The unmaintained repo has a link in the readme pointing to the best fork
My dad comes home with the milk
Lmfao
This is the problem, making the fork known to the userbase of the original software. When the Atom text editor was killed by Microsoft we decided to fork it as Pulsar but it was an uphill struggle to really get the word out. We got a massive boost when the youtuber Distrotube featured us in an episode and again with an itsfoss article but we still routinely find people who have been using Atom without knowing we even exist.
TIL Pulsar exists
You found some more by commenting about it now.
But if the fork is on GitHub there are some ways to search for the most maintained forks, albeit not with the GitHub tools which is unfortunate
There’s always the fork network graph, but it’s not exactly easy to spot which forks are good, just the ones with the most recent commits
What tools would you recommend to fund good forks. I’ve had a Firefox extension or two but they’ve either creased working or weren’t fantastic to begin with. Currently just using the network graph, limitations and all.
lovely forks
Simplemobiletools --> Fossify is pretty epic
Do the Fossify versions already have new features? I’ll still using Simple Mobile Tools from F-Droid, without ads, and am asking if it makes sense to download Fossify apps already
Mostly minor improvement, such as the fossify phone app grouping by date in the call history
They have material you by default instead of the weird accent theming there was before
No big changes yet afaik but its a good idea to switch anyways
What happened with simplemobiletools?
dev sold it to a shady company
https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241#issuecomment-1837102917
Keep in mind that software doesn’t have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn’t have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn’t have any major issues, there’s no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn’t seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.
Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.
I’d say that problems mostly come from the need to update dependencies in case of vulnerabilities being discovered. But not every software needs elevated privileges or can become a vector of attack, I guess
Desktop - Linux - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
Desktop - Windows - Maybe it still runs in a compatibility mode?
Desktop - iMac - Here’s an emulator, good luck.Mobile - PostMarketOS - Yes, likely. If not, here’s a flatpak
Mobile - Android - Maybe? Try it and see if you get permission denial
Mobile - iPhone - Fuck you, no.Wait, flatpak works on PostMarketOS?
Yep! It’s the default on things like phosh and gnome mobile for packaging apps
Windows is pretty good with backwards compatibility, probably the best out of anything. I can run Visual Basic apps I wrote in the early 2000s on Windows 11 and they still run fine. Some old 32-bit games work fine too. You can even run some 16-bit Windows 3.0 apps on 32-bit Windows 10 if you manually install NTVDM through the Windows features (it was never ported to 64-bit though)
Linux is okay for backcompat but I’m not sure an app I compiled 20 years ago would still run today.
Tell that to video games, which constantly need a compat mode enabled
Isn’t WizTree a lot faster?
I use windirstat almost monthly and have never heard of WizTree. Keeping this in mind for next time I use it.
Though at this point, maybe I should just commit honestly
Yt-dl - > yt-dlp
YT-DL is greater than YT-DLP?
Edit: Oh, it’s an arrow. Got it.
It may be a game, but…
Pixel Dungeon -> Shattered Pixel Dungeon
SPD is already pretty good though, why is PD better?
PD is the original, SPD is the fork
Sorry, that’s now how I meant my original post - I just thought that I really like SPD already and was interested in what PD makes better/ what features SPD missed. I in no way wanted to say that PD was bad, just was excited to know what PD made better :)
I think you are misinterpreting the arrows. Pixel dungeon is the original game with SPD being the preferred fork
The arrows aren’t PD > (greater than) SPD
But rather PD -> (turned into) SPD
youtube-dl moment
The fork is yt-dlp
It’s still in the Debian repositories, but no yt-dlp yet. Rest in peace youtube-dl
Wow, Debian is that slow?
Clementine -> Strawberry :)
What’s a fork, I know what GitHub is and use it too. Just don’t know what a fork is haha
It’s basically like a copy of the original repository. But you can pull in and merge changes from the original, make a pull request for the original to pull your changes. Fork+pull request enables you to contribute to someone else’s repository. Things like Chromium are in part forks of Safari, just that they diverged over time.
yo but tbh this gets old.
i just want my stuff to update without me having to find out a year later its unmantained and had a fork all along.
or having to watch the repositories of stuff i use for signs it might be unmantained. i didnt know half the (popular!) stuff mentioned here was abandoned then forked.
libforknotifier when (or even how)?
OpenOffice -> LibreOffice
Really, why? I don’t known OpenOffice, so I’m just curious.
Oracle happened to OpenOffice.
Sun Microsystems bought Star Division, the original creators of StarOffice, which was proprietary. Sun open sourced OpenOffice, with StarOffice still available with proprietary add-ons. When Oracle bought up Sun, they first reduced resources to OpenOffice and then shut it down altogether when LibreOffice came along, with trademarks and such assigned to the Apache project.
The original OpenOffice is no longer in development. LibreOffice is an active fork of that.
And I believe it’s being developed by some of the same people, too.
“PIN number”
vs.
“FOSS software”
Who’d win in a fight?
The Personal identification number number
Gitea -> Forgejo, e.g.
What happened to gitea?
afaik it got bought by some company and people fear that there will be anti-user changes like with all the other open source projects that were bought by a company in recent years.
No company has bought gitea. They just made a commercial entity which can accept contracts for enterprise installations and make some hyper specific customisations not needed for normal users (like some specific mode of internal authentication) in those installations. So far Gitea has been great still.
They did start a cloud service for hosting Gitea which introduces a direct incentive for them to make Gitea less hosting friendly by, for example, making newly added configuration options less comfortable to set up. And more recently some changes to code contributions that are not exactly community friendly (as a result forgejo will be unable to upstream some of their changes)
What lead to Forgejo, as far as I am aware, was less a problem that is already there and more the set of problems that have a very high chance of eventually manifesting, at which point forking the project would be too late.
Synergy -> Barrier
Does it have Wayland support yet?
No, but Lan Mouse does! https://github.com/feschber/lan-mouse
