audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.
Free and Open Source Software
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I literally can not think of anything software wise, especially FOSS as I use the command line a lot and those tools and concepts go back decades. Being a retro computer geek I can list a ton of old proprietary systems or software that I consider perfectly usable.
Oh wait, I just thought of one: RiscOS Open. The best OS for ARM besides Linux, all my Pi's run on it and it natively uses BBC BASIC, although not Free as in Freedom BBC BASIC, or even BASIC in general is a programming language that has a lot to offer.
Although not software I think the biggest thing I have in mind would be Optical Media. Most consider it obsolete, even against data tape, but I use it extensively precisely because it has features no other media possesses (ignoring LTO tape). Featurea such as many decades of longevity, cheapness (even today it's cheaper than equivalent sized flash media) and above all it's the only media that has read only properties.
SSD's, HDD's are not close to archival grade, only optical and tape (ignoring film and the ultimate archival media, vellum) are.
All my data that must be recovered at all costs is archived to BD-R, which in turn is backed up to LTO tape, which in turn is backed up into the cloud. Both the bd-r and LTO tape are written and finished days before the data has been uploaded to the cloud! Because my upload speed is 20Mb/s maximum the old SCSI LTO 4 drive writing to tape at 60MB/s wipes the floor with it, the bd-r records much slower than that but still is done in a fraction of the time.
Maybe if I'm ever able to get 1Gb upload bandwidth I'll use the cloud more, but at the moment it's running at a slower speed than my first 486 with it's 210MB HDD!
Edit: Ah! Wait, I forgot to mention Window Maker. I use Window Maker as my window manager. Works like a charm and hasn't changed in looks one bit since the 90's
KDE 3 over everything else.
I love modern KDE, and use many different desktop environments regularly, but nothing will ever come close to the feeling I had the first time I got to experience KDE. And I really don't think anyone has been able to approach the configurability KDE 3 had
I see you, but man, I am of the exact opposite opinion. Configurability is, for me, a bug that needs to be fixed when it comes to desktop environments. It should be as standard as possible across machines.
I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.
Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.
I understand why I should care about encryption, in theory. In practice, 90% of the time, I don't. If I'm texting my kids 'hey where are you?' or my husband: what do you want for dinner?' or a friend, 'hey, come hang out!' - I just don't care. And putting up with all the hassles that come with encryption via matrix... It's just, generally, far more hassle than it's worth, IMHO.
I've tried replacing closed-source feed reader apps, but it's hard when most of the focus is in self-hosted webapps, paid services or the UI is very uncomfortable. Also, mobile apps for this are counted and I just can't with their UIs.
USENET. Replacements aren't distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don't have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
In light of recent IBM/RH activity those keeping the old ways, and user choice, alive are more important than ever.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:NeddySeagoon/YeOldeGentoo_2021_Edition
Alsa may be a bit awkward but the other stuff is just more chaos on top of it, it's not an alternative.
I try wayland once a year or so, maybe one year I will manage more than a few hours or days.
lvm/luks/ext4 is still better than btrfs which still hasn't gotten round to addressing encryption, big hopes for bcachefs.
Sftp. At work we are switching to api and it sucks in comparison. Even it works its great but when it doesn't its harder to fix than sftp.
Instant Messenger was the shit back in the day.
vi, lynx, mutt, and of course X11 > wayland
though also controversially, I'll take systemD over sysVinit