Brief: Movim is an open-source decentralized social media platform that relies on XMPP network and can communicate with other applications using XMPP.

We’ve already highlighted some open-source alternatives to mainstream social media platforms . In addition to those options available, I have come across another open-source social media platform that focuses on privacy and decentralization.

Movim: Open-Source Web-based Social Platform

Just like some other XMPP desktop clients, Movim is a web-based XMPP front-end to let you utilize it as a federated social media.

Since it relies on XMPP network , you can interact with other users utilizing XMPP clients such as Conversations (for Android) and Dino (for Desktop).

In case you didn’t know, XMPP is an open-standard for messaging.

So, Movim can act as your decentralized messaging app or a full-fledged social media platform giving you an all-in-one experience without relying on a centralized network.

It offers many features that can appeal to a wide variety of users. Let me briefly highlight most of the important ones.

Features of Movim

• Chatroom
• Ability to organize video conferences
• Publish articles/stories publicly to all federated network
• Tweak the privacy setting of your post
• Easily talk with other Movim users or XMPP users with different clients
• Automatically embed your links and images to your post
• Explore topics easily using hashtags
• Ability to follow a topic or publication
• Auto-save to draft when you type in a post
• Supports Markdown syntax to let you publish informative posts and start a publication on the network for free
• React to chat messages
• Supports GIFs and funny Stickers
• Edit or delete your messages
• Supports screen sharing
• Supports night mode
• Self-hosting option available
• Offers a free public instance as well
• Cross-platform web support

Using Movim XMPP Client

In addition to all the features listed above, it is also worth noting that you can also find a Movim mobile app on F-Droid .

If you have an iOS device, you might have a hard time looking for a good XMPP client (I’m not aware of any decent options). If you rule that out, you should not have any issues using it on your Android device.

For desktop, you can simply use Movim’s public instance , sign up for an account, and use it on your favorite browser no matter which platform you’re on.

You can also deploy your instance by using the Docker Compose script, the Debian package, or any other methods mentioned in their GitHub page .

Concluding Thoughts

While the idea of decentralized social media platforms is good, not everyone would prefer to use it because they probably do not have friends on it and the user experience is not the best out there.

That being said, XMPP clients like Movim are trying to make a federated social platform that a general consumer can easily use without any hiccups.

Just like it took a while for users to look for WhatsApp alternatives , the craze for decentralized social media platform like Movim and Mastodon is a possibility in the near future as well.

If you like it, do consider making a donation to their project.

What do you think about Movim? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Brief: A Qt-based video player for Linux that acts as a front-end to mpv along with the ability to use youtube-dl.

Haruna Video Player: A Qt-based Free Video Player

In case you’re not aware of mpv , it is a free and open-source command-line based media player. Okay, there is a minimalist GUI for MPV but at the core, it is command line.

You might also find several open-source video players that are basically the GUI front-end to mpv.

Haruna video player is one of them along with the ability to use youtube-dl . You can easily play local media files as well as YouTube content.

Let me give you an overview of the features offered with this player.

Features of Haruna Video Player

You might find it a bit different from some other video players. Here’s what you get with Haruna video player:

• Ability to play YouTube videos directly using the URL
• Support playlists and you get to control them easily
• Ability to auto-skip based on some words in the subtitle.
• Control the playback speed
• Change the format to play (audio/video) using youtube-dl
• Plenty of keyboard shortcuts
• Easily take a screenshot from the video
• Option to add primary and secondary subtitle
• Change the file format of the screenshot
• Hardware decoding supported
• Color adjustments to improve the quality of what you watch
• Ability to tweak mouse and keyboard shortcuts to be able to quickly navigate and do what you want
• Tweak the UI (fonts, theme)

Installing Haruna Video Player on Linux

Unfortunately (or not), depending on what you prefer, you can only install it using Flatpak . You can install it on any Linux distribution using the Flatpak package .

You can find it in AUR as well if you’re using an Arch-based system.

But, if you do not prefer that, you may take a look at the source code on GitHub to see if you can build it yourself like a normal Gentoo user.

Concluding Thoughts

Haruna Video Player is a simple and useful GUI on top libmpv . The ability to play YouTube videos along with various file formats on the system is definitely something many users would like.

The user interface is easy to get used to and offers some important customization options as well.

Have you tried this video player already? Let me know what you think about it in the comments below.

Brief: Super Productivity is an awesome open-source to-do app that helps you manage tasks, track tickets, and manage time.

No matter what you do, improving productivity is a common goal for most of the people. Usually, you would end up trying various to-do list apps or a note-taking app to help yourself organize and remind things to efficiently keep up with your work.

Sure, you can check out those lists and try them as you like. Here, I’ve come across something unique that you also may want to try if you wanted a desktop to-do application with a solid user interface, GitHub/GitLab integration, and a list of essential features.

Super Productivity seems to be an impressive to-do list app with some unique features to offer. In this article, I’ll let you know all about it briefly.

Super Productivity: A Simple & Attractive Open-Source To-do App

Super Productivity is an open-source app, and it is actively maintained by Johannes Millan on GitHub.

To me, the user experience matters the most, and I’m completely impressed with the UI offered by Super Productivity.

It also offers a bunch of essential features along with some interesting options. Let’s take a look at them.

Features of Super Productivity

• Add to-do tasks, description
• Track time spent on tasks and break
• Project management (with JIRA, GitHub, and GitLab integration)
• Ability to schedule tasks
• Language selection option
• Sync option to Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other WebDAV storage location
• Import/Export functionality
• Auto-backup functionality
• Ability to tweak the behavior of timers and counters
• Dark Mode theme available
• Add attachment to tasks
• Ability to repeat tasks completely for free
• Cross-platform support

In addition to the features I mentioned, you will find more detailed settings and tweaks to configure.

Especially, the integration with JIRA , GitHub and GitL ab . You can automatically assign tasks to work on without needing to check your email for the recent updates to issue trackers or tickets.

Compared to many premium to-do web services that I’ve used so far, you will be surprised to find many useful features completely for free. You can also take a look at the video below to get some idea:

Installing Super Productivity on Linux

You get a variety of options to install. I downloaded the AppImage file to test. But, you can also get the deb package for Debian-based distros.

It is also available as a snap . You can find all the packages in the GitHub releases section .

If you’re curious, you can check out its GitHub page to know more about it.

Concluding Thoughts

I found the user experience fantastic with Super Productivity. The features offered are incredibly useful and considering that you get some premium functionalities (that you’d get normally with to-do web services) it could be a perfect replacement for most of the users.

You can simply sync the data using Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other WebDAV storage location.

It could also replace a service like ActivityWatch to help you track the time you work on your tasks and remain idle. So, it could be your all-in-one solution for improving productivity!

Sounds exciting, right?

What do you think about Super Productivity? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Brief: A lightweight open-source RSS reader for desktop Linux with all the essential features.

Personally, I utilize services like Feedly to keep up with the latest happenings across the globe. But, it is a web-based service offering some optional premium features that I may never require.

So, I looked at some feed reader apps available for Linux and QuiteRSS seemed like an impressive solution as an alternative to web-based services.

In this article, I’m going to share a few key highlights about QuiteRSS along with my experience with it.

QuiteRSS: A simple RSS reader for Linux desktop

QuiteRSS is a quite useful open-source feed reader that is absolutely free and easy to use. Yes, all you need to do is just grab the ULR of the feed and add it.

It has most of the essential features that you would expect from a standard desktop-based RSS reader. This includes offline reading. You can download articles of your choice in a click and read it later even if you are not connected to the internet.

Don’t worry about adding RSS feeds one by one in QuiteRSS. The Good thing is that you can import feed list in OPML file format and add a bunch of RSS sources without making lots of efforts.

You can ‘add star’ to articles or add labels to them for organizing it better.

As you can already notice from the screenshot above that it offers a minimal user experience, let me also mention some of the other features that you get with it.

Features of QuiteRSS

• Embedded Browser
• Feed and news filters
• User labels
• User filters
• Theme options (Dark/others)
• Ability to customize fonts and colors
• System tray icon support
• Proxy configuration (optional)
• Feed import wizard
• Automatic update feed on startup
• Mark/Unmark
• Import/Export feeds (OPML files)
• Pop up notification on updates
• Sound notification support
• Quick news filter
• Quick search feature
• Cross-platform
• Portable version (Windows)

In a nutshell, starting with filtering the feed to cleaning it up, you get all the useful abilities. You can also configure a proxy if that’s what you need.

The embedded browser is really helpful to prevent switching back and forth to check out any linked resources in the feed stories.

Considering it as a feature-rich cross-platform feed reader, every feature listed should come in handy.

Installing QuiteRSS on Linux

QuiteRSS is available in the universe repository of Ubuntu and you can install it using the following command:

sudo apt install quiterss

You might not get the latest version all the time from Ubuntu’s repositories . For that, you can easily add the official PPA in Ubuntu -based distributions:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:quiterss/quiterss
sudo apt update
sudo apt install quiterss

It is also available to install on Fedora using the default repository. In addition to that, you can use Pacman command to install QuiteRSS on Arch Linux or get it from AUR .

You can refer the official installation instructions to get started. If you’re curious, you can also check out their GitHub page .

My experience with QuiteRSS

It is a simple feed reader with a clean user experience. You do not get a rich formatting for the RSS feed you follow but it is good enough for readable experience.

I find the ability to add labels quite useful to be able to filter out the stories I’ve read and enjoyed. For some reason, whenever I minimize the application or switch the workspace, the application closes automatically. It does appear in the system tray, but I do want it to stay active unless I manually minimize it or close it.

So, I have to re-launch every time I move from it. If you face this issue, you might want to head on to their GitHub page to raise a new issue (unless they are already working on a reported issue).

The ability to switch themes (especially having a dark theme) is fantastic. You can also customize the fonts and colors to tweak the experience of your feed. Overall, it is a great feed reader to have on Linux.

If you use QuiteRSS extensively or like the idea of this open source software, please consider making a donation to the project on the developer’s website .

Have you tried it already? What do you think about QuiteRSS? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Brief: Rocket.Chat is an open-source team communication application with features and looks similar to Slack. You are free to self-host it or opt for their managed service for a fee.

Slack is a useful and popular team communication app that potentially replaces emails for work. A lot of big and small teams use it, even we at It’s FOSS relied on Slack initially.

However, we needed a good open-source alternative to Slack and that’s when we came across Rocket.Chat. Sure, there are several other open-source slack alternatives , but we opted for Rocket.Chat for its similarity with Slack and ease of deployment.

Rocket.Chat: An Open Source Communication Platform

Rocket.Chat is an open-source communication platform for team collaboration.

You get all the essential features to facilitate proper communication along with the option to get started for free, opt for hosted service by the Rocket.Chat team or deploy it on your server.

You can totally customize as per your requirements when deploying it on your server. No matter what you choose to do, the feature-set is impressive.

Let us take a look at what it offers.

Features of Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat is a powerful and flexible team communication tool. Here’s what you can expect from it:

• Easy file sharing (drag and drop support)
• Audio file sharing support
• Video conferencing with Jitsi Meet integration
• Separate channels (private and public options)
• End-to-End encryption support
• Customize the theme of the service (including the ability to customize it)
• Guest access support
• Unlimited message history (depending on the storage of your server for self-managed setup)
• Broadcast channel support
• RSS Integration
• Several 3rd party app integration support
• White label (optional if you want a custom branding)
• Read receipt (Enterprise plan)
• Push notifications support
• Customizable user permission
• 24 x 7 Support (depending on the pricing plan)
• LiveChat integration support which you can add on your website
• Real-time translation
• Self-host support
• Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux)

In addition to all the key points mentioned above, there are a lot of little nifty features that should come in useful in Rocket.Chat.

Installing Rocket.Chat client on Linux

If you have a Rocket.Chat instance deployed or hosted by Rocket Chat itself, you can access it through web browser, desktop clients and mobile apps.

On Linux, Rocket.Chat is available as a snap and a Flatpak package . You can go through our guides on using snap or Flatpak on Linux to get started.

I would recommend installing it as a Flatpak (that’s how I use it) to get the latest version. Of course, if you prefer to use it as a snap package, you can go with that as well.

In either case, you can explore the source code on their GitHub page if you need.

My Thoughts on Using Rocket.Chat

I’ve been using Rocket.Chat for quite a while now (for our internal communication at It’s FOSS). Even though I was not the one who deployed it on our server, the documentation hints at a swift process to set it up on your server.

It supports automation tools like Ansible , Kubernetes , etc and also gives you the option to deploy it as a docker container directly.

You will find plenty of administrative options to tweak the experience on your instance of Rocket.Chat. It is easy to customize many things even if you are not an expert at self-managed projects.

Personally, I appreciate the ability to customize the theme (it is easy to add a dark mode toggle as well). You get all the essential options available on smartphone as well. Overall, it is indeed an exciting switch from Slack and it should be a similar experience for most of you.

What do you think about Rocket.Chat? Do you prefer something else over Rocket.Chat? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.