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.
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.
Spotify and games
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Google maps, venmo, and lyft are my last real holdouts.
I tried Osmand~ but it like using your dads Garmin from 2005. The last two have been hard to find good alternatives to. Would be nice if signal payments were in a stable coin instead of a shitcoin.
I’ve been using Organic Maps for my navigation. It uses the same OpenStreetMap data, but navigation (as well as searching for e.g. “food” as opposed to a specific place) works flawlessly and routing happens offline.
Seems ok, but seems to struggle w/ long distances. Works better than osmand tho, thanks
OsmAnd is a maps app, not a navigation app
Uh no. I have been using it for navigation for the past 5 years, probably even longer. It is hit and miss in some areas but it works OK.
Are there good FOSS navigation apps?
organic maps is built on open maps and is FOSS. Takes some getting used to though. The time estimates aren’t accurate (it doesn’t account for traffic) so always add time to the estimate, and you can’t really search for things by name you generally need to input addresses (except for maybe your airport. This also varies based on where you live because folks might be updating it more for you locally).
Basically it’s a solid option but not good enough for me to ditch Apple maps completely (I trust apple slightly more than gmaps but not by a large margin 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.
Affinity was an affordable and featured alternative to the Adobe suite, but just sold to canva so yay capitalism
If it was open source then it still is. You simply clone the sources to a new project and continue
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They’ve said they’re committing to keeping perpetual licensing and are using Canva’s resources to speed up development though. So far, seems okay to me. At least for now. Unless anyone knows otherwise?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
