I feel like what hurts this the most is lack of brand recognition - half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so. When you look at the individual components, like Nextcloud, you know that the company behind that project is interested in making it work. You know that Nextcloud, GitLab and others make money through their enterprise offerings and probably aren't too interested in selling their users' data or finding other alternative ways of monetizing their platforms.<p>When a seemingly random company pops up and just rehosts a number of these FOSS platforms, you tend to be skeptical of their motivations or offerings, seeing as they make bold claims about otherwise insignificant platforms, especially given how often you hear untrue statements about privacy nowadays and even moreso if you don't know or care about their history: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org</a><p>Personally, i applaud their efforts and attempts at popularizing these tools and platforms (as someone who self hosts OpenProject, Nextcloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat and many other pieces of software that i use myself), however i fail to see where their target audience lies: the majority of people who don't care about their privacy will simply stick to the larger cloud offerings of Google or Microsoft office components and something like GitHub for their code, whereas the more privacy conscious folk are more likely to self host software or will need lots of time to build trust with them.<p>I do hope that they have a sustainable existence and a net positive impact on the industry, though!
My own very minor gripe is with the maps component.<p>Because it uses OpenStreetMap as a map source it doesn't show any settlements larger 250,000 for my area because those settlements call themselves "towns" and not "cities".<p>When you zoom out all you see is a blank space with no labels for quite a large area of the screen.<p>Meanwhile very small settlements (< 20K people) <i>are</i> shown at max zoom just because they happen to have the right kind of church building, which in the UK means they can call themselves "cities".<p>I've raised this issue with OpenStreetMaps support for many years and they just either say it's something to be fixed by client libraries or it's not important.<p>They could be right I guess. However, Goople maps, Apple maps and Microsoft maps handle this correctly and that's what OpenDesktop explicitly say they are trying to replace here.
For those unfamiliar with this product (such as I), here is a brief paraphrased history from Wikipedia:<p><i>In 2007 openDesktop.org was established as an umbrella page for content from the sites such as Xfce-Look.org, GNOME-Look.org or Linux-Apps.com, which now continue under pling.com<p>The websites are operated and maintained by hive01 GmbH, based in Bielefeld, Germany.</i><p>Does anyone here use it? How's the mobile sync?
Would someone be able to help me understand what is 'Libre Cloud'? Even if your code is released under AGPL or something like that what guarantee do you get that software running and not that plus a tiny delta? So how can cloud be libre when I cannot treat it as nothing but untrusted 3rd party entity? Is the argument here that opendesktop.org is a trusted party?
According to the payout terms.[0] It appears this service is making money though some sort of store front on pling.com. They are hoping you use Open Desktop to contribute to their store.<p>Looking through the store, it feels a-bit like Patreon.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.opendesktop.org/terms/payout" rel="nofollow">https://www.opendesktop.org/terms/payout</a>
Questions:<p>1. Who is providing these apps and services?<p>2. What is their long-term goal?<p>3. Why should I trust them with my data?<p>4. Where are they located?<p>5. When did they get started?<p>6. How do they plan on becoming financially sustainable?
Another repacked Nextcloud. Nope, thanks. First of all it's PHP and it's not like they follow the best coding practices.<p>And then - both Android and iOS Nextcloud clients are happy to crash and leave semi-uploaded files unnoticed.<p>I'm not even talking about e2e encryption, which is somehow supported but good luck not to loose your data.
I've come across this before. Have never been able to find out what you get with a "free account" or why someone is giving away free accounts.
One alternative to this would be [0] by the /e/ foundation [1].<p>[0] <a href="https://e.foundation/ecloud/" rel="nofollow">https://e.foundation/ecloud/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Fe%2F_%28operating_system%29?wprov=sfla1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Fe%2F_%28operating_system%29...</a>
Stumbling upon this site while browsing for KDE Plasma theme. Searching with 'open desktop' or 'opendesktop' terms on HN does not seems like someone has posted them in the past, so I decided to post it. Looking at their services, there is an opportunity to create a mobile-desktop ecosystem out of them like Google services.