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.
Discord. As a chat platform, it is by far the most user-friendly one out there despite its proprietary nature and lack of respect for privacy.
Messaging platforms are so hard to replace since there’s a social traction aspect. I can pick out the most secure and private messaging service, and then have no one to message on it
Steam, because most my games are on there.
Discord, because most my friends and social groups are on there.
Discord, Steam and Obsidian.
I’m really liking Logseq. I started on it instead of Obsidian since Logseq is FOSS. I understand it’s not too hard to switch over since they both use markdown files, granted some scripts need to be run to convert markdown differences between the two.
Logseq’s business model is to charge $5/mo for syncing on their (fully encrypted with a private key) server, but you can use a FOSS syncing solution (or a property one) if you prefer. I pay to support the project and to simplify sync on work devices I don’t have administrator rights on (so most other sync solutions wouldn’t work well.)
I tried Logseq, but it was slower than Obsidian and it’s section/block oriented and I want it to be note oriented (Obsidian). It is a decent alternative tho.
I love logseq conceptually but constantly use org-roam because logseq is prone to performance breakdowns on my hardware
I started on it instead of Obsidian
This is the way. I started on Obsidian, and Logseq is painful in comparison. It’s a good product, but I got accustomed to too many nice conveniences over the past couple of years.
Google Maps. It sucks, and stores randomly pop in and out while you’re trying to zoom in past the McDonalds ad that’s showing despite you searching “shoe store”, but it has so much more info than the competitors that they don’t compare.
Tried Openstreetmap? OSMAnd? Organic maps? Both of which use OSM. HERE maps (not open source)?
Obsidian. Plain text files with as many or as few plugins as you want. All versions of the app look and behave the same (other than mobile, but at least android is kinda close). Nothing stored in a database file, no manipulation of the text files themselves (looking at you, Joplin). I’m open to another option but so far, nothing is as elegant and platform agnostic as Obsidian.
I don’t understand why we spend so much time praising proprietary software in these communities.
As to your question, I have a separate Windows machine for gaming, but that’s it. I keep one foot in the free world and one in the proprietary. As for productivity tools I can’t think of a proprietary tool I “can’t quit” or that I would pick in favor of a free tool.
Fans of proprietary software have this weird belief that free software users choose inferior tools for purist or idealist reasons. This is offensively ignorant. No one chooses bad tools on purpose; we just consider freedom to be part of the criteria of a good tool.
A tool with fewer features that is harder to use is by definition an inferior tool.
we just consider freedom to be part of the criteria of a good tool.
You just described choosing an inferior tool for ideological reasons.
A tool with fewer features that is harder to use is by definition an inferior tool.
That’s only your opinion, not an objective truth, and I only partially agree with it. Having the most features is not as important as having just the right set of features, and there are anti-features to consider as well. Feature creep can actually impact the usability of a tool, so these two criteria are sometimes in contradiction.
Ease of use is subjective and depends on the user, because users’ needs, ability, tastes, and concerns differ. Of course, I don’t think anyone deliberately chooses a tool because it is hard to use.
I don’t agree that freeness is purely an ideological concern. I don’t think a tool that works against me, or imposes arbitrary restrictions on me is a good tool by any measure. A good tool doesn’t enshittify, or spy on its user, or refuse to work for arbitrary reasons. If a tool doesn’t work and you are legally not allowed to fix it (as in the printer which inspired the movement in the 1980s), it’s not a good tool. If a tool punishes you for something you didn’t even do (as BitKeeper did to the Linux developers) it’s not a good tool, even if it has the right features.
I don’t tell you that your opinion is wrong, only that I don’t agree with it. We are told our concerns are invalid and don’t matter.
That sounds like an idealist reason to me lol
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.
same, everything i use is foss apart from games
Steam
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I feel LaTeX is not a replacement for inDesign. It would be a replacement for something like word. maybe try scribus?
Spotify, Netflix, a bunch of online services, old games, the update software of my car GPS…
Solidworks - A reliable FOSS 3D CAD package would be amazing… Parametric Blender? Photoshop/Illustrator - I know how to do 50% of what I need to in GIMP/Inkscape, but I lean on Adobe usually!
FreeCAD is the best FOSS program I know for solid modeling. Librecad works for 2D.
I would agree that FreeCAD is the best, but it’s not slick and doesn’t feel particularly robust. Don’t get me wrong, I have no rose tinted glasses on when it comes to Solidworks, but it’s generally very usable and very powerful.
Actually Solidworks is consider low to mid market. NX and whatever PTC calls their high end now are the main stream CAD systems as far as I know.
I worked with Creo for years, and ProE before that. I still have nightmares about the cascading unresolved reference screens. I’ve never used NX, but my understanding is it is AAA, though not super user friendly by default. I’ve pretty much exclusively used Solidworks for over a decade now, and I have to say that it’s generally pretty well behaved, and I’ve never really found I couldn’t do what I wanted to in it. Thus it has become my crutch.
Nice thing about Solidworks is I think is used the ACIS kernel. Means it is directly compatible with a lot of other software.
Man, I tried to learn FreeCAD, but coming from the Inventor/Solidworks paradigm it was hard.
Spotify and games
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.
I’m not off Google Maps either, but the closest to replacing it for me is Organic Maps, FWIW.
i dream of the death of whatsapp so we can finally move to something better, anything really, my standards are on the floor.
ill take telegram? discord?? smoke signals???
can some kind hardworking hacker collective kill it or something? please??
tbf discord is worse than whatsapp
whatsapp doesn’t even have a decent app for PC…
What’s wrong with the Microsoft Store app?
I keep getting logged out, and have to scan the QR Code with my phone every few days.
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.
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.
Misidentification is easy to fix in Jellyfin, with a couple clicks you can completely fix all metadata if it gets something wrong.
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.
+1 for Plex. Basically perfect and so much more polished than JF (which I tried on three separate occasions to force myself to like).
