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.
Winapps moment?
Facebook messenger bc of my waterpolo teammates, discord, google maps bc im horrible at using maps and other apps are just too hard for me lol. Spotify bc i have all my liked songs and albums on it and im too lazy to migrate. On the desktop side everything i use is foss basically.
What FOSS Map apps have you tried?:)
Osmand and orgabic maps. Google maps just feels like home to me.
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…
You can use Gmaps WV to use GMaps without an Google account at least
Have you checked out Transportr btw?
Oh yeah, I did try it a year or so ago. I’m giving it another try but it still doesn’t work. I’ll try to get involved, thanks for the suggestion.
iOS
I freed myself from these chains years ago now, It was definitely worth it. understandable if you are locked in for work though.
There are jobs that require iphones? Now that sounds like a nightmare (unless you’re developing apps for ios or something).
Possibly lock-in to their ecosystem of wearable devices. Those often poorly integrate with android.
I’ve never had one which required a specific phone, but I’ve been excluded from the work group chat at two different jobs because it was on iMessage and I was the only Android user.
I honestly consider this an advantage of using Android though :P
Wow, that is a uniquely idiotic problem caused by a dumb societal trend and perpetuated by a malicious company more interested in locking people into their products than innovating in an actually competitive manner. It’s sad that this is even an issue.
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.
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…
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.
The only ide that’s a heavy enough hitter to compare to full on vs would be kdevelop. The gnome ide just isn’t at the same level
I believe there is Code OSS for VS
VisualStudio is different from VSCode.
Paraphrasing our Lord and saviour Mental Outlaw, convincing normies to use Signal is the hard part. And so I have to use ZuckApp
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.
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.
Pop OS has been a windows killer for me.
Revolt Chat has a bootstrapping problem like most new social software.
I love Linux, but it is definitely not for everyone. I’m a software engineer, so debugging weird software issues is just a normal part of my life. Sometimes really weird stuff happens. Recently I had an software update repository that my package manager was pointing to go down, so all software updates were failing. I had to figure out where that repo was being added and remove it. As far as I can tell, it was a default one that was installed with Ubuntu, so not even one that I added. I don’t think I can blame myself on this one (usually I can). If the average Windows user had that happen, they would just abandon Linux.
You basically have to have a personality where you don’t mind fidgeting with things constantly to get things to work. If that isn’t you, then Linux just isn’t for you.
I would note that ChromeOS is mainstream with normal users and it is effectively a well curated, highly-opinionated Linux distribution. Distros like opensuse Aeon and Kalpa, and Fedora Silverblue, are going from well established platforms into the highly curated, highly-opinionated direction as well. Limited set of options that work well out of the box not prone to breaking, and explicitly not for tinkerers. I tend to think that if Linux is ever going to reach mainstream users (outside of ChromeOS), it will be through these bulletproof, opinionated distros that put bubble wrap around the user.
That is exactly the sort of problem that made my experiences with Linux so awful. I also had very bad interactions with other Linux users when I asked for assistance with fixing the problems I was encountering.
I consider myself decently tech-savvy and I have been building and running Windows machines my entire life, but Linux just feels impenetrable by comparison.
Yes, Linux user can sometimes not be the most welcoming bunch. There is definitely a large subset of Linux user that are what I would call elitists. These people think they are better than others because they use Linux (think “I use arch btw” people). Answers like, “lmao you should already know the answer to the question you are asking” are just not helpful to anyone or anything other than their own ego.
Hey,i would be glad to hear ur problems which u had during linux experience and possibly to solve all of them :)
Thanks for the offer! I don’t use any form of Linux on my desktop at the moment, however, and don’t plan to for the foreseeable future.
Nationwide banking.
adobe lightroom and photoshop. no, darktable and gimp are not as good. darktable barely functions with a trackpad and gimp is like photoshop from 2010.
Affiinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher for me. I can’t afford the Adobe stuff, and the Affinity software is pretty decent, but still not OSS.
if affinity had a lightroom competitor i would use that instead. i have affinity photo and its basically on par with photoshop except for edge cases. but yeah as you mentioned not FOSS either.
shit, gimp is like photoshop from 2003.
Apart from the new Beta features, I’ve found 90% of my Photoshop workflow is replicated in Photopeaedit: I am an idiot - Photopea is not open source. Although it will help remove a reliance on Windows.
photopea is not open source ☹️
Paradox of Windows 10 MS will soon end support and my cpu is “too old” for update to win11 so Ill be forced by Microsoft to use linux
Also Google Play Services, because my phone didnt allow me to flash MicroG
About the Cpu being “too old”, did you launch the update app in windows 10, or did you create a USB stick? I just installed Windows 11 on my first gen Ryzen using a USB, even though the Windows 10 updater told me it’s too old
I’m running W11 on a first-gen i7-930, no TPM.
My pc has i7 4470k and its not listed on supported by wondows 11
Did you try microg installer revived?
For android you have f-droid
I know
I have deleted all google’s dogshit “system” apps and replaced ones I need with fdroid alternatives
The thing is I had to keep play services so some unavoidable apps still work:
- Gmaps - google has monopoly
- YT - find video>share>newpipe>enjoy
- Play Store - give back aurora 😭
Yeah I think one can take care of privacy at a reasonable level without being like Sauls Goodman brother . The issue if we try unnecessary to disappear completely, you have to spend an enormous effort and time and it becomes in some kind of obsession. I personally take basic core measures like giving myself free to data cross of the different well known algorithms from companies and fraudulent sources. I don’t complete desiapoear but I’m like a puzzle for them .
Aurora can be used with a gooe account, still better then nothing imo
For gmaps replacement, I use either organic maps or magic earth (non foss but privacy respecting). For gmaps search results I use GmapsWV (sandboxed gmaps web view)
I know
I have deleted all google’s dogshit “system” apps and replaced some of them with fdroid alternatives
The thing is I had to keep play services so some unavoidable apps still work: Gmaps YT
On that matter, if you haven’t dug on the topic yet and if I may suggest, look for Linux systems (“distros”) with either the Xfce or Wayland desktop environments, since they’re some of the lightest around (Xfce being the most stable of the two, but Wayland seems pretty promising already).
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.
If you haven’t checked out Pop!_OS I’d recommend giving it a try. While I’m using a system76 laptop so they guarantee hardware compatibility, it’s been one of the smoothest and most functional DE/guis I’ve used. Ive never had to resort to a command line* and aaalllmost everything you’d expect to find exists in the gui.
*caveat. Except for some really esoteric problems, which are usually a result of my own tinerking
Pop os has constantly been recommended to me. I’m certainly putting it on the list to try this year. I’ll probably load up a ventoy USB with a ton of oses and report back eventually.
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.
In my experience most problems with linux are at the intermediate level, i.e. things like setting up university/work vpn, installing games (with wine), getting used to different applications for office stuff. This is all stuff that many people have to do that can be hard to achieve if you only have guides for windows/mac
Basically the longstanding issue of having “total control”. There needs to be a middle ground between having total control and being forced to use it (while for the most part having no limitations but are either not very straightforward or are far too straightforward) and being given the illusion of control (while for the most part not having limitations until you do, then you can’t get around them).
The Steam Deck has been the most accessible Linux desktop and it still has been frustrating at times.
Firmware in all the consumer devices I want to hack, but don’t want to reverse engineer.
