What non-FOSS software are you using that you wish you could replace?

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.

Thalestr,
@Thalestr@beehaw.org avatar

Discord and Windows. I have had so many bad experiences whenever I have tried Linux that I am extremely reluctant to give it another go despite all the improvements it has made.

metaStatic,

Pop OS has been a windows killer for me.

Revolt Chat has a bootstrapping problem like most new social software.

fulano,

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…

MiddledAgedGuy,

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.

thingsiplay,
thingsiplay avatar

@fulano Oh my, that's terrible! At least they should give another option to communicate!

fulano,

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.

nyakojiru,
@nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I second this . It’s really frustrating having 5 or more different messaging apps

Lem453,

The web client on desktop is not terrible. Not great, but not terrible.

mamotromico,

Honestly the current windows desktop app is fairly decent, it’s what makes it bearable to use for me.

CapedStanker,

Well on the bright side, you helped an animal and that is awesome! Yall brazillians in general are pretty awesome peoples.

itchy_lizard,

Someone hasn’t watched many gore videos

asap,

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?

fulano,

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.

asap, (edited )

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:

etke.cc

fulano,

In that case, won’t the server have access to my credentials?

asap,

No it won’t have your credentials, but you will authorise the bridge as a device, like you would with the web app.

fulano,

Ah, I see. But in that case, won’t the server have access to my messages in plain text?

asap,

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.

MediaActivist,
MediaActivist avatar

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.

elmodelm,

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.

asap,

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.

Auster,
Auster avatar

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.

fulano,

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.

Maxy,

I am currently using the proprietary Nvidia driver, simply because nouveau isn’t performant enough. I can’t wait for NVK though, maybe that driver will finally be viable for us Nvidia-users.

John_Coomsumer,

This is a big one for me, I currently have NVIDIA gpus on all my machines, (i am going to avoid them in the future, the corporate price gouging is unacceptable) but at the moment that makes switching to linux for my gaming pc quite a bit more obnoxious.

jabjoe,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

For home and work, none, locally. The problem now is Google and MS Teams, LinkedIn, Github, etc. That’s the new battle ground. They would make us thin clients to their mainframe and that we must rent access.

RotatingParts,

Any program that communicates with USB connected hardware via a non-standard, Windows only USB driver as provided by the hardware vendor. In other words, you can’t just plug a device into any OS and start programing it via a standard USB driver.

_TK,

Photo editing software. My wife didn’t want to pay for Lightroom anymore, so we switched to a software with a one time payment, Luminar. There are some FOSS alternatives, but none of them have been a hit with her. All of them are missing something or are intended to compete with a different line of product like Photoshop, Illustrator, or ProCreate.

emr,
@emr@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Reason. It’s got a unique workflow that is hard to break from. I even tried Renoise, but it’s hard to switch.

citizenserious,

Shazam

samuellb,

I really wish that you could install a clean AOSP on any Android phone, just like you can install FOSS OS’es on most laptops.

Last Android phone I bought had a few strange “vendor apps” (one with Chinese characters only in its name), and if I disabled Google Play Services the SMS app would go crazy and show error messages (as notifications) all the time. To add, “adb uninstall” was blocked by the vendor and there was no unofficial ROM.

I prefer small phones, so the market of phones is really really small for me :( Otherwise, I would have bought a Fairphone.

guissou,

Notion

Saintzillla,

The dream.

At least give me better widgets on Android so I can ditch TickTick.

ReK_,

Microsoft Office. If you need to do any kind of professional documentation for external organizations, it’s basically impossible to use anything else.

Zapp,

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.

SomeRandomWords,

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.

SemioticStandard,
@SemioticStandard@beehaw.org avatar

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.

tesseract,

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.

tesseract,

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.

CoffeeDev,
@CoffeeDev@lemmy.studio avatar

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.

tesseract,

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.

sounddrill,

Winapps moment?

AngryHippy,

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.

CoffeeDev,
@CoffeeDev@lemmy.studio avatar

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.

hellishharlot,

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.

Aio,

If by Arctis nova pro you mean SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7 then this repo might interest you: github.com/Sapd/HeadsetControlit’s basically software that allows you to change afew settings for headset inside a terminal.

hellishharlot,

It’s not everything but it’s enough that I might get by with it! Thanks stranger

Aio,

No problem :)

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