VLC! No ads ever, that’s insane!
To piggyback off of this, consider donating to VLC.
Donated!
But does it whip the llama’s ass?
I think not.
- this is a really old Winamp reference for you younger folks.
VLC isn’t a WinAmp replacement? Though.
Foobar2000 is!
Foobar themes and customisation was and still is absolutely amazing.
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.
I donate every. single. month.
Mozilla seems to be pretty transparent. You can see their financial statement at State of Mozilla.
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
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.
I use a separate app for my codes, if someone somehow gains access to my Bitwarden if they have TOTP as wellcthrn they have all my accounts. With my TOTP in another app they still can’t access them.
FYI, This product is 100% marketed on Lemmy for a profit. I’ve seen astroturfed threads multiple times now.
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.)
Free app marketed for profit… There might be something wrong with you
It kinda does feel like it’s being promoted here, which seems unnecessary for a free, open-source program hahaha
Might just be because people really like it and want to share.
I don’t doubt that! I’ve just seen it mentioned a LOT, much more than any other sites I’ve visited.
I’m not suspicious about it anymore, though—if it wasn’t a free open-source program, that would be a different story! Spotting obvious ads disguised as comments everywhere on Reddit was always fun.
7-zip
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It seems evident that the effort put into a comment would mirror one’s investment in the topic. With these bare minimum answers I always assume the quality of the recommendation matches.
Have you considered asking the question yourself and explaining in your post that you are seeking for actual recommendations instead of expecting them in a post with a one-line random question like this one? Maybe?
Most “ITT people” love to help with “ITT” matters, but also enjoy throwing quick answers in posts like this. Just a heads-up.
LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets.
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.
Bitwarden and firefox
I don’t use it but blender is another one
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
Linux
Not an “app” but close enough :) I agree anyway
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:
- Vivaldi browser
- Joplin notes app
- nextcloud
- wikipedia (obviously)
- Öffi
- Signal
- keepass
- rif for reddit (R.I.P)
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.
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.
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.
Additive Manufacturing
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.
Music Production
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.
Photo Editing/Design
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.
EDA/PCB Design
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.
Programming
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.
General Computing
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.
Operating Systems
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.
Games/Emulators
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.
