this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Most of those are programs rather than services.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
honestly I assume when someone says open office they mean libre office.
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.
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.
WACUP is the nice new alternative unless you want WinXP support retained
on linux i use audacious, works well
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.
i see. in that case wacup on wine would do the job. (it's basically a slow wip winamp reverse engineering job, based on the last aol version and slowly replacing parts of it with updated/reimplemented stuff)
WinAmp is long gone, no? Audacious is the closest looking replacement. I'm sure it's what you probably meant? maybe? lol.
Still working on win10, didn't set up Linux fully yet, still dual-booting but i'll give updates when i figured everything out.