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.

tesseract ,

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.

CoffeeDev ,
@CoffeeDev@lemmy.studio avatar

I have been experimenting with using Inkscape and OpenSCAD for 3d modeling, and it seems to work for what I do, but I know quite a few people prefer a more graphical interface than OpenSCAD.

AngryHippy ,
@AngryHippy@slrpnk.net avatar

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.

Lauchmelder ,

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

Saintzillla ,
@Saintzillla@beehaw.org avatar

Not FOSS, but I'm a big One Note user for work and wanted to find something for my personal life and most likely will use it for my next professional role in at least some capacity...Notion is by far the most customizable and complete solution that's also user friendly because of existing user templates. I've been SERIOUSLY impressed and I've been trying everything I can find.

Best part is that the phone and computer apps are both very capable. One Note on phone is the worst companion app.

Masterkraft0r ,

notion is also not FOSS though. and i had bad experiences with the mobile app when cell service is bad.

Lemongrab ,

Notesnook is free, e2ee, nice ui, and has cloud sync. Recommmend

dkt ,

Not really the same thing at all if there's no handwriting support.

bartlbee ,

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 . . .

sic_1 ,

So much this! And with the connectivity between Rhino/Archivad, Revit and TwinMotion I fear a solution is far away. Which surprises me because all of our professional software works fine natively on Mac, which is also Unix based. Isn't there an easy way to emulate from that direction?

thedarkfly ,

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...

gutter564 ,

You can use Gmaps WV to use GMaps without an Google account at least

emma ,
@emma@beehaw.org avatar

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.

fulano ,

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...

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