
Ask HN: Do you live a Free Software only life? - EduardoBautista
Sometimes I consider the thought of moving towards free software only.  But then I worry about the worse UI&#x2F;UX that free software usually provides.<p>Are there any of you who have recently made the switch to Free Software?  What was your experience?  Do you miss anything from the non-free software world?
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fturco
I try to use free software only, but unfortunately that's not always the case.
For example the BIOS of my desktop computer is proprietary. I also don't use a
FSF-approved GNU/Linux distribution on my desktop because I prefer Gentoo. But
I set ACCEPT_LICENSE="-* @FREE" and I don't have any exceptions in
package.license. Unfortunately I still can't enable the bindist USE flag due
to some unsolved issues with openssl. I use deblobed linux-libre instead of
gentoo-sources. I use LineageOS on my smartphone, which brings a few more non-
free software with it. I also routinely run proprietary Javascript code on my
browser when visiting most websites.

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mindcrime
In my personal life, I use almost exclusively Free / Open Source Software. At
least when I'm on a PC, the OS and all the apps I use are F/OSS. My phone runs
Android which at least uses an OSS kernel, but I do still use the closed
source Google apps. I keep thinking one day I'll switch to something like
"Whatever Cyanogenmod is called these days" but I haven't made that leap yet.

I don't really miss anything. I'm not terribly picky about UI, and I've been
doing things this way for about 15 years, so I'm pretty much inured to any
pain I might feel from missing any closed source stuff. And frankly, I
consider KDE to have a strictly superior user experience to, say, Windows,
anyway.

At my day job, though, I am stuck using Windows, Outlook, etc. :-(

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cbluth
I've been using Linux on my personal laptop since about 2006, and Linux on my
work laptops since 2011, and cyanogenmod/lineageos on my phone since about
2012. I also have a little lakka.tv device hooked up to my tv.

My personal preference, I love gnome3 and android. I prefer them over the
osx/ios. And the interface on lakka is pretty amazing. I have everything I
need, and I haven't looked back.

I certainly own things like video game consoles which aren't OSS, but I like
to buy them to hack them, just for fun, I guess. I use tons of non-free stuff
like google docs et al, and whatever else is convenient, easy.

Every macbook ive owned has had Linux on it within minutes after removing it
from the box.

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vinayan3
Richard Stallman has a good description of what the computing environment
which has only free and open software is like.

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html)

One big issue is that streaming movies or tv shows might be tough. Some of the
decoders used are closed source.

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elviejo
I haven't thought about this question in a long time... Because in a long
there hasn't been anything I miss from the closed source world. On the
contrary there are many things I miss when I'm forced to work on a Windows or
a Mac machine. 1\. A window manager like i3 or xmonad

