We all know the struggle of beloved services slowly going downhill. What’s one service, tool, or website you’ve been using for years that’s still great and hasn’t turned to crap?

  • muxika@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 months ago
    • audiobookshelf
    • gluetun
    • homeassistant
    • immich
    • invidious
    • jackett
    • jellyfin
    • kavita
    • lazylibrarian
    • lidarr
    • mylar3
    • mumble
    • navidrome
    • podman
    • prowlarr
    • qbittorrent
    • radar
    • sonarr
    • syncthing
    • tko@tkohhh.socialEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      YES to Reaper. No surprise that the original developer of Winamp makes an amazing DAW.

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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        11 months ago

        Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.

          • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.

            Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.

            AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.

            I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the missile crow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.

            The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.

      • Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’m ok with things relying on ads to make a product free. Someone has to pay for a product or service, if I don’t want to pay for it, then show me an ad and let someone else pay for it. The thing that overwolf and more specifically curseforge do that keeps them out of the enshitification category for me is they simplify modding of games.

        I’ve been around since the early days of video game modding and know how hard it used to be. They have streamlined it to the point that if someone has created a mod it is a simple button click to download, and install, and then keep the mod up to date. You can even create and share collections of mods and mod packs. And if a modder has added a donate button, it’s a single click to donate to the modder. It’s everything I want out of the modding community with none of the headache, and it’s been like that for years.

    • Skanky@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Sure, I’ll add to that.

      • Audacity
      • Inkscape
      • Notepad++
      • DaVinci Resolve
      • QR Bittorrent
      • YouTube to mpe 3 convert (the command line one - can’t remember the actual name rn)
  • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Stack Exchange. I know, controversial, as people complain about rules being there too strict and community not being too welcoming nowadays, but still a real goldmine of knowledge. All of that with no ads, no spam, no dark patterns.

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 months ago

    Playing cards. More or less unchanged from 30 years ago. Real nice, games still play the same too.

    Oh also my local electric company is still providing well for not too much money.

  • felsiq@piefed.zipEnglish
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    11 months ago

    Not an overly surprising one, but the arch wiki has been an incredible source of info with no ads, tracking, or any of the modern web bullshit for as long as I’ve used it.

    They’ve been hit with some pretty major DDOS attacks recently and they’ve done a really good job of keeping the important parts of the service as accessible as possible - they haven’t resorted to buying into cloudflare’s monopoly or blocking vpn users despite either or both being the easy way out.

    For anyone else who’s relied on them as much as I have, now would be a great time to donate!

      • No1@aussie.zone
        0·
        11 months ago

        For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.

    I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
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        11 months ago

        Some people miss this but Librewolf uses most of the code from Firefox…so its still VERY dependent upon Firefox developers/services to do its thing. Its still better, but if Firefox suffers, then Librewolf does too.

        Theres an excellent graphic here: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source
        I used to compile and contribute a long time ago. Its pretty easy to get it working and make adjustments…when you know what Firefox does in the background.

        image

        • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          11 months ago

          I used to compile and contribute

          Thank you for your past service o7

          (I want to normalize open source contributors getting the same kind of recognition for providing a Public Good that we currently give to teachers, de-escalatory police, and following-legal-orders military)

      • AtariDump@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It’s… beautiful

        Until sites don’t work because they block too much.

        I’ve settled on Waterfox.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      11 months ago

      Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.

      Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.

      LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…

      Honestly, switch to Libre Office.

      • IlmariGanander@lemmy.wtfEnglish
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        11 months ago

        I’ve tried so many times to switch to LibreOffice, but as far as I can tell it’s just not made for novelists. It regularly shits itself when dealing with a 300k manuscript that Word has never given me problems with.

        I genuinely tried using it for a full year, using it on Linux even, to see if it was just me being cranky about changes to my writing routine…and maybe it’s still just me, but I eventually went back to Windows and my old copy of Microsoft Word 2010.

        As far as I can tell, using Libre Office (or Open Office) as an actual writer seems to be a niche enough use case that developers don’t fix some of the issues that crop up that are specific to the needs of a novelist. It also gets laggy and unreliable for long word counts.

        But if you need to make a basic sign to be printed out, or letters, or use it for short things like so many people use Word for in an office setting, it probably is ok.

        I just had trouble with it behaving poorly with my long-format works in ways that MS Word never crapped out on me for.

      • doortodeath@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Thanks for the heads-up. Got both on my pc but i instinctively open up OO when i need to do writing. Will give Libre another chance now :)

    • radiouser@crazypeople.online
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      11 months ago

      WinAmp is long gone, no? Audacious is the closest looking replacement. I’m sure it’s what you probably meant? maybe? lol.

      • doortodeath@lemmy.world
        0·
        11 months ago

        Still working on win10, didn’t set up Linux fully yet, still dual-booting but i’ll give updates when i figured everything out.

      • SGG@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        11 months ago

        That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.

        One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.

        There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?

        • solrize@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.

          I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.

          I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.

    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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      11 months ago

      You’re still using Winamp?

      Which version? I never really moved on to Winamp 3 (migrated to foobar back then), has it evolved further from that? Does it run on Linux?

      I still sometimes miss my Winamp 2 days with a Calvin & Hobbes skin and spending hours with its visualization features as a young teenager.

      • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org
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        11 months ago

        WACUP is the nice new alternative unless you want WinXP support retained

        on linux i use audacious, works well

        • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
          0·
          11 months ago

          On Linux I have found my audio player of choice (Sayonara Player), I’m specifically asking for Winamp because I have nostalgia for it; and because I don’t know any player that has its extensive visualization features.

  • RotatingParts@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Do RSS feeds count as a “service”? I fear one day they will go away and that will be the end of my efficient way of keeping up with things I am interested in.