What non-FOSS software are you using that you wish you could replace?
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.
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...
My laptops BIOS
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
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
For me it's Adobe After Effects. Yeah, I can do most of what it does in a combination of blender, natron, gmic, etc.. but I really like the workflow of AFX. Not having that tool was one of the hardest parts of cancelling my Adobe subscription. Nowadays I would even settle for a non-foss alternative. As long as it's running on Linux. But so far, that has not happened (I use other non Foss tools that work great, like resolve/fusion and Houdini.. but I still miss AFX)
Edit: yeah, I missed a detail in the question: I do not currently use AFX but used it a lot in the past and am now trying to replicate workflows I based on it with other tools.. still miss it a lot and would give a lot to have a solid alternative...
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.
The Affinity suite. Truth is, I don't want to replace them because I really like how they work; I just wish there was a native Linux version, because it's almost impossible to get it to run in Wine. Have to use a VM for the time being.
Stream Deck is another one I miss, and the FOSS alternatives just don't cut it in terms of functionality.
@John_Coomsumer Besides the mentioned Nvidia drivers, I use Steam. Steam isn't bad by any means, but I wish it was at least an Open Source GUI that uses it's proprietary backend service. This way we could have such a variety in Steam GUIs. Actually impressive that almost everything is Free and Libre software on my system!
Shazam
Paraphrasing our Lord and saviour Mental Outlaw, convincing normies to use Signal is the hard part. And so I have to use ZuckApp
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.
Ableton Live, Presonus Studio One and about a million VST plugins. Digital audio workstations and software instruments/effects are an area where open-source has made only limited inroads. Ardour was decent last time I used it, but since I got into Ableton Live with Push it's hard to go back to other things.
Windows+Visual Studio. I run them in a VM, and for a while managed to keep it at 50GB, but combine it with a moderately large hit repo and you can just give that up. And yes, I know vscode is a thing, but there always ends up being some legacy/COM/platform specific library that makes it non-compatible.
firmware/drivers
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.
Nationwide banking.
Intuit software, specifically TurboTax. This also may become obsolete to replace if the IRS will give out free software as rumored for next year, but I'm surprised nothing as intuitive ^pun ^heh or user-friendly has popped up. Maybe I need to do more research, not sure.
Nvidia drivers. Back in 2019, I was looking to replace my Nvidia card with an AMD one, but decided I could put that off for a few months. Then COVID happened along with the cryptocurrency boom and prices skyrocketed to unreasonable levels. Nvidia drivers are honestly the last holdout on my machine barring perhaps some firmware somewhere.
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.
BattlEye, the sole reason why I still need Windows for gaming purposes.
Banks and finances
On android, i wish Xplore file manager had an alternative. Didn't find anything to replace it. Dualpane file managers are the best. (btw, its one of the app where donating to dev really feels like he deserves it ).
Firmware in all the consumer devices I want to hack, but don’t want to reverse engineer.
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.
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.
Winapps moment?
Reason. It's got a unique workflow that is hard to break from. I even tried Renoise, but it's hard to switch.