Ask HN: Do you live a Free Software only life?

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. :-(

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

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

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

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.

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.