For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn’t always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is repeating an earlier post.
WhatsApp: I have been unable to convince my family and friends to use any other platform. Plus. in alot of countries, having WhatsApp becomes a must. Office 365: The only option I can use for work including Outlook and Teams. Google Maps: I keep trying to use OsmAnd+ but it is almost impossible to search for addresses.
in alot of countries, having WhatsApp becomes a must.
Why is this? I hear this a lot, but I don’t understand
At least here in Germany it is like that. if you got a new number or whatever you are 99,9% certain that number is on WhatsApp it’s inevitable its the main source for chatting for everyone. So if you’d want to switch platforms youd have to convince a lot of people and most would not be ready to do that since why bother when you can just use WhatsApp?
Google maps, venmo, and lyft are my last real holdouts.
I tried Osmand~ but it like using your dads Garmin from 2005. The last two have been hard to find good alternatives to. Would be nice if signal payments were in a stable coin instead of a shitcoin.
OsmAnd is a maps app, not a navigation app
Are there good FOSS navigation apps?
spoiler
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Is Organic Maps better at navigation than OsmAnd?
spoiler
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Plex. I’m not sure if Jellyfin is foss, but if it is, I haven’t felt like converting my library. I’ve put a lot of work into making it just right.
Steam, obviously.
other than video games, I think that’s really it. I still use some others, like Spotify, but not primarily, I just like to have options.
+1 for Plex. Basically perfect and so much more polished than JF (which I tried on three separate occasions to force myself to like).
Jellyfin is FOSS. You can by the way just install it and point it at your library to see if it recognises everything. It won’t change your file layout. If you have your movies named "title (year)“ and series in a folder format like “series title/season x/s0xe0x” (x being season and episode numbers), it should actually automatically recognise it all.
But I admit, if you have deviations from that you would need to correct those first and it seems from what I read that Plex is not as picky with that as Jellyfin is.
Well, I’ve tried it since this comment, and I’m using it occasionally (primarily because I like the Delfin app for Arch Linux), but there’s a lot of reasons I still prefer Plex. First and most importantly, I use PlexAMP as my primary music player and I have 1tb+ of music that I don’t feel like perfectly setting up again. It’s a huge amount of work, and I listen to a lot of lesser known shit that just isn’t easy to gather data for, and a lot of Various Artist shit that I’m really particular about how it shows up.
The other big issue I have is that Collections is a separate tab in Movies, rather than being listed alongside the rest of my library like in Plex, and that’s really just not useful for me. It automatically populated my collections just fine, but if my primary Movies tab is just gonna list each individual movie and I have to actually go to the Collections tab to see collections, it’s just not how I like my library. If I can find a solution for this it’ll go a long way to pushing me toward JellyFin.
Spotify, Netflix, a bunch of online services, old games, the update software of my car GPS…
Well… Steam.
Games, Discord and banking stuff
Well I have separate computer for music production which I don’t think has any FOSS software on it, so everything that has to do with that.
Dropping The List here because answering in detail would take …a very, very long time.
I guess that list could be helpful for some, but for me (and IMO, music production in general), it’s woefully inadequate to the point of hilarity.
Pro audio has been a complete mess in Linux for ages, and it’s not even close to where it should be in order to be generally usable. Every 7-8 years or so when my old music computer starts to die I try and check if it has made substantial improvement, but apart from Musescore actually being good, it is hard to find any tangible progress from 15 years ago. Pipewire gives me some hope, but it’s far from production-ready in Pro audio world. And I’m not really going to get rid of all the VST stuff I’ve bought in the last 20 years (all of which still works out of the box on a new computer!)
In addition, making music is the one hobby I have to get me away from tinkering with computers. I am not interested if I could make my Linux setup equally good if I spent weeks tinkering on it, when it’s literally easier for me to work for a week and buy a Macbook Air (or whatever crappy windows PC), where I get all of my old work ready for action in under a day, and I can trust that everything I do will just work, and work well at that. And it does it while allowing me to work remotely with other musicians since we can all use the same stuff.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be in my grave before FOSS Pro Audio ever gets there, unfortunately.
Edit: Ironically, the one FOSS thing I would love to use in my audio stuff is Guitarix, which is then the thing that doesn’t interop well with anything else. And I would love to have easy way to do all that I do on (Win/Mac Os) on Linux, but 20 years of disappointment is pretty hard to overcome at this point.
Have you tried Ardour, Bitwig, Reaper or Zrythm? Studio 1 also has a Wayland-native version now, which is paid.
But I get the tinkering part, poorly.
I’ve tried all of them except Zrythm. In fact, REAPER is my DAW of choice. But while that works on Linux, a lot of the plugins I require do not (or well, I guess it depends on how people define “work”), and REAPER in itself is not FOSS.
I wanted to package an ambisonic VST3 plugin as a Flatpak, really need to learn that as this would make things really easy.
But I have no idea of audio production, find it really cool but its a complex topic.
Just games. And I am thankful for all the open source implementations as they are almost always vastly superior to the original releases.
Thank you John Carmack for releasing the sources to your games!
I wanted to fully switch to Linux and FOSS for a while now but specialised software like CAD and image editing are either non existent or completely useless for professional purposes in their FOSS versions. What angers me most is that most is them could run on wine easily if the developers did some minor changes so it seems intentional.
Google Earth and Google Street View.
Even after all these years of using them, I’m still amazed.
What proprierary Javascript is needed for core functionality? 😅
Any reason you prefer noscript to unlock Origin?
I find it easy to use and use both, Noscript for Javascript (all opt-in), UBlock for adblock (badness enumeration) and “cookie autodelete” (on mobile, for opt-in keeping cookies and deleting the rest)
Proprietary firmware on Google Pixel, blobs in Dasharo Coreboot.
On Android there are tons of video and image editors embedded in Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok etc. but nothing comparable.
I find Desktop video editors confusing but I use Footage (GNOME) and “OpenVideoEdit” on Android.
