What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free?
What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free?
What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free?
VLC! No ads ever, that's insane!
But does it whip the llama's ass?
I think not.
VLC isn’t a WinAmp replacement? Though.
Foobar2000 is!
To piggyback off of this, consider donating to VLC.
Donated!
Bitwarden is one I use several times a day. They do have a support plan for like $10 a year that gives a couple extra features like TOTP support, but the base level is incredibly robust. It’s open source, too. I know a lot of folks also host their own servers with Vaultwarden, but that’s a little beyond my skill level.
I pay for it just because it's cheap and to support them
Same, the free tier is so good that I'm paying to make sure it stays free.
I pay for it just because it's cheap and to support them
I did this too when it first came out, and then the product became robust enough that I recommended we implement it at work because secrets management was non-existent. We have a bunch of licenses on the Enterprise plan now and it just keeps getting better each update.
My only complaint is that migrating the data to a new server is a pain in the ass and never works correctly, even when following the migration instructions to the letter. Always have to open a ticket with them for that. Not enough of a pain to move to another product, though.
I also still pay for my personal plan. It really is a fantastic product.
Great I do the same too!
It’s so cheap! The value for the price is astounding.
I use the business plan to seperate personal and business but the sharing features are also great.
Oh wow, is it really cheap?! Good much money can I invest right away?!? 11?!1111!
I just recently started using their totp function and I can't believe I didn't switch sooner. Just the fact alone that it automatically copies the code to your clipboard is such a Time saver not having to open up a separate app.
It's a wild time saver. I can’t believe other folks go to a whole separate app for their codes! Hitting Ctrl+L to autofill passwords and user names then Ctrl+V for TOTP feels like a hack when I watch other people struggle with their other solutions.
FYI, This product is 100% marketed on Lemmy for a profit. I've seen astroturfed threads multiple times now.
Free app marketed for profit... There might be something wrong with you
I kinda thought that too, but it’s free and open-source… so that would be weird.
Looking into password managers, though, it does really seem like the best choice. Lastpass had breach lately, KeePass requires self-hosting, and other offerings cost more (and aren’t open-source.)
Firefox. I couldn't imagine using the internet without it.
I've never thought about it, how do they make money? I've never seen an ad or sent them money.
They make a large amount from Google paying them to be the default search engine. Also they have been making additional projects that can be subscribed to as add-ons for Firefox (like a VPN and an email forwarding service that allows you to make fake email addresses or phone numbers to use on sites that will forward the messages to your real inbox/phone). You can use a limited version of the email thing without paying though so it is easy to try out. And they are always ready to take donations of any size and can be reoccurring. I personally pay .99/month for the email service even though I don't use it often. As it is nice to have if I need it, and it is basically a donation at that point. lol.
Here are links to those products if you care to read more about them or at least see pricing.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/
But even just making a point to donate some one-offs here and there does help in small ways to keep a real option in browsers that isn't just another Chromium-based project.
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
Everyone hated when IE was the only browser that sites were coded for, and we are seeing more and more Chromium only sites. Which means a bad vulnerability in Chromium will impact all the browsers based on it. Also privacy add-ons for Firefox tend to work better and block ads well.
Mozilla seems to be pretty transparent. You can see their financial statement at State of Mozilla.
I donate every. single. month.
They get paid by Google to feature their search engine as the default primary search engine. In Fennec, the non-google-play version of mobile browser Firefox, Duckduckgo is set as default, even though both versions are maintained by Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind Firefox.
Mainly a non profit
I adore Firefox but several years ago, Google Suite (Docs, Sheets, Forms, etc) decided to change their font system in some bizarre way that they're never formatted right on Firefox and cause spacing issues. It sucks because I use Docs and Sheets so frequently that I end up needing to keep two browsers installed and switch whenever I want to work on some of my projects.
This but in the Fennec flavor
Fennec is only for Android, because the desktop Firefox doesn't have have weird app-store shennanigans to begin with, so there's no point of maintaining Fennec for desktop.
And I do use Fennec for Android, just to keep the Google-Play shennanigans out of my browser.
7-zip
Yes, I totally paid for WinRar.
It's said that when Jesus comes back, you get to go to heaven if you paid for it.
Microsoft is adding extensive archive format support (using libarchive) to Windows 11. I'd like to thank 7-zip for its service over the decades, though.
The way Msoft are going with right click options I'm doubtful it'll complete.
Linux
Not an "app" but close enough :) I agree anyway
I came here to post that!
On this note it's crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.
I can get if you're using some adobe products, or some game that hasn't been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.
Bitwarden and firefox
I don't use it but blender is another one
For the self-hosters out there, there's VaultWarden, which works seamlessly with all Bitwarden plugins and apps.
It's very lightweight and easy to setup and run. It has support for multiple accounts, so you can use it for your family, or business, or whatever!
What is blender for? I would Google it but I imagine it would mainly be kitchen accessories
Blender is an open source 3D art/graphics program, on-par with what companies charge hundreds of dollars per month for. Unlike some things where people say "Use GIMP instead of Photoshop!", Blender is actually industry standard everywhere I've worked
3D modelling
Linux.
The world would be a very different place if linux didn't exist.
No Android phones, insanely outdated internet, software development confined to what corporations allowed.. Yea things could have been a lot worse
Insofar as BSD is very different. Linux emerged while BSD's legal status was in serious doubt, and had already gathered considerable inertia by the time the court case ended, but the court case ended favorably for the BSD community, so we'd have ended up on that if not for Linux.
/thread
This is it.
Firefox, ppsspp, termux, VLC, Tachiyomi(SY), and KeypassXC/DX are coming to my mind. Probably there are a lot more. These are for android. Although they do apply to desktop except termux and Tachiyomi.
Edit: I haven't added the various FOSS tools as they don't really come in "App" Category. Some of them:
+1 for Firefox and VLC. Always amazes me that such good programs are available for free. Remember to donate to FOSS projects, people!
Thanks for the reminder about VLC. I don't use it much any more, but back in the wild west days of audio/video codecs (some of which were paid), VLC would play everything.
VLC is still one of the most powerful video/audio player in existence.
VLC + autohotkey = game changer. I use it every day
I'd replace PPSSPP with RetroArch
Blender
Genuinely free? VSCode
Freemium: Discord
You pay with your data: Google Maps
If there's one service that I'm okay giving my data over for, it's Google maps.
Without that, we wouldn't have traffic data or how busy a business is. Crowd sourcing information is the only way to get a service as good as google maps. It's actually amazing to me that it's free given all of the satellite and street imaging done.
I used to contribute to google maps. I had the same vision you do. But then I learned about their dark way of stealing people's data. All your contributions to google maps are now property of google. You are giving away your efforts so one of the richest world companies becomes richer. And keep abusing their users. So now I use openstreetmap.org
Yeah why the fuck is that? VSCode has no business being as good as it is. It's developed by Microsoft, after all. Are they planning to take it away from us and charge money for it in a few years? Why does it work on Linux so easily? Is it a government conspiracy to fill our brains with subliminal messages somehow? Wtf is the catch?
My best educated guess is that's it's a ploy of some kind. If Microsoft makes a free code editor that's really good, maybe no one will make a free open source one that's as good so that they will have control over the 1 most viable code editor? There are other things similar to VSCode but they cost money and are too big a pain to pirate because VSCode is better than them anyway.
It's not only VSCode, it's also Github and C# and TypeScript to a lesser extent as well, probably. They want to have control over the "coding" ecosystem. And look at what they already did with github, they trained AI on all projects on it, and they then sell access to that AI.
Here might lie the answer to your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish
They learned their lesson with the old Visual Studio. Spending all of that money to maintain an IDE where the core 90% of it was no better than any open source or shareware alternative.
The only reasons people needed VS specifically were all features that could easily be turned into self-contained plugins.
And with everything turning into cloud services, there’s pretty much no point in trying to sell installable local apps that are impossible to fully DRM and have no justifiable subscription fees.
And when an enterprise goes to pick a cloud repo service, cloud code workspace, cloud hosting, devops system, AI development assistant, etc… Who are they gonna pick? Maybe the one from the same company that makes “that one app all our devs rave about”?
I feel like the Google maps algorithm has gotten worse over the last year or so. Maybe it's the Android auto interfacing with my car, but it sends me on weird routes sometimes even with a similar eta. I think it might be related to the eco settings but man is it annoying.
Discord also makes you pay with your data.
Their privacy policy says they don’t sell your data.
Not that you should automatically trust any communication platform (present Lemmies excluded), but exchange of data for services is at least not the business model on paper.
In a sense, you still “are the product”, because people won’t buy Nitro if there’s noone to talk to.
But that’s different from like… tracking micro-motions of your mouse to categorize your personality traits and increase ad conversions.
I thought Discord was pretty data hungry?
Jellyfin, it's literally free Netflix if you own even just an old computer and some storage. Also open source that is another huge plus
One thing I like about Plex is that there's literally an app for every device I own. What's the Jellyfin support there?
There's an app on f-Droid, there's an app on the Linux app store (Pls don't get mad at the name, i switched to Linux less than a month ago) that's as much as I need, I don't own a "smart" TV, I don't own a car with an iPad, my fridge is dumb so the only screens I need supported are the Linux pc and the phone, and those screens are supported.
I gave Jellyfin a full year, and at the end of that year, the problematic Chromecast support did me in. Back to Plex I went.
LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets.
Honestly the open source office suites are pretty amazing now. It's what put me off Linux initially all those years ago, how Word/Excel just felt way better than LibreOffice, but now even the browser based stuff is on par.
I've only ever used Google Drive suite for my office work so that was super easy on Linux. I've heard people who crunch huge datasets in Excel don't have an alternative though
Home Assistant. It is an incredibly powerful smart home solution that is far more capable than any other solution one needs to pay for.
Weawow is a completly (also ad-)free weather forecast app run basically solo by a Japanese guy. I was surprised when I found this app that it was so good in every aspect that I had to donate the guy. It has has more than half a Mio. reviews on google play with an average of 4.9 . Idk of any free app with that many reviews having this kind of rating, well deserved.
Further honorable mentions:
Just downloaded Weawow - one of the more impressive things for me is that it's only 144kb.
10 MB for me on Play Store
I love weawow! Agreed about making a regular donation to the Weawow dev... or it'll face the curse of other top, rated free apps - the developer has tons of users, dealing with all their support requests, and can't make a living from it, then rightly sells up to some sh!tty company who then turns the app to shite. Yes, that's the story of the legendary Quickpic app.
yeah you can see all donation transparently on the donations section (unless u opted for anonymous) and fortunately it's looking like it's going quite well. I assume the creator actually has some more employees now or at least professional help for all the translations of the app as it seems to be available in a lot of languages.
Nice find, I just downloaded it and it looks amazing, thank you!
rif for reddit (R.I.P)
That's why I'm even here.
Vivaldi is same as Chrome you pay with your user information.
I don't think thats true, Vivaldi is more like Chromium is you want to do that comparison. Well anyway they are way different thant the google user profile tracking you get with all the google servies. They mostly makeoney with partner deals in pre-set bookmarks and search engines. They explicitly say they don't collecr user data: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/
But yeah I get your point. They are still not a "non-profit" like the signal foundation or wiki etc. Still the whole company and the team behind them relies om a lot of work by voluntaries im they forums an big collection and I totally would pay for Vivaldi or donate for them if they ever want to change their business model to become donation driven.
OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by millions of volunteers. It includes data about roads, buildings, shops, points of interest, and more.
Many of the benefits of Google Maps without all its spying and advertising.
Bonus in line with this: OsmAnd.
Edit: a more lightweight, but fully FOSS OSM client: Organic Maps. Blazing fast and under constant development.
Edit 2: Here is a Lemmy community dedicated to OsmAnd: !osmand@lemmy.ml
Taking the opportunity to get on my soapbox and remind everyone that free software still requires someone's time and effort to maintain. If you've been using a free app for a while and you and you enjoy it (and you have the means to do so), consider sending a donation to the developers/maintainers! It's a good way to help ensure that the great, free app you enjoy stays great and free.
If I might add to your excellent reminder, that if you're lacking on funds but have some coding skills, most projects are in need of some help. Stick your head into the dev forum and try a low-hanging bug.
If you can't code, MANY projects need help with documentation, translation, marketing, fund raising, etc.
Writing a comprehensive positive review on an app store or review site can have an impact.
If you do have a few bucks but need more for them than a donation can offer, buying their products (when available) - even just stickers and mugs helps to spread the word around while also supporting the developers.
Or, if you don't pay for the product, you are the product.
Totally agree. I donate to projects already but I need to do it more.
Krita
Oh god yes. Like GiMP, but like, usable.
Syncthing, Joplin, and Libreoffice are programs I use on a daily basis.
What do they do?
Syncthing allows you to sync directories between devices. I have different folders synced between by Windows desktop, Pi4, Android, tablet, and laptop.
Joplin is an open source note-taking app that I use with Windows and Android. I use Syncthing to sync the notes between my different devices.
Libreoffice is a replacement of MS Office.
FreeCAD Linkstage - RealThunder's fork of the FOSS CAD package is less buggy, has improved rendering, and is much easier to use.
PrusaSlicer - A snappy alternative to Cura for slicing 3D models for printing. A lot of awesome features and it's constantly under development.
Blender - I've done a little here and there with Blender, but Cycles works great for product renders. It's such a vast and amazing program that can accommodate so many different use-cases.
LMMS - An FL Studio-like DAW with a simplified workflow and robust features. Lackluster plug-in support out of the box, but the addition of a VST host and waveform editor make it a fully-featured way to make music.
Element - Fully open-source VST host with support for VST3. Also works as a standalone application, which means you can create plug-in chains without touching your DAW. You can also save presets of those chains, and do crazy signal routing with the two-dimensional geometry nodes-esque UI.
Vital/Vitalium - It's literally FOSS Serum. You can follow Serum tutorials, and have them turn out. A wavetable synth that's so darn easy to use, you'll never want to use anything else. This is the quintessential FOSS future bass producer's synth.
Dexed - DX7 cartridge manager and emulator. It sounds like an awesome 80s FM synth; what can I say? Must-have for synthwave and noodling around with new sounds.
Sforzando/SFZ - An open standard and a free player for said open standard. Allows for what are essentially lossless, unzipped soundfonts.
VSCO/VSCL - A few decent symphonic instrument libraries based around SFZ. Both are CC0.
Freepats - A decent place to find more SFZ instruments. A few classics like a dry Tele and a few CC0 pianos live here.
Audacity- The only FOSS waveform editor worth using. It's extremely flexible, has a ton of useful built-in effects, and makes for a great companion to LMMS when you need to make more in-depth edits to samples.
Cardinal - FOSS fork of VCV as a VST, which enables you to create crazy virtual eurorack creations and play them with MIDI. You can also use it standalone, and the sheer number of built-in plug-ins basically guarantees your dream of automatic music generating machines are only a few clicks away.
MusicGen - A recent ML tool by Facebook that can be run locally; essentially SOTA on few-shot text-to-waveform music generation. If you have a somewhat-high-end GPU, it will probably work for you. A great tool for sampling into weird ambient tracks.
RVC - A recent tool that is fast to train and provides extremely realistic voice-to-voice conversion, especially for vocals. Ever see those AI SpongeBob singing memes? This is probably how they did it.
PhotoGIMP - While I'm still using Photoshop, PhotoGIMP is an add-on for GIMP that attempts to port the Photoshop UI to... GIMP. It's mildly successful, and potentially can ease the pains of transitioning to a new program. I'm honestly too lazy to switch at this point, but it looked promising when I peeked the last time.
Inkscape - I suck at vector anything, but this program proved to be useful on occasion. I believe it's a serious competitor to Illustrator if you bother to learn how to use it properly.
A1111's Web UI - Now totally FOSS, this absolutely insane piece of software integrates with so many different useful plug-ins to accomplish basically any conceivable image generation or AI-with-images task imaginable. You can literally do anything from normal text-to-image generation to upscaling or colorizing, and even img2img; it's multi-modal to no end.
KiCAD - Hands down the best EDA package I've used. Granted, it's the only one I've used. Still, this is how FOSS software for engineering purposes should be designed. I wish they would send their UX people over to help FreeCAD out. If you need to design a PCB for anything at all, use KiCAD, period.
NodeJS - The sole reason JavaScript is worth learning for more general computing tasks; with the sheer variety of packages on NPM, it feels like you can do anything.
VSCodium - All of what makes VSCode worth using, and none of the creepy MS telemetry.
7zip - The one program to conquer all archive formats. It works, and it's absolutely tiny. I've even installed this on Windows 2000, and of course it worked fine.
LibreOffice - Occasionally buggy, but certainly the best FOSS office package currently available. LibreOffice Writer and Calc are especially usable and work great.
VLC - Is there anything this traffic cone can't play? Superb video and audio codec compatibility, although it won't play a MIDI unless you feed FluidSynth a soundfont to atone for your sins.
Strawberry - For when you want to listen to tons of music, but you hate the clunky nature of other audio managers. Strawberry basically doesn't use a DB, and instead edits metadata directly. It will also instantly update when you add new songs or change metadata, so you rarely have to restart it. It's the fastest way to manage tons of music I've found.
PCPartPicker - A website, but still worth mentioning. This is basically the only tolerable way to part out a PC, and it makes sharing specs of your recent projects trivial.
Rufus - Someone else mentioned this one, but it's basically the only tolerable way to create bootable installation media. Works well, and it's FOSS.
Manjaro KDE - The closest you can get to SteamOS's desktop mode. Based on Arch, like SteamOS, and the same DE as SteamOS.
ZorinOS - Tolerable derivative of Ubuntu LTS, especially for Windows natives.
Quadrapassel - Best Linux Tetris clone ever conceived. It's in my Steam Deck library, for Pete's sake.
Yuzu - Pairs well with a PC handheld and a "screw Nintendo" attitude. The Switch emulator that is often marginally faster (and often slightly less accurate than) Ryujinx.
OpenRCT2 - RCT, especially the first two games by Chris Sawyer, are some of the best tycoon games ever created. OpenRCT2 is a faithful reimplantation that is going places.
This is an amazing list. I will +1 Dexed cos FM is great, and add a few more music production apps to the list.
BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - A great all-in-one orchestral vst with decent samples. Great for people wanting to bridge the gap between writing with sections and writing for specific instruments. Lacks articulations like Legato and Marcato, but is ridiculously good for the price of jack shit
SPAN - An excellent mixing and mastering vst that gives you a highly configurable fft spectrum analyzer, with a few presets for translation checks. My favorite feature is the correlation meter, which helps me visually check interference in stereo mixes
Kontakt free library - Has some solid samples for a selection of instruments, but I mostly use the Jazz Guitar and Bass Guitar from here for basic sketching
Equalizer APO - System wide EQ. Extremely configurable. I've since hopped over to SoundID Reference, but prior to that, I was using this. It's great for making all your headphones and speakers sound like any other pair of headphones, and there's a huge library of headphone presets that tell you how to get a neutral signature on just about any pair of them
I use KeePass every single day
Same. Love it so much
How is it compared to Bitwarden?
This article might help answer that question for you.
As a recent convert, Bitwarden feels so modern. I'm not 100% comfortable not having my keyfile locally, but I've kept an old copy that I'll maintain with some of the more crucial passwords.
Syncthing. I get so much use out of it yet it's probably the least naggy thing on my computer.
I sometimes forget I even use syncthing because I never have to mess with it once it is setup.
ffmpeg
I genuinely want to use it but I have no idea how or even how to start. Any advice?
Ask Google what you're trying to do and you'll find your answer, or ask ChatGPT.
Krita. I don't use it at a professional level so I don't know if it's missing important features, but as far as I know it's also used by skilled artists. Also, the documentation is great.
Any mentions of Krita on the internet come attached with one of two conversations.
And the latter is then split absolute evenly between nerds who for some reason really dislike Libre Office's mascot and want to shit on all software mascots. And between people who want to fuck her and also fuck anything ever designed by Tyson Tan. And I gotta say, you freaking degenerates, I WANTED to play Freedom Planet 2 but every time I think of that game I also think of this shit and how one of you made this gigantic copypasta about the bat girl and....
What was I talking about?
LibreOffice has a mascot?!
Krita is good, intuitive wise on the same level as Photoshop for me 😵💫
I don't use Krita for art either. I use it as a PaintdotNET replacement and it blows it 20km out of the water
Krita really is exceptional for free software, started doing digital art in it just for fun and it's crazy how many tools are avaialble
I was looking for alternatives for Photoshop Touch (A great photo editing android app) as my new phone does not support 32bit apps. Found this and it even have an Android app. 10/10 rn
Others have mentioned most of my favorite tools. One thing I'd like to add is SageMath. It's a mathematical software that's comparable/better than commercial offerings like Mathematica and MatLab. I've rarely seen anyone in the academia using anything else these days. If someone does use something else, it's just because they're more used to it. SageMath is by far the best tool for most things math.
Also, while typing about Sage, I was reminded of how great of a tool LaTeX is. If you want to write anything that'll be more than a single page, LaTeX is probably the best way to do it.
99% of open source apps and tools
Basically, yeah. I mean: Linux.
Blender. Gimp.
Countless others
Gimp could've been actually used personally as a photo manipulation program... If they just didn't name the damn thing GIMP
Maps. Gives me accurate directions,live traffic data and anything else I need on the road e.g restaurants,hotels,petrol stations etc.
Well, you pay with your data so there's that...
Fwiw, OpenStreetMap is pretty amazing
Yep but honestly live traffic and occupancy for buildings, as well as my own location history for me personally is just too useful. I can find out where I was for essentially any point in time since ~2016 data that would've been lost to me several times if I were to have kept the data myself.
Seriously it has sort of changed the world. I know I'm just handing all my location data to Google but the way it works and the features it offers are amazing and I cannot imagine a world anymore in which I might get lost if I just take a wrong turn somewhere. That combined with the free messaging has made "finding" anything location related a non issue. I can send people a location to meet, I can look up an address someone gave me, I can send my spouse my live location while I'm on my way home to let her know how far I'm out, I can find a hardware store in a town I've never been to because I need to tape to fix my bag or whatever, people write helpful comments about where to park or whatever. Maps will suggest different routes for pedestrians, cyclists, drivers or find you a public transportation route if you wish, including (usually) the exact time your train or bus or whatever leaves. It's fantastic
Look into OpenStreetMaps site for desktop PCs, and pick one of many android apps for the mobile phones that use OSM (i prefer osmAnd, it has a free premium version on F-droid software store) and you won't be needing to send all your location data to Google ever again.
🔥🦊
Obsidian - fantastic Markdown editor with rich base functionality and a huge garden of plugins.
So I just tried this, on Android. Yes it is pretty nice. Wish it would do plain .txt files too. Or even source code and syntaxes highlighting for different file types. Limited to just MD files sucks. Not really interested in the whole "canvas" thing. UI is a bit clunky on Android, but not terrible.
Currently using Acode front F-Droid for Android, which addresses the issues named above. And it's FOSS, which Obsidian is not.
Obsidian isn't meant to be a general purpose text editor, it's a personal wiki; None of the things you mentioned are its goals, though it can highlight source code in code blocks.
It's meant to be a second brain, with interlinking between notes and ideas a la the Zettelkasten method. I use it for keeping everything from DND notes to local documentation on my home lab, to meeting notes... Think Notion or the like, if you're familiar.
Here's a great overview by one of my favorite YouTube channels: https://youtu.be/DbsAQSIKQXk
For general purpose editing, I personally use Neovim in Termux.
While Obsidian does work on mobile, I find it really shines on a bigger screen with keyboard and mouse.
Markdown has code blocks with syntax highlighting.
https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#syntax-highlighting
I think syntax highlighting may be a core plugin that comes deactivated. If it's not that then there's definitely a community plugin for it.
Blender. The leap from 2.79 to 2.8 and beyond was astonishing
Can't agree more. Blender is very solid 3D editor software with a lot of features for creating 3D models and scenes, whereas other software of such level of functionality is very expensive. I'm no way a professional 3D modeller, but I am very grateful for enthusiasts behind Blender to make it possible for random people to even touch the world of 3D modelling, not even speaking about to create quality assets for their pet projects.
GNU!
Just had to give a shout out to Stallman & GNU. I've seen a lot of mentions of thanks to Linux on here, but Richard will never let us forget that Linux ain't shit w/o GNU software to interact with it.
Just think of the number of GNU programs you've used, just in a typical day on the terminal.
My hat is off to you, Richard.
It's really a shame Stallman and many of the other free software pioneers are absolutely creeps to women.
Yeah I respect the all the important work he's done but I hate him for how shit of a human he is
A lot of GNU software has some other FOSS equivalent that it can be replaced with. GCC, however, was basically the only production-worthy FOSS C/C++ compiler for a long time, until Clang came along.
GNU was the very first free Unix reimplementation project. Without it, maybe only excessively expensive commercial Unix systems would be available alongside Windows. Although 386BSD was also an early effort, the intense FUD campaign prevented it from being used for more serious purposes. At the time, GNU/Linux played a crucial role in competing against commercial Unix systems.
Very yes. But GPL license, while inteded to make IT world better, still makes life harder for common developers.
how
how so?
I can't believe Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/) is free. It has nearly all the same features as Photoshop and works in just the same way. But it runs in the browser! Super quick, regularly updated, and free. Amazing.
Darktable photo editing software. It has an awesome suite of features and functionality and supports almost every digital camera raw format.
Nice to see another darktable user! I also learnt so much about photo processing thanks to their tutorials. It's very technical stuff that went ober my head mostly but it was fun to read.
I gave a shot. The UX was downright hostile.
Sadly it's the case for a lot of open source softwares I feel. I've had the same feed back on GIMP.
But honestly once you get used to it, it has some really great tools that actually make it just as powerful (if not more depending on who you ask) than its direct competitor: Adobe Lightroom.
It's a little rough to get into it, but imo it's worth the investment.
Signal and Telegram
I'm pretty sure they're selling the data
Signal is certainly not. It's open source, and verifiably end-to-end encrypted. The only information that they have about you is your phone number, when your account was created, and when you last connected to the service.
Telegram is not so privacy friendly, with a major problem being that it's not end-to-end encrypted by default.
DaVinci Resolve was the last app to really surprise me. It's a fantastic app for video editing with a ton of functionality. Most of the paid functions seem like composite fuctions of the free functions or overly professional tools, but for getting started with simple 2D- or 3D-animations or short film editing, it's beyond amazing.
Obsidian
The plugins for obsidian are staggering in their scope and possibility. I haven't even had occasion to look at how to develop a plugin, because every need I could possibly have is met already.
Too complicated. I prefer upnote
Personally prefer Notion, but Obsidian is a definite runner up.
Limiting myself to free as in freedom (no ads, not free to use because you are the product): KeePass/KeePassXC, GnuCash, Firefox, LibreOffice, digiKam, GIMP.
Digikam runs on my old thinkpad and handles hundreds of photos a session without batting the proverbial eye. It really is fantastic.
Audacity.
Is the source code still tainted or did they remove the telemetry after the backlash?
As far as I know it never even made it to the program, it was just something they were planning - and subsequently cancelled due to the backlash.
For both professional and personal use, I can list 2 that you likely haven't heard of:
https://github.com/meowtec/Imagine Imagine PNG/JPEG optimization - it basically compresses images and photos so you can email lots of stuff back and forth without using the likes of WeTransfer.
https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ Ditto Clipboard Manager - a multi clipboard for Windows. Ever try to paste something, only to realise you've already copied over it? Its use and helpfulness is so ubiquitous, I just could never live without it anymore.
Windows has a clipboard feature like that built in now. Press Win+V to enable it.
From what I've seen, it's not nearly as customizable as Ditto.
That's a far cry from what Ditto can do.
I love Ditto, I use it daily!
FileOptimizer collects these sorts of apps and tries out each on your files to get the best compression. I use it every day, particularly for work.
Looks interesting, I'll give it a go!
FreeCAD. All the CAD you need without the subscription and blocked off features.
I can believe it's free, coming from professional cad software it's basically un-usable.
Agreed. Using free CAD feels so substantially worse than literally any other option.
I believe SketchUp is also free for most users, and I'd much rather use it if I don't want to pay. It's not FOSS, but FOSS ≠ good
I also agree. Use audodesk inventor for work and fusion 360 for personal use. I tried freecad and could not do it.
It's FOSS!
I don't know if this will show up or is already in the list, but: Rufus. I burn all my thumb drives for os installs with Rufus. It also lets me bypass a lot of the windows garbage that they've tracked on to the installer, like making you sign in to a Microsoft account to install. Also, Ventoy. It's a multiple OS installer, so one big thumb drive lets me install any number of OSes from it.
While I'm setting up those OSes, ninite gets me my windows programs, and Snappy Driver Installer Origin gets me my drivers. No more laptops with pre-installed bloat for me!
Visual Studio Code
Cura
Blender
WINAMP + GOLDWAVE!!!!!
Unfortunately with vsc you (us) are the product
I'm checking out vscodium this week, thanks to another lemee thread, and so far it's great, without the MS surveillance.
I'm usually really against that sort of stuff, but I'm okay with it in this case since it has become somewhat of a circular loop. They pump that data into ChatGPT, which gets consumed by GitHub Copilot, which gets pumped into VS code, which gets consumed by me.
The fact that they release Cura for free, make it available on all platforms (Mac/Windows/Linux), continuously improve and update it, and have incorporated the setup of basically every 3D printer you can buy is amazing.
Also, octoprint is free and open source and is incredible as well.
Oh yeah! Octoprint is rad too, and Klipper!
Ffmpeg, VLC
ReadEra is a great freemium ebook reader that got me back into reading again.
ReadEra was the only App that was able to load my huge book collection and search it, after trying over a dozen other apps. It's very well programmed.
Koreader which is also mentioned in this thread couldn't handle it.
So good I paid for it.
Same.
Bitwarden - been using it for over 5 years, such an amazing utility.
Proxmox and OPNsense. Blows me away that I can get that level of functionality completely open source.
Proxmox is so good it's hard to believe. It's VMware levels of features and convenience, while also supporting LXC containers, no license shenanigans, no enshitification, and the full flexibility of Debian under the hood
The recent-ish addition of Proxmox Backup Server is the cherry on top, with de-duplicated , incremental system image level backups with support for individual file restore
As a Mechanic. Ampol Netlube, from lawn mowers and passenger vehicle to motorcycles and heavy mining/industrial equipment, I can find how much lubricant it take, what viscosity and specifications.
Tailscale's free tier is unbelievable.
I second this, incredible product all around. Even better, they recently changed the free tier from allowing 20 devices to 100. An upgraded free tier is not something you see often.
Thanks for the HU, that just got them my business!
Tailscale is a zero config VPN for building secure networks. Install on any device in minutes. Remote access from any network or physical location.
So much software is so necessary that I cannot believe it is NOT free.
That doesn't make any sense. Necessity is the driving factor for it to cost money
Except for basic human rights
Rclone, Neat Downloader, VLC, FreeCommanderXE, LMMS, any Keepass program, Rufus, Gimp, Notepad++, 7zip, ffmpeg, yt-DLP
The only calculator you need! It has custom units, functions, it's quick, light, stays on top.
I used speedcrunch for a long time but ended up switching to Qalc and haven't turned back.
Yes both!
I use Qalc for unit conversions (I often need to convert measuring units without acces to internet) and SpeedCrunch for everything else