OPEN SOURCE alternatives to the MOST POPULAR productivity apps!

Try the new Thunderbird release: Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: # 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to a weekly podcast, vote on the next topics I cover, and get your name in the credits: YouTube: @thelinuxexp/join Patreon: Liberapay: Or, you can donate whatever you want: 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: 🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Website: Mastodon: @thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: PeerTube: Discord: #Linux #OpenSource #apps 00:00 Intro 00:42 Sponsor: Try the new Thunderbird interface 01:35 Replace Obsidian 03:49 Replace Notion 06:40 Replace Teams and Slack 07:51 Replace Trello 09:24 Replace Acrobat Pro 10:33 Replace Visual Studio Code 11:47 Other alternatives 13:16 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux 14:25 Support the channel Obsidian offers the ability to link notes together, it uses markdown and plain text to store your notes, it has a plugin ecosystem, and the visual knowledge graph that lets you explore topics and the relationships between your notes. BUT it’s proprietary, so we have Logseq. It takes notes as markdown files, it has more than 150 plugins, and a bunch of themes, it has mobile apps, it’s private, and it does have the same linking features and knowledge graph. It even lets you create queries to generate tables with all the information you need, based on the links and data you entered in your even offers their own syncing solution if you want that. It’s available for Linux, as an AppImage, and for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Another really powerful app is Notion. While it’s free of charge, it’s also proprietary and doesn’t have an official Linux version. The closest thing you can find in the open source world will be AppFlowy, and while it’s really close, it’s not as feature complete just yet. You can create your own structure, with pages and subpages, and you have a few page types, like calendars, boards, tables, or documents. You also can mix these types on the same page, like having a board with cards, that you can also present in a table, or on a calendar, but you won’t get as many templates as what Notion offers. If you want a more full featured app, there’s AnyType instead. It’s also open source, and has a Linux client and mobile apps, but the interface is a bit more involved and less clear to start with than AppFLowy. Now this one, you might not have as much control over, generally, a company or project will impose Slack or Microsoft Teams on you. But if you have all the power, then you might want to take a look at Mattermost. It’s a fully open source Slack / MS Teams alternative, that you can self host. It lets you create channels, and chat, with side threads, file sharing, screen sharing, and audio calls. It can be integrated with a bunch of developer tools to automate things, you can format messages with markdown, or code snippets, and all messages can be archived, with full history search. If all you need to organize yourself is a board, you might use Trello. This one is pretty easy to replace: you can just use Focalboard. You can either self host it if you want to let multiple people access the same board, or you can just use it as a personal app, with a macOS, Windows and Linux application. If you need to create and edit PDF documents, you might use Acrobat Pro, from Adobe. You can always open them in GIMP, Inkscape, of LibreOffice Draw, but these tend to either open a single page, or break the document’s formatting. Libreoffice draw does a great job IF you have all the fonts used in the PDF installed on your system , but editing text is generally handled in a line per line basis, instead of recognizing things as paragraphs, which can be a pain to deal with. Visual Studio Code’s ... code is licensed under the MIT license, so it IS an open source / free software project, but the binary you can get from Microsoft isn’t open source. The alternative, thus, is easy: VSCodium. It’s built on the open source parts of VS Code, but removes all the tracking, telemetry and proprietary components. It’s compatible with VS Code’s plugins and extensions, and has the exact same interface and features, but in a nice open source form.