For me its honestly a ton of my work software (digital forensics), shit is too niche to be replaced by good FOSS options. Cellebrite, Magnet Axiom, etc. Autopsy is great and free and has a linux version but it simply cannot get the same level of data without a pretty nutty level of custom code.
And the biggest side effect of this is FUCKING WINDOWS. God I would replace this nightmare OS in a heartbeat if the aforementioned work software would make linux compatible versions. We have legitimately wasted 10k hours dealing with windows bullshit that would not be a problem in linux. Though im sure linux would take a different 10k for its own problems.
What about you guys? Doesn’t have to be work related, thats just the thorn in my side right now.
Discord. God I hate that program, but everyone I know uses it.
Same as Reddit; it’s network affect. There are different applications out there for various purposes that work better/nicer than Discord. But not enough people are using them so everyone goes where everyone else is at.
Discord on Linux is one of the biggest reasons I stopped trying to switch to Linux. Not the only, and I know web apps are a thing. But I hate setting literally a web app when there’s a “native” app, but their native app was doubling all my back/forward button inputs, and high was a massive disruption.
It was far from the only reason, more like the final straw in a growing list of frustrating shit that ALMOST worked right.
Windows Discord is also a web app.
That’s weird, I’ve never had that issue
Bloody banking apps. I’m sick of them not exposing any API to make third party apps.
The financial system. If i could i would use monero all the time since its FOSS money. Banking software, visa, slavercard, discover, etc APIs all proprietary.
Mechanical CAD. Something like SolidWorks or Fusion 360.
FreeCAD just isn’t there yet. They’re still struggling with the topological naming problem. However, Blender was like this in the field of 3D animations. Now it’s the standard. That gives me hope for FreeCAD. Anyway, MCAD is very important. I’m learning modern C++ and the FreeCAD code base in order to contribute.
I also wish there was a better CAD kernel than OpenCASCADE.
Whatsapp
And no, I can’t simply stop using or ask friends to move to an alternative. I’m from Brazil and that thing is so popular and mainstream, that even stores or public services use it.
Just this week, I had to report an animal abuse case to the authorities, and the official communication channel I had to use was through whatsapp.
It’s sad to see how dependent of a single proprietary service for something so important we allowed ourselves to become…
You can use a FOSS app at your end to chat with WhatsApp users, if this isn’t something you’re already aware of. Element.io plus a bridge. Beeper.com is a turnkey platform that sorts it all out for you.
It doesn’t help replace WhatsApp as a platform, but perhaps it would suit you?
I have been looking at this possibility, but running a bridge means that I will need to self host a service, which adds one more point of failure, while not really removing whatsapp from my life, so I’m not convinced it’s a good alternative.
That’s what beeper.com does. It’s also open source, but they handle running it for you.
But absolutely I agree that it doesn’t remove WhatsApp from your life, and that’s a pain point for me also when I’m working with services in Asia, who like Brasil predominantly work from WhatsApp.
If you don’t like Beeper, you could try these guys who host a managed solution (means you don’t have to deal with any issues), and let’s you offer the service to others:
In that case, won’t the server have access to my credentials?
No it won’t have your credentials, but you will authorise the bridge as a device, like you would with the web app.
Ah, I see. But in that case, won’t the server have access to my messages in plain text?
Yes and no. No, in that the bridge code is published, and it takes no action other than re-encrypting your message with the destination auth. But you have to trust that server. If you don’t trust the server, then you can run your own. Running your own Matrix server isn’t all that hard; I’ve done it before and there’s an Ansible playbook which does all the heavy lifting for you. But these days I prefer someone to run it for me.
How often do bridges to proprietary services break though?
I used to run bitlbee to use many chats in my irc ckient like 10-15years ago, and I remember things like google chat plugin breaking at least every month.
I last ran it myself a couple of years ago, and it was fine. These days I’m using Beeper, and I haven’t had any dropouts as an end user. If there are issues, they’re dealing with it not me.
My laptops BIOS
Ableton Live, Presonus Studio One and about a million VST plugins. Digital audio workstations and software instruments/effects are an area where open-source has made only limited inroads. Ardour was decent last time I used it, but since I got into Ableton Live with Push it’s hard to go back to other things.
I haven’t found a FOSS Ableton/Bitwig replacement either, but the FOSS audio world has many wonderful synths a effects.
adobe lightroom and photoshop. no, darktable and gimp are not as good. darktable barely functions with a trackpad and gimp is like photoshop from 2010.
Apart from the new Beta features, I’ve found 90% of my Photoshop workflow is replicated in Photopeaedit: I am an idiot - Photopea is not open source. Although it will help remove a reliance on Windows.
OneNote on my foldable laptop. I use it to take notes in uni simply because it’s the best option out of all the ones I’ve tried. I like OneNote’s stabilization and infinite canvas. What annoys me tho is that you cannot set the canvas to paged, so if you’re planning on exporting to pdf you have no idea where the page boundaries are.
With the last Windows 11 update they fucked it up tho and now the app is garbage anyways
Not FOSS, but I’m a big One Note user for work and wanted to find something for my personal life and most likely will use it for my next professional role in at least some capacity…Notion is by far the most customizable and complete solution that’s also user friendly because of existing user templates. I’ve been SERIOUSLY impressed and I’ve been trying everything I can find.
Best part is that the phone and computer apps are both very capable. One Note on phone is the worst companion app.
AnyType is an open-source alternative to Notion which recently launched:
Onenote! I use it for school and work, and love the syncing capability and the flexibility in structuring and organizing my notes. I also like the keyboard shortcuts and the way it can dock to a side of the screen to keep the main content visible
Would https://anytype.io/ be a replacement? It’s very new so you might not have heard of it. It’s designed like Notion, but it might have everything you need.
If your needs are more simple, https://notesnook.com/ could be worth looking into.
Other FOSS options are Joplin and Logseq. I’m an Obsidian user myself; not FOSS but the storage format is completely open which is the most important to me.
DuoLingo
Same. “Ik leer Nederlands” :)
But this one is tough since first you would have to crowd source a ton of user contributed lessons. Not sure how that could work…
Ik lees de krant en een olifant eet een boterham.
Autocad. This is the main (only?) reason I continue to use Windows. Professional 2d cad for architectural drafting has been lacking in Linux for a long time. There are a few commercial alternatives, Bricscad being the big one, but due to (cheap) grandfathered licensing cost for Autocad, I"ve been unable to push for a purchase. Qcad (professional) was another option I looked at but, despite being a good program at an amazing cost, had enough differences in work flow that I couldn’t find a good way to integrate it into a shared workflow.
Every once in a while I switch to Linux and either run a W10 vm or RDP just to work around the issue but, inevitably, get frustrated with performance. Freecad and Blender both seem to be working on the problem -but- from a BIM perspective, not detailed drafting . . .
So much this! And with the connectivity between Rhino/Archivad, Revit and TwinMotion I fear a solution is far away. Which surprises me because all of our professional software works fine natively on Mac, which is also Unix based. Isn’t there an easy way to emulate from that direction?
