a look at https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/task-management--to-do-l... if you haven't already.

Wasn't aware of this. Excellent resource, thanks!

Surely one of the 10000 todo list apps we get every year out of coding bootcamps will be good by now. /s

It's also a common interview question before the standard became movie listings. I believe the bootcamp and university standard is food delivery apps now.

There's plenty of code out there, but the student ones are underengineered and the interview ones tend to be overengineered.

https://www.mytinytodo.net/

I have been using this!

Paint.net. There's GIMP and Krita which are significantly more complex, and Pinta is wildly unstable in my experience (plus missing some important features). Paint.net perfectly hits that balance between complexity and ease of use for my purposes, and is the only piece of software I really miss from Windows.

Dropbox server implementation. Has a great open source MacOS client, but the server implementation is needed. I would contribute financially towards such a project, as Dropbox will never be satisfied to remain reliable file sync (and I am currently a paying customer). They keep churning features to expand the TAM. This will eventually lead to enshittification. Underlying storage could be any S3 compatible target. Each file could be an object, stretch goal would be deduplication across blocks such that Dropbox’s Pocket storage system does.

https://www.maestral.app/

Google docs

True, I need this one. Especially as ggdocs is barely impossible to customize.

What about OnlyOffice?

The software and hardware in an electric car.

Isn't this way more about regulation rather than the tech?

Still would be cool to see even if not allowed on the roads :-)

Almost any firmware project.

AutoCAD

Spotify

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