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.
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!
Google Maps. It sucks, and stores randomly pop in and out while you’re trying to zoom in past the McDonalds ad that’s showing despite you searching “shoe store”, but it has so much more info than the competitors that they don’t compare.
Tried Openstreetmap? OSMAnd? Organic maps? Both of which use OSM. HERE maps (not open source)?
I’ve used organic maps, and maybe osmand? It’s good! And progress is fast. But it’s not quite there yet for me.
This conversation is making me realize that it may have been a year since I last tried it? Guess I’m due!
The user generated data on google maps is really useful though.
OSMAnd is good in many ways (and has come a long way too), but the app suffers from too many settings and too much menu diving for my taste. OrganicMaps is good because it’s like having “OSMAnd lite.” Used to be that without Google Services that there was no voice navigation, but now I’m able to use RH Voice with Organic Maps. MagicEarth is another map navigation app, but not open source.
the FOSS options are terrible in my area
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.
FolderSync on android. It’s the only automatic sync application I’ve found that syncs to mydrive.ch.
Also a couple of UI apps, BarLauncher, which is a notification thing that let’s you put app icons to launch from the notification drop down, and LaunchyWidget, like a scrolling “fence” to dump app icons in on your home screen. They’re both so simple, I’m surprised that nobody has built FOSS versions of them.
On my PC I don’t use any proprietary software at all.
Well I have separate computer for music production which I don’t think has any FOSS software on it, so everything that has to do with that.
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!
@hedge typewise seems cool
Discord. As a chat platform, it is by far the most user-friendly one out there despite its proprietary nature and lack of respect for privacy.
Podcast Addict I really want to use AntennaPod, but I can’t do without priority podcasts.
Also Feedly. Feeder (FOSS) is so close, but doesn’t allow different sorts for different feeds.
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.
+1 for Plex. Basically perfect and so much more polished than JF (which I tried on three separate occasions to force myself to like).
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.
Well, I’ve tried it since this comment, and I’m using it occasionally (primarily because I like the Delfin app for Arch Linux), but there’s a lot of reasons I still prefer Plex. First and most importantly, I use PlexAMP as my primary music player and I have 1tb+ of music that I don’t feel like perfectly setting up again. It’s a huge amount of work, and I listen to a lot of lesser known shit that just isn’t easy to gather data for, and a lot of Various Artist shit that I’m really particular about how it shows up.
The other big issue I have is that Collections is a separate tab in Movies, rather than being listed alongside the rest of my library like in Plex, and that’s really just not useful for me. It automatically populated my collections just fine, but if my primary Movies tab is just gonna list each individual movie and I have to actually go to the Collections tab to see collections, it’s just not how I like my library. If I can find a solution for this it’ll go a long way to pushing me toward JellyFin.
