I really wish there was a FOSS alternative that supported the autodownload of transactions across my plethora of banks/accounts (some I even chose specifically for better integration) but its sooo incestuous that theres really not much and what alternatives are available are usually cloud based where you cant guarantee the security of all your financial data.
I am… Really confused about your use of the word “incestuous” here. It may be that there’s, uh… Another context for the word that I am not aware of, but how is the lack of integration between FOSS alternatives and banking platforms… Incestuous?
Companies like Intuit aka Quicken pay large sums of money to not only access banking API’s but also lobby heavily to keep them closed source. They also make sure that other access to the same API’s come at a higher rate so that competitiors will pay more for access or support when things break. Its why theres very few alternatives and of what alternatives there is either generally requires you to setup your own export/import system for transactions or is backed by huge sums of VC (ie: Mint, which is also now owned by intuit).
Similar to how companies like TaxAct or TurboTax (another Intuit brand) lobby heavily to make tax filing overcomplicated and confusing AF so they can sell tax filing services. Even getting to the free file is purposefully designed to push to you pay some company 350 bucks to tell the government what you made (which they already know and tell you in your tax filing).
Basically banks and merchants (or more accurately their processing systems used by banks and made by companies like Jack Henry, FIS etc) are in co-hoots to avoid progress and keep their walled guarden closed.
It’s a general term used to denote that two companies of the same/very similar sectors are in bed with each other with an arrangement that is exclusive and specifically designed to keep outsiders out
It’s been a while since I tried it, along with gnucash and some other web based self hosted budget project that was abandoned.
I les s want the budgeting aspect but more the itemizing and ledger/balancing features. I use the budget to predict and track certain spending but often it’s more just tracking purchases and consolidating transaction spending. Even quicken kinda sucks at auto categorization, but does well enough.
It’s good to know where you are spending money, what your monthlies are. Where you can cut down and nickel and dime. Helps with things at the macro level with patterns. Especially with the new found subscription service culture.
I use quickens auto budget, kinda, but if I go over it’s whatever. We live well below our means overall. We pay our CCs off in full each month etc.
It also helps with taxes for things like write offs (though the standard deduction is almost always still the best deal for me) and helps when deciding on bigger spend projects etc (ie: house fixes, cars etc). Like if I have had to put a ton of money into a car and it gets close to the point of the value, is it better to get a new car? Well with quicken I can very quickly go look and see exactly how much I have spent on my truck in the last year.
I also love how Shazam automatically updates my list to an Apple Music playlist, so I just have a running list of good music that I’ve heard over the years. It’s fun to shuffle it and remember where and when I heard certain songs from years ago.
Affinity suite over any of their open-source competitors. I love Krita for painting, but for image editing, Affinity Photo is just so much better-suited and unlike Gimp, it’s modern, actively maintained and has a much more thought-out workflow. I heard that Inkscape was fine, but I personally didn’t like it either (but then, I also didn’t really like Illustrator all that much, it’s really a fully subjective opinion). But even if you did like Inkscape, you don’t have the seemless integration between the products as Affinity does. You can create pixel graphics in Photo, import them in your vector graphics in Designer, and can seemlessly embed any of the two into your documents in Publisher. And each program has a special mode (“persona”) that gives you the basic functionality of the others, and the UIs and workflows generally feel very similar and unified between them. For the hobbyist who doesn’t want to pay for an Adobe subscription, it’s truly unbeatable and the only reason I still need Windows every now and then.
Microsoft Excel - I tried a lot of the FOSS office suites but I always come back mainly due to familiarity but also compatibility (which I know is not much of an issue lately).
Google Photos - I have Immich setup and use it but my wife and people around me use Photos and so I have to conform.
“Pixel OS” - I can’t move to Graphene or similar due to banking apps.
What are the open-source alternatives though? I don’t think there are even proprietary alternatives, it’s like Netflix before each publisher decided to make their own streaming platform.
Adobe lightroom vs darktable. Don’t get me wrong, I still use darktable instead of lightroon, but my god, it is incredibly unstable and everything is just harder to do.
I’ve installed Darktable probably 10 times in the past 5 years, and uninstalled it immediately after. Basically collecting its .exe files at this point.
There’s just something about the UI that makes it daunting and unappealing to use for me. I’m hoping more FOSS programs can get the Blender treatment with UI/UX improvements and a ton of fundind.
It’s just plain better than any other alternative. Better UI, better UX, better features, better customization, support for Monet… I could go on all day.
Too much insularity is also harmful for society and yourself. Viewing different opinions, unless they teeter on the nazipedogore stuff, is not particularly that harmful. Trolls can be annoying, though, but people should not be categorised as trolls if they are simply arguing civilly and in good faith.
Free software, as defined by the fsf, preserves the users freedom to study, change and distribute the software. The right to study entails that the source code be made available: Wikipedia article. Calibre is licensed as GPL3, thus it is free software as defined by the fsf.
Visual studio code. There’s nothing else that’s anywhere near as good that doesn’t cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don’t do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can’t remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.
Fair enough. I get that it takes to much time to setup. But it definetly is possible to get autocompletion and syntax higlighting etc. In a terminal based editor like vim.
I don’t mind spending a copule of hours setting up my development environment, since I spend so much time coding anyway. So its a trade off. But if VS code works for you, theb definetly stick with that. I used VS code alot myself but tried exploring other tools and switched to vim. But it nerver hurts to try other things out.
both GNU emacs and vim can have autocompletion powered by the same language servers that vscode uses. They support the same features (jump to definition, rename symbol under cursor etc etc) as well.
I suspect the op doesn’t realize that you need to setup plugins in order to achieve this functionality. But yes, the functionality on VS Code that provides auto complete is from Language Servers and Neovim and other editors do support the Language Server Protocol via plugins.
What are you talking about? Neovim LSP autocompletion is way faster and smoother than VSCode’s, and one of the reasons I personally have trouble working in the latter nowadays.
It’s similar to chrome. Chrome is not open source, its base project chromium is. The VSCode distributable has closed source stuff on top which is mostly telemetry. There’s a purely open source build of VSCode called vscodium.