Another mobile OS. Something that isn't built entirely to exploit me.
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I hear you. With Android turning into a closed OS like iOS later this year things are not looking very bright for people like me that uses alternative stores a lot.
Honestly, I would really fuck with a comprehensive Linux mobile experience. I know some things exist, but they aren't yet fully rounded off. I say this now, but know damn well I'd tinker with something I shouldn't and wind up needing to reinstall the OS like five times.
Tell me about it. Like Linux Phone hurry up!
I miss the FirefoxOS concept. Ahead of its time. Basically ran PWAs for everything.
Excel. There are other options, sure, but excel is really hard to beat.
Email. Gmail really does it well. However, I have switched mostly to Proton, so maybe that'll stick.
Pandas/Polars is all I need in a Jupyter notebook to replace Excel. Its not even a contest if you know some python for doing any real work.
I concede Excel has a lower bearer to entry for teams composed of mixed technical abilities.
So much this. If you find yourself writing nested formulas e.g.
=IF(A1>=90, "A", IF(A1>=80, "B", IF(A1>=70, "C", "F")))
Do yourself a favour and switch to Python and Pandas. You can do so much more, so much faster, and so much simpler. And at the end of an your code, you can pd.to_excel() to spit out your dataframe as an xlsx.
Also duckdb. Realizing I could do SELECT ... FROM 'arbitrary-file.xlsx' was a wondrous occasion
Anything closed where the update is "throw it away, buy the new model". Industrial electronics, car stereo, any gen 1/old product.
Most recently Amazon deprecated older Kindles for no apparent reason except the fact that they were still being in use for over a decade.
Do you work on industrial electrical? Kinda curious about your comment there. The company I work for implements new systems, some of the biggest in the US, but we do plenty of maintenance, refurbishing, tuning, etc on some very very old systems. I've seen working equipment that is from the dawn of the 20th century, still going fine. Maybe we come in and install a new VFD on them, or recently we did a system running 2 setups of 8k amps @ 480V for motors that had gone through a whole entire fire that was so bad the roof collapsed.
Maybe it's just the sector I'm in, which is steel and aluminum mills, but I've seen industrial be the one that does not want change because it comes with a high price tag. The sales guys need to convince these places that they can't keep running everything on electrical equipment from the 70s to 90s
Literally anything that you have to pay monthly for. I do not care what it is.
I have an old version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that, legally, they still have to provide me a download for. But, holy absolute hell if they didn't make it nearly impossible to just download the version I paid for. Of course, the new one is subscription only. Costs so much I'd have paid more in 3 months than the single one time payment I did for the old version a decade ago.
Photoshop. GIMP is serviceable, but just give me damn Photoshop circa like, 2015?
What about Affinity Photo?
Not familiar with that one, but I'll give it a look!
Operating systems.
Windows is a collection of legacy code with trash strewn over top, but it is ubiquitous.
Apple’s offerings are typically decent and reliable, but the executives spent a lot of time lately kissing the ring.
Linux is simply not something I’m interested in supporting for my family.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
I’d just like something that’s easy to use, common enough I don’t need to teach people to use it, secure by design, and not owned by an evil megacorp.
Hey I don't want to preach but if many people were able to learn how to use Chrome OS over the last decade they will be able to learn how to use the latest Ubuntu (or whatever flavor of Linux is now considered the most intuitive and fully featured for new users).
I believe Mint is the current "beginner edition" of Linux. Ubuntu has been getting a lot of hate lately from what I've seen.
My latest build is running Bazzite on an HTPC, but it's still a project and not fully up and running quite yet.
RCS messaging. The important bits are closed source so you have to use google services.
When's the last time you tried FreeCAD? I also used to think it's trash, but version 1.0 really changed that and now 1.1 is freaking amazing.
Like last week. It’s cad software from 20 years ago that’s trying to be everything and not really mastering anything.
I want an open source option that focuses on UI/UX and not… well, whatever freeCAD is doing.
I have the same UI issues with GIMP and Inkscape. When programmers try to make human interface. (No offense to programmers)
I've been using GIMP long enough that I've learned where things are. It's not intuitive, but I can usually accomplish what I set out to do without swapping to another program.
Inkscape feels like a foreign language that I don't speak.
This is probably slightly off topic from the intent of this post but I wish any device that produced sound, like your coffee maker pinging when your coffee is ready or your washer/dryer audibly notifying you when a cycle is complete, had at least a small ability to modify or change that sound. Even just a small way to change the frequency or pitch of the sound would help. Today manufacturers take the approach of 'it's important that someone knows when their spin cycle is complete!', rather than 'let's let the consumer have some control over their audio environment'.
I suggest:
Household Acoustic Notification Standard (HANS)
Where it’s a standard protocol or noise making system you can configure with some kind of device. Perhaps it also outlines LORA notifications as well.
Paint.net. I so wish for something simple with a competent UI on Linux.
Pinta is the closest, but it's too far behind modern paint.net.
GIMP lacks a competent UI, and Krita is too advanced for basic photo editing.
To flip the CAD thing on its head, if I want a Python API for AutoCAD, Creo, or SolidWorks, their response is "fuck you, use our GUI cuz that's easier for us to implement license verification with. And oh yeah, it's all Window only." The only CAD software I find remotely useful is FreeCAD. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's the baseline that all other CAD softwares somehow fail to match.
PDF or really just an alternative to Adobe that isn't even PDF but a completely different format that is open source by default so that nobody really needs a specific app to make edits. Maybd that's just ODT?
Also, maybe not an alt per say but just want games to work on Gnu/Linux. Like all the AAA titles should be able to run on, for example, Linux Mint natively without Wine. A pipe dream sadly since capitalism dictates what works where but I digress.
Going back to Adobe though, would love something other than Photoshop that isn't GIMP. Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Glimpse which basically did what Linux Mint does for Gnome and gave GIMP a much better interface. Sadly, they shut down their project. Lame.
Honestly, notes apps. All of the big tech options are fine, but they’re big tech, so fuck them. All of the open source options suck. The best I’ve found is just Nextcloud Notes, but it’s still shit. Basic Markdown syntax, no linking notes, adding attachments is… well idk, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
[…] FreeCAD is trash […]
What issues have you had? What features do you wish it had?
I wish the UI/UX wasn’t made by people who still live in 1995, as a major start.
Could you be more specific?
Not OP, but FreeCAD auto-constraints in sketches are all over the place, and figuring out which constraint is a problem and selecting the right element in the UI is terrible.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but FreeCAD tells you when a constraint is redundant, and clicking on it highlights the respective constraint in the sketch:
^[1]^
References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): "1.1.1". Accessed: 2026-06-11T23:44Z.
The redundant constraint detection works pretty well and FreeCAD usually remove them.
The main issue for me is that certain auto-constraints will not work as they advertise on your cursor.
The biggest culprit for me is the coincident constraint.
Let's say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn't applied.
And the other thing for me is that navigating which part of a line (and which line) is selected is not intuitive and correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
[…] correcting or adding constraints to fully constraint the drawing is a wild goose chase.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
I just reformatted my PC so I don't have FreeCAD installed.
But the UI for finding out which line or line end is selected and apply the correct constraints is hard.
The thing I've struggled the most is the coincident constraint which should be applied but isn't. Finding the right line end points is not intuitive and the UI doesn't show the selections well.
[…] navigating which part of a line (and which line) is selected […] is a wild goose chase.
Do you mean if they're colinear?
[…] Let’s say that you have two lines in a 90 degree corner. If you add a line in the middle of any of the two lines, the cursor shows you that it will add a coincident constraint. But when you create your line, the coincident constraint isn’t applied. […]
What you're describing sounds more like a bug to me. At any rate, I wasn't able to confirm the behavior you described (maybe I'm misunderstanding you?):
^[1]^
I was able to get both a symmetric constraint (green arrow), and a coincident constraint (red arrow) on the two 90 degree lines.
References
- Type: Screenshot. Publisher (Application): FreeCAD. Published (Version): "1.1.1". Accessed: 2026-06-12T22:47Z.
I will reinstall FreeCAD (just formatted my PC) and try to reproduce the issue.
For me, it would show on the cursor that the coincident constraint was supposed to be applied, but it wouldn't do that.
Social media app with circlejerk auto-hide would be Awesome. Would have to be politically agnostic.
A really different approach to CAD is OpenSCAD. I was not happy with FreeCAD either.