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VLC is a big one for me.
some new weird video format opens windows stock media player because it’s not yet associated with vlc
“Hey… it looks like your going to have to buy a codec…”
manually open in vlc where it runs seemlessly
I’ll take “things that haven’t happened to me in years for a dollar Alex”.
A variation happened to me last week that’s why it came to mind. Was opening an mp4 recorded on a digital camera on a new laptop. So the stock player had a go and gave a message similar to the above. vlc was installed moments later and of course had no issue…
People buy codecs?
+1 VLC will dutifully try to play even corrupted to hell files that any other media player would just fail with some form of “can’t play, file is corrupt”
VLC is pretty great. I would say IINA is at least a close second on Mac. Haven’t had a problem playing anything in it yet.
VLC runs great on Mac and Android as well
Wasn’t there some big thing where they tried to buy it and the person that made it was just like “nah”
I agree that it’s cool and all, but I just really don’t like VLC. It’s ugly, bad UX and misses some major features. I love other similar and also free ones thoigh, like PotPlayer, MPC and MPV.
Wikipedia
Don’t forget to donate!
But then it’s not free anymore /s
That reminds me, I should donate
7zip
I haven’t used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere…why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we’re on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?
I’m always amazed when I’m following a tutorial written for windows and it says “download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip”. I just right click the file and extract it…
Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.
Windows can do that, but opens archives as folders and will run executables by extracting them to a temp folder without dependencies. And the unpack dialogue is cumbersome, with 7zip you get a simple right click -> extract here / to folder dialogue, that somehow still is too much to ask of the main OS.
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Organic Maps
Organic maps is great bit I wish it had real time traffic data. For that reason I normally use magic earth instead.
Thank you very much for pointing out that app exists
Organic maps is so good
Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
It’s a beautiful, FOSS, offline/local Google maps-like app for Android that uses Open Street Map data.
There are plenty of other offline/local map apps, some paid, some free, but they are nowhere near as polished.
Practically all of the free map services use OSM.
there’s been many a time i’ve been out in the middle of nowhere with a friend or family member and google maps stops working on their phone, and i get to pull out OM and save the day :^)
Voyager.
Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
Lemmy mobile client
It’s the closest thing to Apollo or Narwhal for Reddit, but for Lemmy.
Big thing is that the dev is very active and responsive to feedback. Which is really useful given Lemmy is in its developmental phase for the most part.
Unlike Sync which while good is largely abandoned thses days.
It’s my favorite client I’ve been using since it was a web app
Have you tried phtn.app? It’s gorgeous.
First I’ve heard of it but it looks nice
I like the mlem testflight and arctic for iphone, mlem sometimes cant display an image tho
Krita. I had a uni licence for Photoshop for years, even took a Photoshop course but still kept using Krita. It has an intuitive UI and all the tools I’ll ever need.
RStudio+R is way better than any of its proprietary alternatives.
Blender. I’m no 3D modling expert but it does everything I as a hobbyist want to do with it and so much more. Nowadays, the UI is pretty decent, too.
Finally, the Lagrange browser is really good. The gemini protocol is kinda niche though, but if you’re interested it’s unreasonably pretty, well optimized and has a great UX. The guy who maintains it really puts his heart and soul into it.
The fact that you put those examples together with this Lagrange browser made me curious enough to check it, I had never heard of Gemini protocol before. So, simply put, thank you for sharing about this, I’m going to be installing Lagrange and start checking out geminispace.
Cool! Every once in a while, I open the browser and check what’s going on in the gemini://midnight.pub
It’s a lot of fun. It only took me a couple of hours to figure out how to make a “site”.
gemini://motion.chrisco.me
Our local community is getting into it.
Was not aware about the Gemini protocol so thank you for pointing that out!
Freaking LOVE Lagrange, super glad to see it mentioned here
shit bruh, never knew there are proprietary R IDEs.
I mean spss and stata are Rstudio+R alternatives
Linux.
At least $100 per system, if not more.
ZFS
Yeah man zfs Same with snapraid and mergerfs
SSH.
Alternatively, Postgres.
Came for these, leaving satisfied.
Off the top of my head from daily use;
- Borg backup, powerful backup software for self-hosted oriented users or enterprise automation.
- proxmox, hypervisor that is performant and easy to setup for simple and complex virtualization needs.
- bitwarden (combined with vaultwarden self-host), password management, secrets management, and available on basically all platforms and browsers. Self hosting your vault gives you peace of mind over who has your most sensitive data.
- obsidian, a great notes app with polished cross platform applications that don’t do any funky proprietary storage shenanigans. Files are files and folders are folders.
- kate (and most of the KDE suite), premiere Linux desktop environment suitable for customization and all the expected luxuries user would expect from windows or macOS. Kate specifically is a noticeable modern upgrade over notepad++ and rivals VSCode for programmers.
Could you expand on what you mean by ‘complex virtualization needs’ - I read this phrase sometimes but would appreciate an expert’s perspective 🙏
My only point was to explain that proxmox is great free software because it supports both simple virtualization needs, such as having several different VMs or containers running on one headless system with very little overhead, and complex multi-system setups that include multiple machines running proxmox and clustered together for both reliability and redundancy with distributed services and applications.
Practically every single FOSS application I use is highly useful to me, and of course, free, so I’ll just list them all here.
- Immich - A full-featured replacement for Google Photos, has a sleek UI, face detection, albums, a timeline, etc.
- Paperless-ngx - Document management system, saves me a ton of paper hoarding, and makes everything easily searchable with OCR.
- Syncthing - Simple file synchronization between my devices, on my terms. Doesn’t share data with big tech companies about my files, and hooks up extremely fast P2P connections that beat cloud-based services by a long shot.
- Metube & Seal - Simple interfaces for downloading with yt-dlp, can download from YouTube, but also many other sites. Doesn’t spam you with popup ads or junk redirects like those “youtube downloader” type sites. Seal is my favorite of the two, but is only on Android.
- Image Toolbox - Insanely feature-packed app for doing practically anything you could want to an image. Converting formats, clearing EXIF data, removing backgrounds, feature-packed editing, OCR, convert to SVG, create color palettes, converting PDFs to images, decode and encode Base64 to and from images, extract frames from gifs, encrypt & decrypt files, make zip files, and a lot more. All local.
- Rustdesk - No-nonsense remote desktop, tons of features, simple file transfer, cross-platform compatibility, and P2P communication without needing a third party server if you so choose.
- LibreOffice - Essentially everything you’d get with Office 365 (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but without the $150 price point. Compatible with the same file formats, and has the same functionality.
- Cashew - Feature rich financial app for budgeting, tracking purchases, saving for goals, etc. Doesn’t have automatic import, but I find that manually putting every transaction in keeps me aware of my spending much better than before, so for me it’s quite worth it. Install directly from the APK, or use on web though. The version on the app stores has some features locked behind a paywall.
- Linkwarden - Bookmark manager with cross-platform support, a web interface, automatic tagging, automatic archiving of any saved links in multiple formats, collaborative sharing capabilities, and more. It’s free, but you can also pay $3/mo if you want them to host it for you.
Edit: And Umbrel (on Raspberry Pi) if you want to host things more easily. Basically just a much more hands-off, user-friendly docker for people who don’t want to tinker as much.
Edit 2: Non-FOSS, but Obsidian is the best note taking app I’ve ever used. Great selection of community-made plugins (which are FOSS) for additional functionality, and all notes are in standard cross-software-compatible Markdown. No locked-in proprietary formats.
I can suggest LogSeq as a nice alternative for Obsidian. Notes are all in Markdown too!
It’s good, but it does not allow for a free file structure. Used it for months but now back to obsidian. Also plugins
I use near the same stuff. But I don’t like these all-in-one centers like umbrel and Casa. I simply use dockge.
And happy cake day.
Cashew - Feature rich financial app
How does Cashew compare to GnuCash?
Nice I’ll definately check those out. For office I use OnlyOffice
Some of your data flows through Syncthing servers (but I agree that’s a great product, I use it myself) LibreOffice works for entry-level users, but it does not have the same functionality as MSOffice. And the UI sucks as much as MSOffice.
You can buy office separately these days again. Not sure if Libreoffice is feature complete these days, but last time I tried it, it was missing a lot of the more advanced featureslike Solver/Powerquery/certain advanced formulas.
I recommend it for everybody and if it is not for you, you wil realise it in a couple of minutes of working with it if you are a oower user
firefox
considering the big monopoly of chrome based is not really free, it’s paid by google or microsoft mining user data
In fairness, Firefox is also paid for by Google.
Linux, Firefox, virtualization, Blender, KDE Plasma, ffmpeg, Krita, Inkscape, yt-dlp, Godot, programming language toolchains
blender for sure, its amazing, especially when every comparable software is an expensive subscription
Also got back into 2d after many years, didn’t want to pirate illustrator, tried inkscape and its all ill ever need
add Graphite to the list
GIMP
Home Assistant
YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.
- 7-zip
- VLC
- Signal
- Currency
- Handbrake
- Fennec (in lieu of Firefox)
Those are the free ones I use very frequently at least, I’m sure there’s more.
