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.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
    27·
    3 months ago

    Nextcloud has had some amazing updates recently. Adding Nextcloud Hub comes to mind.

    • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Is the autocorrect any better than Heliboard?

       

      Edit: I didn’t mean to imply that it’s bad; it’s just not very good. Then again, that may also not be Heliboard’s fault. It personally feels like keyboards in general have become worse at autocorrect during the last ten or so years.

              • Dymonika@beehaw.org
                1·
                1 month ago

                Oops, I misread your comment; I didn’t realize that you were already seeking something superior to HeliBoard. What makes its autocorrect bad?

                • EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  1·
                  1 month ago

                  Sorry, I may need to edit my original comment. I didn’t intend to imply that it’s bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not necessarily bad, to be fair. It’s just…meh. And honestly, I imagine that’s largely due to the fact that unlike the big name keyboard app makers, a lot of FOSS keyboards—Heliboard naturally being one of them—don’t track everything under the sun. Which is a good thing and something I like, make no mistake. The unfortunate downside of that is it’s also not quite as accurate, simply due to it not having as many data points.

                  This is not something I blame it for, but at the same time I was hoping perhaps another keyboard might have a prediction system different enough to be slightly better. Then again, I’m no expert on keyboard prediction systems so I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut in the first place. So apologies for that. :/

                  I feel autocorrect in general has gotten worse in the last decade or so. One problem I noticed, for example, that I’ve faced in other FOSS keyboards, not just in Heliboard, is that compared to ten years ago or so, there is a LOT more instances of autocorrect not catching absolute gibberish (like I get a couple letters off and it doesn’t catch it) or I’m one letter off of a very common word (like 1 key to the left or right) and it corrects it to something wildly different.

                  Maybe I’m just misremembering (after all, human memory is hardly ever reliable), but I feel it was a LOT better around the Jellybean era (for Android).

                  (Side note: this is all Android-specific; I have never owned any iOS device.)

  • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    3 months 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

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      3 months 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.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 months 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.

      • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I agree limiting application scope is useful for multiple reasons, however Jellyfin started as a fork of Emby which already had music support. I have yet to find a standalone application that has enough features to sway me from just utilizing the existing media server functionality.

        • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 months ago

          Emby which already had music support.

          Didn’t knew that ! My bad. Thanks for the precision !

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    20·
    3 months 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.

  • Treeniks@lemmy.ml
    16·
    3 months 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.

  • delirious_owl@discuss.online
    16·
    3 months 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.mlEnglish
      14·
      2 months 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.

      • delirious_owl@discuss.online
        5·
        2 months ago

        Some people don’t like them because the fdroid app wasn’t updated for years. I actually started migrating to Matrix because if this, but I really don’t like that matrix sends a lot of data unencrypted.

        Now that Wire is pushing updates to fdroid again, I don’t see much valid criticism

        • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          Gotcha. So is Wire like, the privacy seeker’s dream messaging app? No phone number, always-on encryption, zero-knowledge servers, open source… any caveats?

          • delirious_owl@discuss.online
            6·
            2 months ago

            Caveat…only some of your friends will actually install it?

            But, yeah, its been my app of choice for years. Its definitely the best imo

  • Adderbox76@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    I want to say the Natron compositing software, but I could be misremembering.

    I seem to recall it losing it’s only maintainer and therefore being updated or maintained anymore. I want to say this was back in 2018, but since it’s not a piece of kit I use often, I don’t really think about it enough for it to stick in my head. Anyway…point being. It posted a fairly large update in 2022 and has been doing updates since then.