Really Great Software

There has been a lot of talk about enshittification of software and services recently. I wanted to redress that by celebrating some programs I’ve been using which are genuinely brilliant.

Immich

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management application which runs in the browser, Android or iOS. It could be thought of as an alternative to something like Google Photos, making it easy to browse, display, search and share one’s photos from multiple devices. It uses machine learning for face recognition, object identification and (with the most recent release) text recognition.

I find it faster, more stable and more polished than the native Photo applications on Windows or GNOME. The clever caching and thumbnailing makes it responsive and slick. The facial and object recognition feels inferior to Google Photos but far superior to OneDrive galleries.

Deployment is fairly simple using Docker. Images can be manually or automatically uploaded, and it can also be configured to use existing image libraries on your network. I use Rclone to synchronise my OneDrive photos to my NAS, and share this library via NFS with Immich. It works well.

Davinci Resolve

I’m not an Open Source purist. Sometimes proprietary software is simply better. One such example is Davinci Resolve, the video editor which blows everything else out of the water.

Calling it a “video editor” is doing it a disservice; it is really a full post-production editing suite with functions for library management, cutting, editing, compositing, visual effects, colour management, colour grading, audio mixing, audio effects and rendering. Historically, the only thing which came close to this on Linux was Cinelerra, but that was never complete and was perpetually broken in some way or another. For real masochists, the Blender video editor could be coerced into something similar but the whole process was appallingly manual. Kdenlive is great for simpler projects, but I have found I reach its limits too quickly.

Resolve is huge, complex and overwhelming. Casey Faris has made an excellent introductory tutorial which runs to over 5 hours of densely packed information. Clearly, it just scratched the surface of what can be done but was more than enough for me to get going with my projects. Like many complex tools, it is often possible to produce good results when one grasps a simpler subset of the functions. I would encourage anyone who has become frustrated by their existing video editing tools to watch the tutorial.

Resolve is marketed under a freemium model; the basic version is free (as in beer) with some features locked behind the paywall of the “Studio” version. However, the free version is immensely capable and I have yet to run into a situation where I would have benefited from upgrading to Studio. Of note, when they refer to “4K” rendering as being a premium feature, they are referring to the Cinema 4K standard. The free version will render to broadcast 4K resolutions (a.k.a. 4K UHD, 3840 x 2160) quite happily. The Studio upgrade is a one-time purchase of about £270. There is no subscription model employed here and, to date, upgrade fees have not been charged between major or minor releases.

Libro.fm

My eyesight is rapidly deteriorating; a combination of age-related refractive changes and glaucoma. Once an avid reader, I find myself straining to find adequate lighting and reading angles. I read less and less.

I like audiobooks. They help me consume literature more comfortably. I can read while walking the dogs. But audiobooks are expensive and difficult to buy without dealing with Amazon.

Libro.fm is an independent audiobook store, application and subscription and streaming service. It serves the same role as Audible, but Libro.fm’s offerings are delivered DRM-free. Therefore, continued access to purchased books is not dependent on continued access to the service. Their app is fairly decent, but the books can also be played on any device or application which supports standard .m4b files completely offline. Furthermore, Libro.fm donate a portion of their proceeds to local independent bookshops. They’re not transparent as to how much they donate, but historic filings suggest it is a sizeable amount. The model seems to be much more virtuous than their monstrous competitor.

Not everything is rosy: subscriptions are more expensive than Audible; the range is more limited; some available books are cannot be purchased via the subscription tokens; metadata such as Chapter headings may be missing; and there’s no synchronisation between the audiobook and any text ebook service. If the priority is price and features, Audible is still the champion. However, if the preference is sustainability and resisting oligarchs and enshittification, Libro.fm has the crown.

Audiobookshelf

The Libro.fm client applications are good, and can work both on- and offline. But I prefer a model where I download and serve the audiobooks myself. Audiobookshelf is a great option for this. It does exactly what you would expect and does it well: hosting and serving your audiobooks to your web browser or client application and synchronising your reading point between devices. (It can do the same with your podcasts as well.) It is a simple docker-based deployment. I love it.

Peertube

I’ll admit - this one surprised me. I was looking for a way to embed videos into my blog site without imposing massive bandwidth penalties on myself or subjecting my readers to the tracking practices of embedded YouTube. With some scepticism, I looked at Peertube, a federated video sharing platform. I had looked at it years ago, when the content and performance was very poor. However, on joining the peertube.wtf server I found a friendly interface, good performance and privacy-respecting streaming. It took a bit of hacking to embed the videos smoothly into my Hugo-based site, but now I have it running I am very pleased with the results. Well done, the Fediverse!

Conclusion

I’m not doubting that enshittification is everywhere, but there are beacons of light in the sludge-coloured darkness. We can fight back by using, buying and supporting great software and great software practices. In some ways, we’re in a golden age of brilliant, shining applications. Let us celebrate them! I could have mentioned another half-dozen applications in this post. I’ll save that for another day, but if there’s a piece of software you have found great, shout it from the rooftops!