For me, it’s Discord. There’s one “bot” in particular that I use heavily, and there’s no good alternative because it deletes and re-sends messages. (Matrix would be a good alternative for my needs, but Matrix clients like to leave tombstones when messages get deleted. I think openSUSE’s Discord removed the bot I’m talking about because of that reason in particular, since they bridge their Discord and their Matrix communities.)
Alternatively: what free alternative did you find that freed you from a specific proprietary program for good? For me, I felt “stuck” with Obsidian.md for a while, but I recently found a little script that’s good for impulsively taking quick little notes (which is what I was using Obsidian for) and I don’t need Obsidian anymore.
Yeah tbh I’m using VSCodium as well, but some Microsoft extensions deliberately don’t work on anything except VSCode. E.g. Pylance[1], which seems to be the only IntelliSense option for Jupyter notebook.
Adobe Acrobat Reader (AAR) for Windows: Governments and financial institutions often want me to fill in PDF forms. Anytime I find issues I’m told to use Adobe Acrobat Reader and Windows. Some technical documents and sewing patterns (my wife often beta-tests patterns) are only available as PDF’s but have problems, The authors usually want to know if the problems occur in Windows AAR.
Obsidian for sure. Once you’ve gone deep it becomes an extension of your brain, and migrating your “everything app” is always such a struggle. My personal notes, day planning, tech documentation, project planning (mostly in kanbans), life planning, etc. Open source options seem to fall apart as a workflow when I include an iOS device (platform constraints there of course) and I’m often writing notes along hiking trails and whatnot without a thinkpad and emacs org mode or similar handy.
I’m not a fan of Discord, but tolerate it enough with occasional checks from their browser app.
Games I play are all proprietary (Dota 2, Runescape, WoW), or need proprietary assets (Diablo/Devilution, Doom/Doomsday Engine). I use open-source Wine for most games. I entertained trying like Minetest vs Minecraft and Xonotic vs Unreal Tournament 99, but the open-source games just didn’t satisfy as a replacement (Xonotic is cool on its own, but doesn’t replace UT99 )
I don’t code, but if I ever got into a language small-time/hobby/learning I’d be avoiding IDEs or anything that would make it harder to work on it cross-platform (particularly whatever VS Code is). I made a Hello World c file and compiled it directly with gcc to kind-of have the assumption that’d probably work for anything else
I wind up occasionally using Discord and Spotify, but I’m never really happy with them so I wind up forgetting about them, so I guess not really tied to them.
If I wasn’t so reliant on PluralKit, I would have ditched Discord a long time ago, lol. Never used Spotify though, all the music I want to hear is on YT and I can just play it there.
My entire “music diet” is Yoko Shimomura, Malcolm Brown, and Daft Punk anyway. And one of those is a Homestuck composer. So I’m stuck with YouTube for it either way. ^_^’
I’ve started to realize most of that is on YT. I find it hard to give up the portability between laptop, phone, car and TV. My daughter’s playlist winds up on there too. I did find myself buying an album because they randomly decided not to allow streaming of an album for a month.
Steam - I never quite outgrew video games (and now in my 40s, I’m unlikely to ever do so!), and there are so many conveniences about the Steam platform, and games I’ve now purchased through it, that I’d have a hard time ever voluntarily ditching it.
With a Intel UHD laptop my Steam library was reasonably limited to only Dota 2, and in the name of avoiding Steam if possible I got it managed through SteamCMD (updates, file integrity checks though command-line and no GUI/RAM-hungry Steam GUI client), and with more difficult bot scripts I pull in from Git. Still proprietary, but less sort-of and kind-of cool
I confess that I have and use three desktops (macOS, Win11, and Fedora 40 KDE). I have years of work in Google Workspace accounts and in my MS360 account. I am a bit of a Note App junkie. I regularly use Joplin, Simplenote, and OneNote. I abandoned Evernote years ago. I confess that I still rely on OneNote for my day-to-day work. It just feels right and works the way I expect it to. I also use RedNotebook on a regular basis as a diary.
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