With a lot of open source projects being worked on largely out of passion rather than financial gain I feel like there must have been several times where a release caught people off guard and “came out of nowhere” with its impressive scale.
To give some examples of how this might happen maybe it was an initial release dropped to the public in a complete state that had been worked on for a while privately or a project that was dormant for an extended period of time and picked back up.
Can anyone here think of an example? It doesn’t necessarily need to be something groundbreaking maybe it got people excited in a very specific niche.
If you do have an answer I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate on it.
Florisboard (Android keyboard) was recently updated for the first time in two years. Literally one day after I had given up on it and uninstalled it.
Note for any new comments:
It helps if you add an explanation of what it does, or link to read more. The name often isn’t descriptive enough, and people love to find new things to use.
Ghidra. Boom, here is 90% of ida pro. Enjoy.
Ghidra the code reverse engineering tool for analyzing code?
Finamp’s current alpha was a huge surprise to me. I stopped looking at development for a few months and in that time they completely reworked it
Wow the UI is nice
https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Finamp is a Jellyfin music player for Android and iOS. It’s meant to give you a similar listening experience as traditional streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, but for the music that you already own. It’s free, open-source software, just like Jellyfin itself.
Nextcloud has had some amazing updates recently. Adding Nextcloud Hub comes to mind.
Hub integrates the four key Nextcloud products Files, Talk, Groupware and Office into a single platform, optimizing the flow of collaboration. Eliminate the confusing hodgepodge of different SaaS tools and the compliance, security, cost and productivity issues that come with it and standardize on a single solution with Nextcloud Hub.
Cool!
MuseScore had a big UI rework with MuseScore 4, with an excellent video about the behind the scenes by Tentacruel (https://youtu.be/XGo4PJd1lng).
Although not sure if it caught people off guard as I’m not a user of it.
I do enjoy his videos. Apparently he working on the audacity overhaul too. Haven’t heard (or looked) at it a few years. Last I head was the freakout when the dared to add some basic telemetry to figure how people actually used the software.
