With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.

To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.

Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.

If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.

  • @delirious_owl
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    5 hours ago

    Wire’s new app just got pushed to fdroid. It was all but broken for a few years with no new updates on fdroid

    Update: Wire is probably the best encrypted messaging app. Its free, has no phone number requirement, has Foss apps on all platforms, messages sync on all platforms seamlessly, and all messages are encrypted (its not possible to send unencrypted).

    https://wire.com

    • @yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml
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      4 minutes ago

      Interesting. Since the CEO of Telegram was arrested in France last month, I’ve read countless threads on c/privacy about which messaging app is best for privacy, and the two names that seem to come up the most are Signal and any Matrix client (e.g. Element); however, some commenters point out Signal’s phone number requirement and I forget what the other caveats are.

      I don’t recall reading about Wire in any of those threads, but at a glance it seems to check all the boxes (open source, always-on encryption, etc).

      Am I missing something? Any ideas why this app wouldn’t come up in such discussions?

      EDIT: Hmm, I just went back and re-read a thread from last week, and Wire is actually mentioned. Maybe I’ve just always mentally skipped over it until now.

  • Otter
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    8 hours ago

    Note for any new comments:

    It helps if you add an explanation of what it does, or link to read more. The name often isn’t descriptive enough, and people love to find new things to use.

  • @Static_Rocket@lemmy.world
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    1211 hours ago

    Finamp’s current alpha was a huge surprise to me. I stopped looking at development for a few months and in that time they completely reworked it

    • @N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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      13 hours ago

      I dunno… Jellyfin does great as a Video media player/streaming platform. I prefer to not have everything in the same basket.

      Also, this is better for Dev, so they only have to concentrate to one type of thing. I would rather suggest navidrome as a music server and Tempo as a music client for android !!

      Tempo doesn’t get updated so much (every few months) but he/she takes his time to make his player functional and very pleasing to the eyes.

    • Otter
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      58 hours ago

      Wow the UI is nice

      https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

      Finamp is a Jellyfin music player for Android and iOS. It’s meant to give you a similar listening experience as traditional streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, but for the music that you already own. It’s free, open-source software, just like Jellyfin itself.

    • @Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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      11 hour ago

      Is it an app for android or just the webpage that integrates all the cloud features like notes, files, etc. Sorry for noob question.

    • Otter
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      48 hours ago

      https://nextcloud.com/hub/

      Hub integrates the four key Nextcloud products Files, Talk, Groupware and Office into a single platform, optimizing the flow of collaboration. Eliminate the confusing hodgepodge of different SaaS tools and the compliance, security, cost and productivity issues that come with it and standardize on a single solution with Nextcloud Hub.

      Cool!

  • Treeniks
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    811 hours ago

    MuseScore had a big UI rework with MuseScore 4, with an excellent video about the behind the scenes by Tentacruel (https://youtu.be/XGo4PJd1lng).

    Although not sure if it caught people off guard as I’m not a user of it.