I really like Syncthing, Nextcloud, Forgejo and Mailcow to collaborate with colleagues.
Kimai allows me to track hours and get paid.
Barrier allows me to use several computers at once.
Xen Orchestra is pretty much on par with VMWare stuff and way cheaper.
What other awesome software does allow you to work more efficiently in a business context and stays out of your way?
Linux?
can’t think of any serious alternative to Linux and it’s already in widespread use, so… yeah, that’s a given :)
Bitwarden?
Vaultwarden here :) But yes, a secure multi-tenet password manager is invaluable.
Vaultwarden is great, but if you run a business, I recommend paying for bitwarden. 1. To keep the devs employees and 2. Reduce maintenance overhead.
Bitwarden is the shit. As if the free tier weren’t good enough, the annual subscription is dirt cheap and you don’t have to remember more than the master password anymore.
I’ve tried bitward3n but I use buttercup and it’s fine.
My worker cooperative helps authors self-publish, and we use as much open-source as possible to do that. We rely almost exclusively on a number of tools which are all better than proprietary counterparts for one reason or another (sometimes merely because they are free and allow us to keep costs minimal) but the main reason is most of our clients value unquestioned data ownership over anything else. We avoid corporate cloud services and self-host as much as possible, for example.
Having said that, IMO many of these are also better designed and better UI than comparable paid tools. Blender being the obvious best example, but WordPress is another one. I used to ignorantly shit on WP so much when I was working in the professional startup industry as a web developer. Since then, I’ve learned to my delight that it’s awesome if you don’t bog it down with a bunch of horrible plugins, and the latest versions with their block editor approach are so good for easy and quick theming.
Here’s a list off the top of my head of our regularly used software. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and many of these are going to be unsurprising:
- Linux (seems obvious, but definitely worth mentioning. We primarily use Ubuntu and Debian based images.)
- Blender (2D/3D graphics)
- GIMP (raster image editing)
- Inkscape (vector image editing)
- calibre (creating ebooks)
- InvoiceNinja (generating invoices, tracking hours, payments, expenses, general accounting)
- NextCloud (storage and collaboration on files, passwords, office editing)
- Gitlab (git repository tracking, deployment management)
- WordPress (client websites)
- Caddy (web server with dead-simple config and automatic https support)
- Zulip (chat, the threading style they use is so effective for organizing discussions about client work, it’s miles beyond Slack or any other options we’ve all used in past corporate lives)
Wordpress even has activitypub integration now! Hooray! Here’s hoping automattic do good on their word and bring it to their other projects like Tumblr
Also as much as I like gimp, it is unfortunately not that widely used due to super specialised and hard to use compared to the industry standard juggernaut that is adobe’s creative suite. You’re probably going to get laughed at in any professional industry if you suggest seriously using it.
I think it depends on your business. I used Libreoffice, Python, ImageJ, R, VirtualBox, Ubuntu, and large Linux clusters for a couple of decades.
KVM Hypervisors
Proxmox VE makes this easy. Also makes building a cluster of such hypervisors easy. There’s a free version that gives you the entire feature set but you need to pay for support and access to the Enterprise repository.
It’s not the only option, and it may not even be the best option, but it’s pretty damn good.
I’m not even talking about proxmox, I’m talking about straight up QEMU with virt-manager on any RHEL like distro. Better yet if you have cockpit installed.
That’s good as well, of course. I use QEMU with virt-manager and cockpit on my office workstation running EndeavourOS and it’s glorious. Keeps Windows from ever being installed on the bare metal.
From a usability perspective, though, I think Proxmox lowers the barrier to entry, as the web UI feels considerably more powerful out of the box than cockpit. An interesting bonus is that you can add it to an existing Debian install, including one with a DE, though it’s not something one would want to do in production.
I don’t consider proxmox to be enterprise grade though, so I won’t touch it.
Care to elaborate?
Libvirt is great, been using it at home to run VMs for ~10 years now.
I happily pay for their support. Haven’t needed it, but IMO; money well spent.
What would be the best option ?
Depends on what level of responsiveness you need from the support team. I run it in my home lab and haven’t needed to raise any tickets as all the info I need to solve problems is readily available on their forums or in assorted blog posts. A company relying on it for their critical infrastructure would probably be best-served with Standard (4-hr response within a business day) or Premium (2-hr response within a business day).
If those still aren’t quick enough it may be worth looking into a partner of theirs, or into another commercial option altogether. I’ve interacted with the Red Hat support team on some high-severity issues and they are top-tier; that was unrelated to virtualization, though, and they tend to push the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution quite hard. I’m talking a response time of minutes.
If I’m using kvm on any standalone (non-clustered) hosts on the data center it’s typically on Ubuntu LTS, knowing that the company I work for has a Canonical support agreement in their back pocket, but we haven’t needed it.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I was interested to know what are the best options for a home lab. I will look into KVM.
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Almost all commercial software is better designed and has a better interface than any FOSS project.
Not really. I have used commercial IPAM and DCIM software and they all pale in comparison to Netbox, for example.
Not really client software but proxmox is damn useful. It’s replaced any hypervisors at at least 2 companies I’ve been in IT at. It’s not going to run your multi-national datacenters, but for the 2 or 4 locations on a low budget, with a need for Virtualization Proxmox makes it easy.
Personal experience:
Argo workflows and Argocd (vs. something like Harness) - Requires a handful of customizations to get it parity, but it’s really useful out-of-the-box I think. Good ol’ Jenkins works too, I suppose.
Soon, OpenTofu - unfortunately Hashicorp is going IPO which means bad news. OpenTofu is the fork of terraform.
Podman - Docker alternative. It’s really close, especially with Podman Desktop. I had a few issues that I ran into, but there are probably workarounds.
Vscode / codium - yeah it’s Microsoft, and has tracking. But it’s popular for a reason.
TrueNAS Scale. It’s based on Debian instead of FreeBSD (like TrueNAS Core) and has KVM virtualization and k3s containerized app support built in, in addition to being a NAS operating system.
In my case with lightweight office suite usage, the integration of onlyoffice with nextcloud is awesome
No nextcloud client required and it can access to all the office documents on your nextcloud
Although OnlyOffice is not “fully” open source, as you can’t compile it without the secret proprietary bits
a lot of developer and infrastructure tools. web servers (httpd, nginx, etc), compilers, frameworks (e.g. Apache Kakfa has no real counterpart AFAIK.)
