Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you’ll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I’ve ever written and no matter how many tabs - it’s all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you’ll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it’s uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it’ll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn’t shit like this more implemented in software?
KiCad - electrical engieneering
FreeCAD - mechanical engieneering
Blender - 3d modeling, rendering, animation
Krita - raster painting
Kdenlive - video editing
LMMS - music creation
Ardour - sound processing
Nheko - Matrix client
Xonotic - FPS game
KDE - K Desktop Enviroment
Hotspot - GUI for perf sampling profiler
KCachegrind - GUI for valgrind cache simulator
QT Creator - C(++)/QML(and prob JS) IDE
Graphvis - graph visualizer
Adding on:
Inkscape - vector graphics program
Meshrom - photogrammetry
Handbrake - video transcoding
MakeMKV - rips DVDs and Blu Ray into video files
7zip - file compression and decompression
Droid48 - Truly excellent HP48 emulator for android
LibreOffice - free word processor & office suite (not without some recent drama though, I guess)
I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty, but hey, more for additional commenters to name.
Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too
Handbrake - video transcoding
FFmpeg.
Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too
Still GPL.
Synfig Studio - 2d animation software
I definitely considered FFmpeg (I mean, it does everything, and pretty much as fast as possible), but the sense I had was that people were mostly posting about tools that were reasonably accessible to novice users, with nice-ish interfaces. FFmpeg is pretty daunting to newcomers.
OpenSCAD (CAD, but with a programming language-style interface) is kind of in a similar category. It’s pretty powerful, and for someone who thinks like a programmer it can be relatively easy to learn, but if you don’t already understand 3d transformations on a pretty intuitive level, the program doesn’t have a lot of features to ease you into that.
LocalSend - like AirDrop, but cross platform
2nded
Been using this for a few weeks now, and it is really fucking convenient
Nice suggestion!
LocalSend is just so effortless and good! I love it.
Obsidian and VLC.
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Bitwarden
It’s a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.
Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I’ve been using it for years and I love it, it’s the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.
Bitwarden’s recent licence “oopsie” has shaken folks trust in them a bit. Not that it’s not a good software currently, but now we know what may happen at a moment’s notice.
No one mentioned SolveSpace, so… SolveSpace. Solvespace is a fully functional 3D parametric CAD solver in a free, cross-platform, open-source, portable, single self-contained executable 10 MB file.
I do a fair amount of hobby 3d printing and SolveSpace makes design and CAD stupid easy. The interface is perfectly laid out, the hotkeys are intuitive, and the capabilities make small-scale projects a breeze.
Now, the program has its limitations, but if I just want something quick and simple, there is nothing better.
SolveSpace… I remember that. Interesting thing, but I ended up using FreeCAD.
I’ve been using FreeCAD, it’s extremely powerful, and just hit 1.0. Might be a bit harder to learn, but worth it.
Yeah, FreeCAD is great, but I can only think of one project that I’ve done where SolveSpace absolutely could not work for the geometry I needed and I had to rebuild it in FreeCAD. But that’s just a product of what I am building: simple things like brackets, knobs, and replacement lids mostly. I don’t need chamfers, drafts, lofts, etc. and I get what I need with minimum of time and effort using SolveSpace.
When I do need those features, complex geometries, or modification of pre-built step files, FreeCAD has never failed me.
Wireguard, I find it both simpler and easier to use than OpenVPN.
dd. No other iso writing utility has worked as consistently, even if my usb devices would gain weird glitches after using it.
Believe it or not I am a person who goes out of their way to avoid using the terminal, so this is very much vouching for the software itself rather than the ux it’s based on.
FLOSS games that are solid:
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
Luanti (aka Minetest)
sgt-puzzles
Glaring omission: OpenTTD, still in contention for the greatest train (and other transport) game ever made.
Looks so good. I haven’t tried city-sims in 30yrs.
I just watched this drokkin excellent overview of what is possible in OpenTTD. Very polished.
I am sure it can be played as a serious endeavor too.
SuperTuxKart is a cool one
Sure is! It’s had so much work done since the early days.
The single player campaign is huge and hilarious. Very satisfying to complete.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
This has been the only version of the game I’ve ever gotten close to beating. For that reason alone it’s worth mentioning.
Yes, I also tried the original Pixel Dungeon one time. Crazy hard mode.
For tips, hide behind doors for as many strikes as possible.
Try to enhance a Glaive with speed, from the Stone of Augmentation(stay with staff for mage). Then upgrade and add a glyph. Plate armour up to +4-6.
For tips, hide behind doors for as many strikes as possible.
I’ve definitely ‘abused’ the hell out of that. But at a certain point with the original, it seems like all the little tricks I learned hit an upper limit to their usefulness.
The original was just brutal.
Try to enhance a Glaive with speed, from the Stone of Augmentation(stay with staff for mage). Then upgrade and add a glyph.
I’ll definitely have to give that a try next time.
I tried for a day or 2 to get strafe-running, could not do it.
Would love to play Xonotic though, it has lots of old-school FPS flavour.
Strafing and moving mouse will make you turn faster, strafing with forward and moving mouse will accelerate you faster. You can see it on strafing bar.
Also read the guide: https://xonotic.org/guide/#bunny-hopping
And I recommend you to join xonotic-relax.ru discord server. It is most active xonotic community, and we do speak English when needed.
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Bitwarden, Kdenlive, Firefox, OBS, Steam.
Steam
Freewhat?
Do you pay for steam?
Yes, about 30% of the purchase price of every game.
Buying games through steam is optional. Steam itself is the game manager. I run many of my non steam games through it and don’t pay a dime for it. Alternatively I can buy steam games through 3rd party stores. The steam client on your machine is free.
They just get statistical data instead, then. I know some folks don’t care about companies knowing your activity and other telemetry data, but I’d probably still count that within the “bullshit around” exclusion criteria that OP defined.
To be fair, you can just refuse to take part in that. They’ll keep asking, every now and then, and you can keep saying no.
Not the optional hardware survey, but they automatically collect other data just through usage of Steam and applications run through Steam.
Lots of free games on there. Valve themselves just recently gave away half life 2 for free.
I can tell Dr steve doesn’t game!
I logged in just to answer this:
Stellarium
When it comes to stargazing and learning more about the night sky, there is hands-down no better program. It’s available on PC (windows/Mac/Linux) as well as mobile platforms. I used it for months for free before I paid for the premium sub, and the premium sub actually feels additive rather than just gatekeeping essential features. Plus, it’s pretty cheap and you can choose to just buy a lifetime pass for $20 and skip the sub. It’s the only app I’ve ever been happy to subscribe to.
This is amazing. I’ve tried half-assed a few times to find an app better than Sky Map and this is in a different league. Immediately uninstalled Sky Map. Finally.
TestDisk and PhotoRec. TestDisk can recover broken drive partitions, PhotoRec can recover deleted files even if the partition table is borked.
Np ++ is the GOAT. Stupidly fast to open, always restores everything you’ve ever typed no matter what, and the only program I’ve ever seen that actually lets you rename tabs where you haven’t saved the file first.
Sublime Text also lets you rename tabs without saving them, though the action is labeled “rename file”… But it’s also proprietary and paid, so that’s a downside for sure.
Micro-team checking in!
Greenshot
Irfanview
Audacity
OBS
Lab Chirp: simple but powerful sound effects generator
Stickies (zhorn software): Networkable sticky notes
Agent Ransack: File content search
Audacity
You may want to switch to Tenacity. Audacity was purchased by a company in 2021 that super promises not to try to sneak telemetry into the program. Again. For the third time.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity without any of that nonsense.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t updated my Audacity version since 2012 😅 but I’ll remember this thank you
kate is similar to npp.
Not going to tell us what it is or why you like it?
The word is a link.
My Linux box seems to have audio issues, weird things that sound like since kind of gated compression that I can’t quite figure out. Will this help?
