OpenOffice was a really solid Microsoft Office rival, and FOSS to boot. Made by Sun Microsystems, of course, and then ruined by Oracle (of course).
Thankfully LibreOffice was forked from it and is still going strong as a very capable suite of document tools. And OpenOffice is basically dead, womp womp.
Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.
Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.
Audacity was the first one I thought of.
Or MultiMC, PolyMC, the Sodium mod, or the original Minecraft Forge.
(Minecraft community devs need to stop having drama lmao)
I love how well the PolyMC -> PrismLauncher transition went. It’s great that the asshole owning it didn’t just spew transphobic hate, but also removed the contribution rights to all other people, leading them to immediately flock to an alternative.
Wait, what happened to Multi MC? I still use it whenever the want to play modded Minecraft returns
I actually had to look it up as I couldn’t remember why I made the first switch. PolyMC was forked from MultiMC after they dropped third-party modpack support. Then there was some drama with one of the devs of PolyMC, spawning Prism Launcher
Wait, what happened to Audacity?
I believe they were bought by someone and eventually implemented some questionable practices. I don’t remember the exact details, maybe someone else does.
I remember reading an update which said that the company went back on most (or all?) the negative changes and it’s ok to use again.
I didn’t confirm it myself, but that’s part of why the alternatives aren’t seeing as much development now
Wasnt it something about data collection?
It was, the company that bought out Audacity added a bunch of telemetry to it
Any good alternatives?
I have used this as a drop-in replacement, with no complaints.
What happened to the Sodium mod?
The lead developer changed the license to a much less permissive one because of drama surrounding being credited in modpacks. The dev thinks there are forks that exist solely to sidestep crediting the original mod, I’m not up to date enough on Minecraft modding lore to know if this is true or not.
I’m pretty sure there’s also a fork that branches off of the last GPL commit but I forget what it’s called.
what happened with the original Minecraft Forge?
The dev who owned the branding for forge (LexManos) is infamously abrasive and rude to others to the point where the forge community was slowly falling apart because new people didn’t want to be involved with him. The rest of the team decided to rebrand to NeoForge and continue without him.
GNOME spawning 3 new DEs every time they have a major version update
look under the hood
They’re Gnome with extensions and a theme
Insomnia suddenly turned into a ransomware. Pay up or have all you dara lost!
A few days later Insomnium popped up supporting the old file format.
CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.
My big question is, why not fork the original first and commercialize that instead. So much forking around the wrong ways! /s
iirc CyanogenMod was trademarked so the creator no longer had rights.
Its kind of sad, but I’m sure the author knew what they were getting into
Gitea, took control away from community and gave it to a for profit organization. Forgejo was born
Lately? Firefox…
It’s Mozilla that’s slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.
Well to that end chromium is still around and I’m sure there’s deshittified builds of that floating around too but it is going to quickly become harder to find not shitty browsers the way things are going over at Mozilla.
The big problem is the browser engine at the heart of all browsers, all the FF or Chromium forks very rarely modify the core. When they do, it’s minor stuff. That’s why AFAIK not a single chromium fork is maintaining manifest v2 in defiance of Google.
If Mozilla goes full tilt enshittification, all the FF forks will suffer a similar fate, they’ll make changes all over, custom interface, cool little features here and there etc; but they’ll never make major changes to the core and that’s assuming they keep the core open source. If they take the core closed source and the forks can no longer get upstream updates for it they’ll wither and die
A browser engine is kinda like the Linux kernel, it’s large, complex and takes a lot of time and effort to make and keep it usable. I’ve seen estimates that if we needed to start from scratch on the Linux kernel it’d take 2-4 years just to get something decently usable.
Browser engines are similar, Ladybird for example, is a new open source browser AND engine from scratch that’s been in development for about 2 years, they’re estimating to have something “generally usable” in 2026
They seem so directionless lately, and by god is AI the wrong horse to bet on for their users.
I should check out LibreWolf…
