As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications.
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
I've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it.
One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there
pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
Just heads up, pCloud throttles you heavily if you upload more than a certain amount of data per month or week or whatever. I have been their customer for a long time, with terabytes available in my account, but when I start to put dyson sphere program save files in there which changed often and were large, suddenly it started taking very long to upload. I have 1gbit at home and it works flawlessly with google drive and my nextcloud instance, so it's them.
I've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/).
I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.
New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.
That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).
I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.
A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.
I've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do
- gdrive style storage
- dropbox style synced folders
- photo app/backups
- PC folder backups
with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux
I'm in the process of migrating to self-hosted immich and the experience is being great so far. If you have a beefy home lab it is incredibly fast and performant. One thing to mention is that you should have a good backup strategy not to risk losing your photo library
To you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work?
I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
Yes, pretty much. I bought a domain to make sure I only have to do this once and parked it with Infomaniak.
Then I setup a new mail account (by now I abandoned Proton for Infomaniak there as well)
The next year I just kept responding with my new email address, asking people to update their contact data and each time I logged in somewhere I changed my email address.
This went really well, just 1 or 2 services where I couldn't change it because they only accept the big providers, no custom domains.
In the end the first 3 weeks were really painful, afterwards it was smooth sailing.
Since then I've swiched provider quite a bit from Proton to Zoho and now to Infomaniak (where I will stay for a long time I think) and each of those changes took me about 2h each time.
So in sumnary, you will curse yourself for a few weeks and thank yourself later!
When first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using
At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it
I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere
If you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain
This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.
TomTom isn't OSM, they just use OSM as one input among many into their mapping model. OSM has significant limitations as a standalone mapping model but many companies find it useful for augmenting more sophisticated mapping models.
Yeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges.
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming. Everything is done e2ee where possible. In case of mail, when the peer has no Proton, mail is indeed send plaintext.
Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought.
It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
I only want it for the mail. Everything else I self-host anyway. It's just that mail is hard with bad actors like Microsoft demanding certain reputation standards (e.g. you have to send X amount of legit mail per month or you get blocked even if they've never seen spam from you!). But for mail the encryption is just useless in my opinion.
The encrypted mail storage adds no value for me because I pull all my mail from the server immediately anyway. It's just a big hassle to deal with that bridge. And when a mail comes in they have to handle it in plaintext (and also, the other party sees it which is 90% of the time microsoft or google or another bad actor). I just view email as a lost cause really.
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
You’re post is full of misconceptions and mistakes.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
> They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t
You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.
> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.
I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.
I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
> Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.
I hope you are right. I'm tired of waiting for a product I paid for while the company is working on new products instead of finishing the one that is halfway there.
They aren’t. They do have made their IT such that they can move very easily. If the Swiss government will pass worse privacy laws, Proton said they will move to Norway or Germany.
I'm using it Infomaniak, including their KDrive as a Dropbox replacement (with 2TB of data). I've even used their video conferencing app. No complaints so far. All seems to work just fine.
Interesting, files on demand is something I'm missing a lot. I'm on BSD though :'( I'll check if it can be made to work (full support is too much to ask I'm sure but perhaps a port can be made).
On the contrary, maps are (IMO) one domain where FOSS is genuinely better. OpenStreetMap data is far more detailed than any corporate map, and the available clients (Osmand in particular) are far more powerful.
You-know-who can only compete because of its (admittedly useful) data on businesses. And, alas, because of ignorance among normies, many of whom are still clueless that, for example, for hiking or outdoor wayfinding, there are much better alternatives available.
The maps can be considered metadata. The data is the points and tracks, which should be self-hostable. I have them synced locally (desktop-mobile). The setup was admittedly an absolute PITA involving shell scripting and Python.
Some anecdata I can offer: since last year I have used exclusively Osmand for navigating over 3000 km of cycle touring, on roads and paths of all types. The most common problem that arises is wrongly tagged surfaces (and occasionally access rights) for tracks and paths, i.e. for "roads" that do not even appear on the corporate maps. There is no comparison in terms of detail. Obviously this is less relevant for regular car drivers.
And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.
Organic Maps is great for offline. It even did better directions in Europe recently, because Google Maps does not have an "avoid unpaved roads" option.
Apple Maps does driving directions way better in general - better visuals, speech etc. It does foreign pronunciations better too IIRC. It's even not bad as a PWA on Android ( https://maps.apple.com ).
Google Maps loves to say take eg "exit Via Emilio Enrico" on some random roundabout in some random Italian town, seemingly with no idea that there are big signs to eg "VERONA". The street name is often totally useless.
I also find Google Maps does a great job at directing me into traffic. Like, not unexpected traffic at all.
Google Maps is great at giving you terrible recommendations because of the heavily, heavily filtered/gamed reviews however. Nothing more untrustworthy than a 4.7 star review on Google.
And of course there is also Mapy, HERE, TomTom etc...
Organic Maps is great for offline navigation, agreed. Also better than the rest for hiking trails. But it doesn't have anywhere near the features of Google Maps.
I wanted to like Apple Maps, but when you are traveling and actually need maps to find your way around, it's unusable. For example visiting some of the top cities in the world, and Apple Maps doesn't have public transport info. Or outdated business information.
HERE maps are unusable on mobile because of whacky two-finger zoom and pan algorithms which seem to be taken from a different decade.
Maybe you could enumerate with more detail exactly how Google Maps is unmatched and what features you need? You haven't said much so far. You also won't really acknowledge negatives of it so I think you are not being very objective. Yes public transport is a good one but only perhaps unmatched by breadth
Citymapper is excellent for public transport.
Google Maps relies on business owners updating details too, often outdated and incorrect. They also doesn't publish a lot of helpful negative reviews
Yes basically you need more than one app for the different things but I prefer that to one single and frankly mediocre app
There's plenty of negatives for Google Maps. None of those are deal-breakers, while the negatives of other apps are deal-breakers.
Negatives of Google Maps:
- Awful graphical interface
- Bad performance
- Ads
- Offline maps could be better implemented
Features where other apps fail, but Google Map works well:
- Unable to zoom or pan map because of janky response. This core feature needs to be right, or the app is unusable.
- No public transport integration. Makes the app unusable if you're on vacation in a different country without your vehicle. Apple Maps fails hard on this. Which is when you are most in need of good maps.
- No routing or bad routing, or routing only for cars and not for bicycles or public transport. Deal breaker for everyday use. Organic Maps has awful routing.
- No business information or outdated business information. For example, Apple Maps will ignore or reject updates which you as a business send to them, using the Apple Business account.
- No or few or outdated photos for businesses. Reviews aren't that reliable, as you mention. But photos will tell you many times what you want to know.
Fair enough. I don't think we are going to agree on much nor convince each other because:
- You want one app that works almost everywhere in the world and UX is paramount to you. Less privacy and mediocrity is fine
- I am happy to use more specific apps that excel at specific functions, and accept some lower performance/UX for the £0 I paid and £0 I paid in giving up my privacy (with the exception of Citymapper - I don't use it myself though. I figure out each city's public transport myself, or talk to staff).
We'll just go around in circles calling out the pluses/negatives of each app
There are absolutely good (enough) alternatives to Google Maps though, I won't budge on that.
edit: I'll also plug newly-discovered Gnome Maps on the desktop. It does walking/cycling/car/public transport routing too, though no idea how well. No satellite though. Also, Comaps has emerged as an Organic Maps fork due to some governance disagreements
> Google has two products without competition: YouTube and Google Maps.
I've actually found great success in migrating to nothing from YouTube. Specifically I've found nothing to have a much less insidious algorithm, no shorts, no comment section, no upvotes or downvotes, no creepy Mr beast thumbnails, it's quite refreshing. If you still want cideos that are exclusively on YT, you can simply skip the website and access them via other means.
Do you mean like in not watching any video or film at all? I'm not sure that this is the best option, since there is a lot of information which is better expressed by moving pictures than by text.
As for the algorithm, it is actually great if you take care to nudge it with subscriptions, likes and dislikes.
For the last few months I've simply stopped accessing YouTube directly. No website, no app. I still watch some videos that are embedded on articles or whatever, and occasionally download specific ones, but I don't see anything that's core to the YT experience, like subs or shorts or anything like that.
It's almost unavoidable to encounter videos that are only hosted on YT, but if I can't watch them without accessing any YT interface, I just don't watch them, I've just decided it's not worth it. I also haven't done anything specific to restrict the website, I've just mentally banned it as a simple rule to follow. It's an insidious service imo that uses casino tactics to steal my time and attention. What I occasionally want is videos, but their entire service beyond that provides only negative value to me.
I don't feel like I've missed much.
For insta, I've always just used their website, which is so terrible, and the content so inconsequential, that it's not a big deal anymore in terms of stealing my attention.
I was a Runbox customer for several years and recently switched to Mailbox and never looked back. Runbox is nice, but I had enough of reliability issues, and a few emails got lost.
"They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.
Agreed, this is a VERY odd statement. There are a bunch of Canadian companies that have been here for a long time. I don't have the data but would DNS and hosting providers like EasyDNS and HostPappa really have primarily US customers?
Im sorry but saying you won't support your own people because you THINK they MIGHT move to the US is BS (I removed it originally because I toned down my knee jerk reaction but I defend it as you brought it up). I hope OP has enough emotional capability to handle some gentle feedback.
FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
My first focus is sharing, search and discoverability.
The biggest issue is that I have thousands of photos but I don't have a good way of filtering by person, date, location, and finding exactly what I'm looking for. Basically browsing my photos like I would browse an online store like Zalando. Search for something and refine with filters.
In addition - I implemented S3-like storage. Makes it cheap and easy to host in the cloud.
I assure you that many Canadians who are making these moves are emitting very little signal outside of their purchasing decisions.
This is not some end state of success, but a process. It's people sharing their ideas, thoughts, and strategies on how to accomplish a relatively challenging economic shift.
What you are witnessing and commenting on is quite literally the messy business of a market organically evolving and developing. "Not American" is now a selling point for services.
Virtue signaling is the worst interpretation you can have of someone attempting to do better. If someone’s trying to make a small impact on the world, shouldn’t you encourage them instead of making fun and claiming they’re just doing it for looks?
If you believe in the moral of it then it's not signaling in the first place. It's only virtue signaling if you do it just to get acceptance or mating or something like that (e.g. I love barbecue but this girl I'm trying to date is vegetarian so I pretend I don't like barbecue to signal that I'm a good match for her).
The usage of the term 'virtue signaling' is almost always a sign that the person saying it isn't being intellectually honest - it's usually just meant to be a putdown.
There are words and concepts that cut reality at the seams, and others that feel good and make you dumb as rocks. Virtue signaling came out the gate strong but has fallen solidly i to the second camp.
The term for this is ethical consumerism or conscious consumerism, defined as purchasing products that align with moral, social, or environmental values, acting as a form of "voting" with one's money.
Virtue signaling takes place wherever changes in group behavior are required by changes in conditions but calling it just virtue signaling is reductive. People are moving off of US services because of the behavior of the US government and US citizens.
> Proton AG is a Swiss technology company offering privacy-focused online services and software. It is majority owned by the non-profit Proton Foundation.
So how is the US "controlling" Proton, can you enlighten us as you seem to be more knowledgeable about this?
If I was outside of the US I would consider it as an effort to reduce risk, not virtue signaling.
If I was a citizen of a nation directly and recently threatened by the U.S I would consider it more as a "screw you" than virtue signaling.
This is probably because I am not especially caring about virtue, but I do like pointing out ways that alternate explanations for things some people might find virtuous could pertain.
If we stay on the current path, in a few months tech will start to feel the pain of Trump's rampage. The only redeemable thing about that is that maybe tech workers and Americans generally will finally stop feeling like they're above it all.
Maybe Americans don't really get this, but the Greenland stuff was a very, very big deal. The rest of NATO was staring down the barrel of the unthinkable: war with the United States. For what? Some lib owning? A bit of fun? A real estate deal? The sense of betrayal is very strong, more than the politicians are letting on.
The sane Americans get it. We know how important NATO is, and sovereignty of nations, and so on. We get it.
We are in a state of permanent horror at what the voting majority has done, all to avoid voting a woman of color into office, to own the libs, to hate on brown-skinned people, etc., ad nauseum. Votes against today, instead of towards tomorrow. Hatred and fear as prime motivations.
The Diego Garcia stuff is a very, very big deal. I think it's unreasonable to draw the comparison between the exceptionally short-sighted Brits and the uncommonly prudent Danes. But hypothesizing Trump Tower Thule as the motive is ridiculous.
Diego Garcia is an island of exceptional strategic importance to the West. When it eventually gets granted to a client state of China, that will steadily degrade the effectiveness of bases there. I expect slower movement than the time the UK promised to protect the rights of Hong Kong citizens, but that is a matter of degree.
I am not aware of Denmark giving meaningful control of Greenland to China or Russia, nor or any plans to push the US out: therefore, while I think the principle is worth considering, I find it to be a small concern not worth angering allies over.
I don’t see how it relates very well to what I said. I think you’re trying to say the that the Chagos island lease disagreement is as big a deal as threatening to invade a NATO ally.
No, that is incorrect. I disagree that my comment draws that equivalency, not least of all because claiming "as big a deal" is to make a comparison between two radically different concerns between fairly different groups, which could only be lined up against one another in some narrowly scoped way.
I'm saying that losing stable access to Greenland sites would be similar to losing access to Diego Garcia sites, and the threat of the latter is a recent flare-up. And if you're hoping to retreat to fortress America, then Greenland becomes much more important than Diego Garcia.
Probably something along the lines of "nice nuclear deterrent shame if it was to stop working" or "nice carriers, shame if the only aeroplanes that can fly from them stopped working"....
American voters witnessed this demagogue incite a riot in an attempt to steal an election, and after that 2/3 of them still couldn't be bothered to vote against him.
As an American myself, blaming Americans for this situation seems pretty fair.
Note that populist demagogue started a trade war and threatened allies with invasion. That tends to put a damper on friendship. And that's before the idiotic blunder with Hormuz.
Bought the paperback, I really like curated anthology, it's best way to discover new talent.
I would have bought Compelling Science Fiction too but look like its out of print.
I worked for almost 10 years at HP/HPE in the 2010s on embedded systems. I don't remember if it was a memo from Dave or Bill, but it was about never sacrificing quality for a deadline. Needless to say, we loved to dig up that old memo whenever PMs pushed too hard to get things released too early.
My father did a stint at HP long ago, before my time.
The thing that I wish he had snagged more of (which HP actively encouraged engineers to do) was the HP branded prototyping boards that fit DIP package ICs nicely and had power/ground rails with detached shared signal busses.
This is not a python module, but a guide to learn the basic of digital signal processing using python in the context of using a SDR. It also goes into the specific of using the most popular SDR HW.
I'm active in the retro game console modding community and we pretty much all jumped ship same time in early November.
I still log to Twitter once a week to check, there haven't been anything new in my following feed for at least a month beside the people cross posting.
So I can easily see myself do just that, I wouldn't miss anything anyway.
I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.
I guess I could update from my previous post in a similar thread. [2]
Long story short, my open source firmware is used by product makers and they make a voluntary contribution often base on how many unit they sell. It is also widely used by Chinese company on AliExpress.
I got one of those Chinese company to sponsor me a significant amount on GitHub sponsor since August 2022.
I guess they forgot about it, still going ever since!
I still make 1000 USD a month from the various HW makers.
One new thing I made this year after 5 year of doing this hobby, is that I finally manufactured and sold one adapter base on this code myself for the OG Xbox console. [3]
Factoring all the expenses I made 7K for a batch of 300. I plan to do a 2nd batch next year, which should yield double that since I will only incur raw materials & shipping expenses.
It took me 48 hour of manual labor to assemble them and ship them. So it's doesn't make much sense TBH, but it's a good experience. Made me appreciate my desk job.
No I got panels with multiple pcb fully assembled from china. But I still had to program them, solder the connector and assemble them into the case. A very long process.
I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.
I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold.
It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.
I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time)
Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
One difference I can see is the "buy me a coffee" button isn't a "these are the people who bought me a coffee" list. I imagine most of these sponsors (from their perspective) are paying for advertising.
Sounds like good advertising! If these companies are trying to sell hardware corresponding to this software, then having a callout right in the software's README is a great way to attract people who are discovering the project through GitHub. This wouldn't work as well if the product was oriented toward non-technical people (not discovering it through GitHub) or if the software wasn't directly related to the hardware (most OSS projects are probably run on general-purpose hardware).
What controllers you would recommend for retro games with a great d-pad and buttons? I can't find anything that's even remotely close to native controllers especially for Super NES.
I've never managed to find a Wii-connector-to-USB adapter that wouldn't inexplicably die within six months, but the 1st-party SNES Classic controllers are basically perfect clones of the original. Ditto the NES versions they have. Wii Pro Controllers are also great and have a similar feel & quality, but with modern ergonomics (no rumble, though, so not great for e.g. Playstation games, and IIRC the triggers aren't analog, which is limiting)
You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing and such.
In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly slow when trying to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
For d-pads on Xbox controllers, you can cut a cross out of an old plastic folder and wedge it between the plastic and the membrane for better feel. It makes the pad crispy. 10/10 all my old controllers have it, too bad no one to play halo3 with. :(
I recommend the PS5 controller! They're very available (unlike the console), come in a few colours, and are regularly on sale -- about $90AUD in my currency.
They're rugged, reliable, pair easily via bluetooth without any custom software required (just hold the PS button and menu button together), and have excellent button feel. I grew up on the super Nintendo so I'm picky at times.
Battery life is excellent, reported over Bluetooth (so linux and macos can see it), and the controller central pad acts as a mouse which makes navigating menus great without needing to put the controller down. They go to sleep automatically if you close the lid on a laptop they're paired to, and you can change the LED colour and brightness on the controller.
I've had and used one for quite a while now, and in that time two of my friends have purchased one to replace various alternatives (8bitdo, & another one I can't remember) for either reliability, pairing issues, or both.
To top off this review: I've never owned a PlayStation!
Something to look out for with retro gaming is a lot of modern controllers have increased latency, which can be frustrating on games that require precision. Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch Online SNES controller isn't great in this regard. You can use this tool[0] to check latency.
Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite different.
https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2/
The ps2 and the SNES had a baby and it is a marvelous baby. (They sell them at Best Buy as well)
It has:
Turbo key function for SNES games,
Vibration,
Macros,
Pressure-sensitive triggers,
Multi-system support (there is a switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to Mac to Linux mode and so on),
And it just werks.
>> If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments from it?
It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not everyone wants to just rip off open source and not give back, they're willing to share the wealth if you make it easy and let people know they're doing it?
I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys" and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source full time.
You’re not obligated by money when the money is coming from donations. That’s what donations mean. The people giving them to you are not your customers.
Also I can recommend OpenCollective; I’m sure there are other similar solutions as well. It’s nice to be able to “expense” stuff and I’m sure donors appreciate transparency.
I think it's really important to make it clear that the contribution is for what is currently there. I get often ask "Will $$$ make you work on that issues" and I always answer no.
What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong. ;)
People are nice? But most likely they want a good relationship with me in case they get problems. Also they benefits from being able to tell their customer they support the project.
What you consider and your manufacturer considers doesn't matter. The definition of royalties is what matters, it doesn't fit in this case as far as I can see. They aren't paying you money so they can use your software, they are donating money because they are nice, they could stop paying at any time and continue to use your software.
Royalties are typically a contractual payment, though. Calling a voluntary payment a royalty is kind of an odd use of the word, if not plainly incorrect.
You're right, these are donations. But they are donations that are determined based on the number of units sold. I believe that's why the parent is using the term royalty.
It's not a contract, as the term "royalty" implies, but it is a royalty in the sense that it's determined per unit sold.
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
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