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...
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:
Discord. God I hate that program, but everyone I know uses it.
Same as Reddit; it's network affect. There are different applications out there for various purposes that work better/nicer than Discord. But not enough people are using them so everyone goes where everyone else is at.
I decided to be the change I want to see, so I got my gaming group a Mumbe server for audio chat. I self-host, but commercial ones are dirt cheap. Sound quality is better than Discord. We use Matrix for text, pictures, etc.
Discord for me, very difficult to get friends to use foss alternatives because, while I don't like Discord, it just has a pretty good UI/UX (aside from some annoyances) that alternatives haven't really matched yet imo. Doesn't make them bad, but I can fully understand why friends would not want to switch to something like Matrix.
I'd be a little scared of showing my friends the matrix channel directory with how sus some of those channels are. I think that's gonna be one of it's biggest hindrance in being adopted by non-tech users, not even its UI or lack of features. Some of those channels are pretty bad.
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.
My laptops BIOS
Bloody banking apps. I'm sick of them not exposing any API to make third party apps.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
Microsoft Office. If you need to do any kind of professional documentation for external organizations, it's basically impossible to use anything else.
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.
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
The whole Adobe creative suite. The options out there absolutely are not replacements, either in functionality or usability. Most of them are UX nightmares and feel actively hostile to the user
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...
DuoLingo
Same. "Ik leer Nederlands" :)
But this one is tough since first you would have to crowd source a ton of user contributed lessons. Not sure how that could work...
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.
If by Arctis nova pro you mean SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7 then this repo might interest you: github.com/Sapd/HeadsetControl it's basically software that allows you to change afew settings for headset inside a terminal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shazam
@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!
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.
The best example that comes to mind is mouse acceleration. Fedora has a setting in the GUI for it but it didn't work. So I literally had to set it in my bashrc to get it to work.
Another issue I saw was os theme being multiple settings depending on gtk or qt apps.
Another issue is video card driver. I've had Ubuntu auto update and brick my install, dropping me down to grub because grub was set to use my Nvidia proprietary drivers but the kernel module wasn't installed despite me setting it in the GUI to use the Nvidia drivers.
Multiple issues with peripherals and having to install a random GitHub Python script for watcom drivers or Xbox controllers.
Oh, also vpn settings on the os level didn't work on debian recently. I had to configure it via command line.
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.
Paraphrasing our Lord and saviour Mental Outlaw, convincing normies to use Signal is the hard part. And so I have to use ZuckApp
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.
I want to jump to linux, but the prospect of starting from scratch on a new OS (or even a reinstall of windows) is just not feasible right now.
Dual boot? I used to do this before moving my daily driver over. Haven't looked back since.
If I was the only person using my PC, I'd probably make the jump.
Unfortunately, my wife would end me if I tried that.
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