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.
Geddit is not bad front end. No reddit account needed
Honestly I can’t replace discord with something that doesn’t have the streaming feature. I use that waaaay too much
I decided to be the change I want to see, so I got my gaming group a Mumbe server for audio chat. I self-host, but commercial ones are dirt cheap. Sound quality is better than Discord. We use Matrix for text, pictures, etc.
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.
That’s weird, I’ve never had that issue
Windows Discord is also a web app.
Just gotta say, I didn’t expect to see emojis in a username, and I am both appalled and impressed
Bloody banking apps. I’m sick of them not exposing any API to make third party apps.
If you just want to set up viewing transactions you can setup Actual Budget
Discord for me, very difficult to get friends to use foss alternatives because, while I don’t like Discord, it just has a pretty good UI/UX (aside from some annoyances) that alternatives haven’t really matched yet imo. Doesn’t make them bad, but I can fully understand why friends would not want to switch to something like Matrix.
I’d be a little scared of showing my friends the matrix channel directory with how sus some of those channels are. I think that’s gonna be one of it’s biggest hindrance in being adopted by non-tech users, not even its UI or lack of features. Some of those channels are pretty bad.
At least there’s a matrix bridge for discord. You’re still connecting to discord from your matrix client, but at least you don’t have to install the discord client or access the website.
The whole Adobe creative suite. The options out there absolutely are not replacements, either in functionality or usability. Most of them are UX nightmares and feel actively hostile to the user
I even tried replacing Lightroom, which if you read the recommendations, people love the various FOSS options out there, but they were all garbage at onboarding or finding functionality or just even setting up a simple library with events and albums to group together and edit.
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.
That ship has sailed unfortunately since everyone was conditioned to hate all cryptocurrency during the dogecoin and nft crazes. Though whenever anyone mentions crypto to me I am not afraid to mention monero as a serious option that I use even if no one knows about it or thinks its a shitcoin.
Eh, i dont think the ship has sailed. The people who stay in crypto during “crypto winters” are generally the real ones who actually want to see a world where governmyth monopoly money fails.
But there in lies the problem, money is solely the domain of government, and anyone who thinks it isn’t is extremely ignorant and naive of how money actually works. The crypto bros have been lying to you, and while the cypher punks meant well, they are woefully ignorant about things like history and jurisprudence.
There is a path forward with crypto currency, but it isn’t through private endeavor. Otherwise we would be trading in wampum shells.
Governments have not always been in control of money. Gold and silver are hard assets that have retained value for thousands of years. Only recently have we been subject to governmyth monopoly money that can be inflated to oblivion by a few secret people in a room who are responsible to nobody but themselves.
Absolutely “governments” have always been in control. How do you think they get the gold out of the ground? An elite hires people to do that work. The elites are the government in these ancient times, and they always controlled the mines. That is literally the very first thing they go for, and we have plenty of evidence for this. The precise locations of these mines was not unknown to these peoples by any stretch of the imagination.
Further, these gold mines were not simple operations, they required skill and aptitude to extract and form the metal into it’s required physical form, indeed just the process of what the physical form should be is itself a complicated political process. It’s also a myth that this is something recent, we simply don’t have the archaeological or written evidence to know what they did, but that doesn’t mean that local elites weren’t controlling the monetary supply through various rhetorical, political and/or physically coercive means just as their distant Sumerian progeny would end up doing. We have evidence of direct economic control going back almost to the very beginning of civilization.
People don’t hate crypto because of NFTs, they hate crypto because it’s all smoke and mirrors. Crypto isn’t money, it’s a speculation market with an excellent ad campaign. You can’t buy things with crypto.
Want to spend money without the government tracking your every purchase? Just use cash.
This so much. I hate all the speculation and grift around it. If some crypto stay stable enough to use as a currency I’d be up to try it. I’ll look into monero, I’ve never heard of it.
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.
I have been experimenting with using Inkscape and OpenSCAD for 3d modeling, and it seems to work for what I do, but I know quite a few people prefer a more graphical interface than OpenSCAD.
OpenSCAD is a good take on CAD. My primary workflow is also based on plaintext (text configs, code, org-mode, latex, etc) and keyboard (no mouse). It’s easy to manage and back it up with version control tools like git. However, there are a few fields that I feel are inherently visual and need a very interactive tool. CAD is one of them. Others are 3D animation and art.
My central and autonomic nervous systems. Mine are shite and have been since I was wee. Even a clean reinstall of the original operating system would likely help a ton, but if the open source community could go through the files and find the all the bugs, who knows what I could make of my life. At the very least I’d be able to work again.
OH FUCK
Brain is running proprietary shitware
Theres no hope for us, but for our kids…
Lets flash something worthy into their heads moment they are getting birth
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 . . .
Tried a bit of bricscad, have to say it’s wonderful just not using autodesk evil ooze. Maybe you can try emailing them so they can give you a discount?
Anyway, here with inventor, a horrible choice I’m stuck with
I hant heard of this before … It has Ubuntu and opensuse as supported plattform, and a one-time buy option?! This sounds amazing!
Yeah, it’s the first alternative I like. It’s not foss but we really really suck at foss anyway
Im always rooting for FOSS alternatives (like inkscape just got a shape builer tool in 1.3, and now i can finally abandon Illustrator for good!)
I wish freeCAD was usable professinally, but for now it’s too convoluted and prone to crashing; and so ill take anything for a testrun that just supports linux natively.
Mechanical CAD is very niche and simultaneously complex to execute… Its just not ideal for hobby development
Yeah, I was hoping freecad would get a bigger push after Autodesk screwed people over with fusion. Still it’s going, slow but going
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?
Photography software in general.
Photo Mechanic, On1 plugins, and Capture One - there isn’t a single piece of FOSS photography software that is remotely useful for my use cases.
High volume tethered shooting with automatic application of edits and adjustments in separate layers is basically impossible.
Fast culling of hundreds or thousands of images along with applying metadata with templates is also not really possible.
Darktable and Digikam are okay Lightroom replacements, but they don’t come close to touching what is available in the proprietary world. Rawtherapee doesn’t do tethering at all, and isn’t very good at what it does do compared to On1 Photo Raw or Capture One.
I am planning on writing a graphical interface for gphoto2 (a Linux camera remote library) which will allow for tethered shooting and some other neat things (like using a computer as an intervalometer). I might also write a web interface for it, so it will allow for using a table or phone to remote control a camera and allow the user to check on timelapses, but it will take a while to get it all to work.
For me it’s Adobe After Effects. Yeah, I can do most of what it does in a combination of blender, natron, gmic, etc… but I really like the workflow of AFX. Not having that tool was one of the hardest parts of cancelling my Adobe subscription. Nowadays I would even settle for a non-foss alternative. As long as it’s running on Linux. But so far, that has not happened (I use other non Foss tools that work great, like resolve/fusion and Houdini… but I still miss AFX)
Edit: yeah, I missed a detail in the question: I do not currently use AFX but used it a lot in the past and am now trying to replicate workflows I based on it with other tools… still miss it a lot and would give a lot to have a solid alternative…
Windows, banking app, Discord, and my router firmware.
Since gaming on linux has made ridiculous improvements im running it fulltime on my desktop machine. But I ran it on my laptops as sole OS for about 15 years now.
For router firmware i bought an archer c7 v5 last year (50€) and am running OpenWRT now. It’s sitting behind my ISPs router, but for that i don’t care.
Banking App would be really difficult since this is a huge security operation with liabilities. And discord would be nice to replace since it just fucks you and steals your data without giving it a second thought but there is no conpetitor i know of.
Can help with all of them. But check out opnsense.
On my phone: a FOSS “find-my-phone” function
On my computer: a FOSS way to access Teams for work. Just give me a Weechat plugin please.
KDE Connect can find your phone, as long as it’s on the same network (basically, only at home). It’s not perfect but it’s something.
findmydevice on fdroid
Access Teams? Do you need anything more than opening the Teams web app in a browser?
That is what I do…but I work for 4 companies that all use Teams and it would be nice to have all the profiles in one place.
Ah yes, maybe you’re in IT like me. 😆
Firefox Containers help, I have a separate container for each client. Actually I’ve been using Arc Browser more recently, it’s a great browser but not FOSS.
I’ve done that before. I work in higher education, actually. None of my employers actually need Teams. I don’t know why we use it. All important info is sent via email.
Oh, and you can do that even in the official application? I thought it was impossible to be logged into multiple Teams accounts at the same time! (That was one of the reasons I was using Teas in a browser, being able to open another instance in a private window.) Or did they finally fix that, at least?
Look at owntrack. Send position data to your own server
That’s an interesting idea
Notion
The dream.
At least give me better widgets on Android so I can ditch TickTick.
Less software and more driverware. My headphones (arctis nova pro wireless) have some really nice customizations available with the sonar software. Nvidia drivers are more customizable but the issue is mostly support for vrr through gsync, dlss, hdr, and Nvidia broadcast. I know AMD is supposedly bounds and leaps ahead of Nvidia but that’s what I have for current hardware because of how useful and ubiquitous the software is.
If by Arctis nova pro you mean SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7 then this repo might interest you: github.com/Sapd/HeadsetControl it’s basically software that allows you to change afew settings for headset inside a terminal.
It’s not everything but it’s enough that I might get by with it! Thanks stranger
No problem :)
Shazam
