Free Software is a substantial part of my life. I got introduced to it by my computer science teacher in middle school, however back then I wasn’t paying that much attention to the ethics behind it and rather focused on the fact that it was gratis and new to me.

Using GNU/Linux on a school computer wasn’t really fun for me, as the user interface was not really my taste (I’m sorry KDE). It was only when I got so annoyed from the fact that my copy of Windows XP was 32 bit only and that I was supposed to pay the full price again for a 64 bit license, that I deleted Windows completely and installed Ubuntu on my computer – only to reinstall Windows again a few weeks later though. But the first contact was made.

Back then I was still mostly focused on cool features rather than on the meaning of free software. Someday however, I watched the talk by Richard Stallman and started to read more about what software freedom really is. At this point I was learning how to use blender on Ubuntu to create animations and only rarely booted into Windows. But when I did, it suddenly felt oddly wrong. I realized that I couldn’t truly trust my computer. This time I tried harder to get rid of Windows.

Someone once said that you only feel your shackles when you try to move. I think the same goes for free software. Once you realize what free software is and what rights it grants you (what rights you really have), you start to feel uncomfortable if you’re suddenly denied those rights.

And that’s why I love free software! It gives you back the control over your machine. It’s something that you can trust, as there are no secrets kept from you (except if the program is written in Haskell and uses monads :P).

My favorite free software projects for this years I love free software day are the document digitization and management tool paperwork, the alternative Mastodon/Pleroma interface Halcyon and the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin. These are projects that I discovered in 2018/2019 and that truly amazed me.

I already wrote two blog posts about paperwork and the fediverse / the ActivityPub plugin earlier, so I’ll focus mainly on Halcyon today. Feel free to give those other posts a read though!

I’m a really big fan of the fediverse and Mastodon in particular, but I dislike Mastodon’s current interface (two complaints about user interfaces in one post? Mimimi…). In my opinion Mastodons column interface doesn’t really give enough space to the content and is not very intuitive. Halcyon is a web client which acts as an alternative interface to your Mastodon/Pleroma account. Visually it closely resembles the Twitter UI which I quite like.

As a plus, it is way easier to get people to move from Twitter to the fediverse by providing them with a familiar interface 😉

There are some public instances of Halcyon available, which you can use to try out Halcyon for yourselves, however in the long run I recommend you to self-host it, as you have to enter your account details in order to use it. Hosting it doesn’t take much more than a simple Raspberry Pi as it’s really light weight.

I know that a huge number of free software projects is developed by volunteers in their free time. Most of them don’t get any monetary compensation for their work and people often take this for granted. Additionally, a lot of the feedback developers get from their users is when things don’t work out or break.

(Not only) today is a chance to give some positive feedback and a huge Thank You to the developers of the software that makes your life easier!

Happy Hacking!