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.
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.
Obsidian. Plain text files with as many or as few plugins as you want. All versions of the app look and behave the same (other than mobile, but at least android is kinda close). Nothing stored in a database file, no manipulation of the text files themselves (looking at you, Joplin). I’m open to another option but so far, nothing is as elegant and platform agnostic as Obsidian.
Steam, because most my games are on there.
Discord, because most my friends and social groups are on there.
Sublime Text, Google Photos, Google Maps (partially)
Sublime Text? What’s missing in other editors that you have in that?
Some combination of things like performance, non distracting presentation, the minimap, multi cursor that works how I like, some plugins I like, no web browser, the way every open buffer is always safe and saved in some cache without necessarily saving to the edited file, the UX for split view across tabs, minimal fuss to get UI text and colors legible for my bad eyesight, etc.
Hmm… dunno if you’ve tried it, but maybe Kate would be a good replacement? It’s pretty powerful.
I’ve found Cudatext a good alternative for light editing tasks.
I really wanted to switch to Cuda, but there are a few small features missing which is super infuriating to me.
I can’t think of any off the top of my head right now though.
Steam
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.
Dropping The List here because answering in detail would take …a very, very long time.
I guess that list could be helpful for some, but for me (and IMO, music production in general), it’s woefully inadequate to the point of hilarity.
Pro audio has been a complete mess in Linux for ages, and it’s not even close to where it should be in order to be generally usable. Every 7-8 years or so when my old music computer starts to die I try and check if it has made substantial improvement, but apart from Musescore actually being good, it is hard to find any tangible progress from 15 years ago. Pipewire gives me some hope, but it’s far from production-ready in Pro audio world. And I’m not really going to get rid of all the VST stuff I’ve bought in the last 20 years (all of which still works out of the box on a new computer!)
In addition, making music is the one hobby I have to get me away from tinkering with computers. I am not interested if I could make my Linux setup equally good if I spent weeks tinkering on it, when it’s literally easier for me to work for a week and buy a Macbook Air (or whatever crappy windows PC), where I get all of my old work ready for action in under a day, and I can trust that everything I do will just work, and work well at that. And it does it while allowing me to work remotely with other musicians since we can all use the same stuff.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be in my grave before FOSS Pro Audio ever gets there, unfortunately.
Edit: Ironically, the one FOSS thing I would love to use in my audio stuff is Guitarix, which is then the thing that doesn’t interop well with anything else. And I would love to have easy way to do all that I do on (Win/Mac Os) on Linux, but 20 years of disappointment is pretty hard to overcome at this point.
Have you tried Ardour, Bitwig, Reaper or Zrythm? Studio 1 also has a Wayland-native version now, which is paid.
But I get the tinkering part, poorly.
I’ve tried all of them except Zrythm. In fact, REAPER is my DAW of choice. But while that works on Linux, a lot of the plugins I require do not (or well, I guess it depends on how people define “work”), and REAPER in itself is not FOSS.
Google Earth and Google Street View.
Even after all these years of using them, I’m still amazed.
What proprierary Javascript is needed for core functionality? 😅
Any reason you prefer noscript to unlock Origin?
I find it easy to use and use both, Noscript for Javascript (all opt-in), UBlock for adblock (badness enumeration) and “cookie autodelete” (on mobile, for opt-in keeping cookies and deleting the rest)
@hedge typewise seems cool
Just a comment – for InDesign-type work, I find something like Inkscape (or Scribus) easier to work with than LaTeX. I usually only use LaTeX for things where the layout needs to be pretty but not customized. Its possible to use it for design, but not a good use of time.
Spotify and games
chrome, the android os and platform and all the apps therein. I mainly use firefox, but some things only work in chrome.
Rhino for CAD.
However, I have been using OpenSCAD for parametric design more than the Grasshopper extension.
Thankfully, skipped ArcGIS entirely for QGIS and Python GDAL wrappers.
Steam
I also run a lot of proprietary stuff like Discord or Instagram due to peer pressure but I let it slide and put my hopes on Android sandboxing the apps and GrapheneOS tweaks. In my opinion, making sure that proprietary app can’t reliably access your data and never giving it anything sensitive yourself is a decent risk model.
The only proprietary software I use and somewhat trust is Obdisian. Honestly, it’s just excellent and I can’t see myself moving away from it anytime soon.
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 recongizes 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.
Misidentification is easy to fix in Jellyfin, with a couple clicks you can completely fix all metadata if it gets something wrong.
