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.
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:
Hey. How have I just found out about this?! Mind blown. Thank you so much for sharing! Franz and such just weren’t cutting it for me…this looks amazing.
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.
Likewise from Brazil and likewise would rather see whatsapp gone from my devices. Sadly, I still need it for work and other official matters. Still, I’m slowly but surely abandoning whatsapp, by either convincing people I talk to to migrate to other, less anti-consumer services, migrating myself to sister groups or alternatives in other services, and/or abandoning a group or chat altogether. And all the while being vocal about it by raising my concerns about whatsapp (just saying “I don’t like it and you should move too” can be pretty counter-intuitive with our countrymen). Hopefully, this way, I can drop it altogether once it becomes clearly irrelevant.
But this reminds me I haven’t deleted/left any chats for a few days, so I’ll take the opportunity to do just that.
But what do you do when services and institutions in general require you to use whatsapp? That’s what is mostly keeping me from deleting that app.
Well on the bright side, you helped an animal and that is awesome! Yall brazillians in general are pretty awesome peoples.
Someone hasn’t watched many gore videos
I second this . It’s really frustrating having 5 or more different messaging apps
I can confirm, sort of. I’m not from there nor have I been to Brazil specifically but I’ve been to South American and Asian countries where it’s nearly as ubiquitous as using native calls and texting in the US.
The web client on desktop is not terrible. Not great, but not terrible.
Honestly the current windows desktop app is fairly decent, it’s what makes it bearable to use for me.
@fulano Oh my, that’s terrible! At least they should give another option to communicate!
Sometimes they do, but then they will take much more time to give you a response.
Sometimes, they simply don’t have n alternative, like my city’s local service for reporting broken streetlights.
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
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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.
Yeah I would love a Discord alternative that I could actually convince my friends to use.
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I’ll give that a try, thanks!
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.
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
My laptops BIOS
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.
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.
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.
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?
What’s wrong with the Arch workbench in FreeCAD?
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
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
You jest but with the upcoming brain chips that might actually be a thing.
We are trying, but the bootloader seems to be unlockabe, and that’s pushing us back.
Honestly, I haven’t found anything that can replace Google Maps for route planning with public transportation. I really wish for crowdsourced timetables hosted on OSM…
You can use Gmaps WV to use GMaps without an Google account at least
Have you checked out Transportr btw?
Oh yeah, I did try it a year or so ago. I’m giving it another try but it still doesn’t work. I’ll try to get involved, thanks for the suggestion.
Microsoft Office. If you need to do any kind of professional documentation for external organizations, it’s basically impossible to use anything else.
The lack of good support for MS Office formats in FOSS tools is Microsoft’s fault. Office itself often creates files that are slightly incompatible with their own published OOXML standard. FOSS tools are left chasing these inconsistencies. I wish the world had settled on ODF instead of OOXML for documents.
Definitely agree with this one, though I will say you can replace one proprietary bit of software (Microsoft Office) with another (Google Drive/Docs) and get a large portion of the way in some industries. Really depends on what you need to do.
But alas, still no widely accepted FOSS alternatives.
Yeah I’ve been seeing this reasoning for many years now, but as someone who lives in Word and Excel for office work, it’s actually been a really long time since I couldn’t use Pages/Numbers/LibreOffice in place of Office just as effectively.
Pro tip: If you draft documents in Markdown, lots of programs have a “preview” that renders perfect formatted text to paste into a Word document.
I find it saves me a ton of hassle to leave Word to the very last step, when .docx is required.
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.
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
Notesnook is free, e2ee, nice ui, and has cloud sync. Recommmend
Not really the same thing at all if there’s no handwriting support.
Joplin.
Rnote is pretty good for handwritten notes, the canvas can be paged too.
I’ll give that a shot! OneNote is literally unusable since the last Windows update because the on-screen keyboard keeps popping up everytime I touch the screen. then it goes away immediately and leaves a bugged white rectangle on the canvas
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.
notion is also not FOSS though. and i had bad experiences with the mobile app when cell service is bad.
AnyType is an open-source alternative to Notion which recently launched:
I use OneNote at work and Joplin, saved to a cloud drive, at home. It’s not as good, but close enough for my needs. I can access my personal notes on all my pcs and my phone.
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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…
Whoever undertook that would need to have a lot of time and personal resources to dedicate to the vetting process. The sheer amount of quality differences that would come in… Not saying you need the FLACs from a professional studio, but you know you’d get someone recording on a HAM radio from the frozen wastes.
Ik lees de krant en een olifant eet een boterham.
/shudder…
