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…
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.
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:
Bloody banking apps. I’m sick of them not exposing any API to make third party apps.
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
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…
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.
Discord. God I hate that program, but everyone I know uses it.
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.
Pretty much anything on my phone. Though I have recently found f-droid, and through that I found Phonograph. I wish open street maps could replace google maps, but I really don’t know what it’s trying to do.
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.
Firmware in all the consumer devices I want to hack, but don’t want to reverse engineer.
Hmm interesting, I would have thought digital forensics would be a space that lots of FOSS would exist in.
For me, it’s Discord and Steam. There are some good alternatives for Steam in the sense of being a game launcher, but not with all the modding and friend join features, which I use quite a lot.
Discord is worse for me though, because Valve is a least a FOSS friendly company, but Discord isn’t the same. all my friends and family are on Discord and have no interest in leaving. There aren’t any FOSS alternatives that have all the core features that Discord has and work well.
And contrary to a lot of FOSS enthusiasts, I actually really like Discord, it works well most of the time for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Windows. Linux as a desktop just isn’t stable enough for me. Too many bugs with GUI settings. I don’t want to look up multiple ways to do things just to be eventually kicked into the command line and hopefully run the right commands to get some basic settings working. I’d love for Linux to be more stable and to have a cohesive GUI.
On the more cosmetic side running KDE apps in Gnome or running Gnome apps in KDE is just a further huge mess that can essentially ruin how your system looks which could potentially soft-lock you on screens that you can’t read. The DE on Linux just should do the Windows and Mac thing of requiring hooks to allow them to set important color and theme settings.
Windows is terrible but it’s still leagues above Linux in some real basic ways. Linux is going to need to step it up if it ever wants a serious “year of the Linux desktop” to happen before the death of the desktop computer altogether.
I’m curious what “basic settings” require you to touch the command line. My elderly mum and dad - who aren’t very tech savvy btw - have been running Linux for nearly a decade now (Xubuntu previously, now Zorin) and haven’t had any major issues in all this time. Admittedly their requirements are pretty basic, but they do all your tasks a typical basic PC user would - surf the web, check emails, work on documents, print and scan stuff, backup files from their phones/USB drives, video chat etc. In fact, the entire reason why I got them onto Linux in the first place was because Windows wasn’t really stable for them - I got tired of having to troubleshoot or reinstall Windows for them all the time. They’d complain about how an update broke something, or how the system was becoming slower etc. But no such issues with Linux. Occasionally I might get a call asking “how do I do this”, but after a few years, these support calls have all but vanished. Linux “just works” for them, it’s rock solid, the GUI is intuitive (at least for Xububtu/Zorin) and they never had to touch the command line.
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.
Look at owntrack. Send position data to your own server
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.
