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..
Yep. You need to pay for the patent with certain codecs, that's why operating systems with a company behind them usually do not distribute them. Same with a few Linux distros, such as Fedora.
You can install them and the packages for your os are freely available. Just not from the company making the product in the fear of patent trolls.
Always have been. It's either included in licensing a software or operating systems. VLC ffmpeg and other open source software are a bit of a grey area since they don't make money from the software strictly speaking.
+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"
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.
VLC just managed to get some newer video files to play for me on a 10 year old tablet that wouldn't play them with it's included video player. It was also one of the *only* apps on the play store that would still work on that old tablet as well. It's been my go-to video player for years now, terrific software 🥂
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 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.
It’s likely for 'user friendliness’. Most people don’t even know what an archive is and that it should be extracted so a folder is much more intuitive and familiar to them.
Is open street map data pretty accurate? I don't expect google mas level of accuracy but I think its important that I can rely on the maps when I don't know anything about where I'm at
I did a month long trip around western Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden) and used Organic Maps as my only navigation app. Worked well for everything I used it for. Even the metro data was accurate. Also, in my home country, Estonia, it's even better than Google Maps, because it has bike navigation integrated.
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 :^)
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.
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.
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.
Plugins are also keeping me on Obsidian as opposed to using LogSeq, but I'm essentially keeping it in my back pocket as a "fire exit" in the case of Obsidian enshittifying, since of course all Obsidian notes are in markdown and cross-compatible.
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
Syncthing is awesome for home devices backups like phone pictures and videos and computer documents that can be version controlled. I also use Local Send app to share files between phones and computers in the house.
Yes, google pay for being the default search engine, but that doesn't mean they collect your information. And even better, there are also Firefox forks security oriented.
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.
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.
I've used it a lot, but unlike most of the others on this list, the commercial product (Photoshop) is so much better that I'm willing to shell out the monthly fee to use it over Gimp.
I’m not sure what field you’re in and photoshop certainly is the standard but Affinity has been great for my needs and is pay once if you’re looking to avoid SAAS
Only problem I have with it is the potential situation of (seemingly) uploading pictures which is bad for confidential stuff.
It may be local but I don't trust it that much.\
Now for personal projects: Absolutely. I even used it once on my phone. Great page!
One story that I should write down because I always tell it when discussing Godot since it's a great example of why Godot is better than other engines is that a while back I was doing a single player game for a game jam, because I was testing it with multiple controllers I wanted that it would pick any controller (it's a single player game after all, no one cares which controller I'm using) and was annoyed at the fact that every game engine requires you to create mapping for all controllers individually to do this, e.g. "controller 1 button A", "controller 2 button A", etc. So I went into the code for Godot and added a couple of lines that allowed me to create a mapping for all controllers, i.e. "Any controller Button A". This felt so useful that I wondered why no engine has it, so I submitted a PR and last I checked Godot is still the only engine that allows for "any controller" style mapping.
Blender is incredible. I am no master by any means, but I use it all the time for 3d printing. And I'm blown away by what actually-talented people can do with it.
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.
Been trying it for years and it's just a low-powered windows? I'm not sure what the benefit is. There's no support, warrantees of any kind, no useful software packages, and everything I would use it for (development, browsing) has a better windows alternative? Sorry for the hate but enjoy your free stuff I guess
set up and left alone as a server is not the same thing as a person using it for discrete tasks. where on earth did you get such an idea? you think that just because my files are stored on a linux box somewhere that I'm a linux user? frankly it doesn't sound like you're in the industry...
You just did a discrete task of writing a reply to some rando on the internet about how you're not on linux while you were using a word processor hosted on linux to send the message to another user on linux.
Ain't technology wonderful?
On the support side, there are enterprise distros (red hat) but the community support honestly is top notch. I know windows has support but I’ve never really needed it day-to-day or had a situation where having access to support on Linux really would have been helpful.
Development side - I find Linux outpaces windows for what I do, plus a number of tools are just built in. Plus Jetbrains IDEs are Java anyway and run fine there.
Browsing, i assume you mean the web? This is functionally identical.
I personally like Linux cause it’s tracker-free and more customizable. I prefer ZSH to power shell and I like that my desktop and server are running the same platform preventing strange bugs between environments.
lol have you ever tried to use windows baked-in support or MS forums with "expert answers"?
And low-powered doesnt even make sense, there is less bloat and bing/copilot shit dragging the system down, my system on the exact same specs and drive boots into Linux in like 1/10 the time as windows.
As for useful software packages, services like Flatpak, snap, and deb are a breeze -and not being able to use enshittified adobe software instead of their now better free and open source alternatives is ridiculous - Linux on any distro is what most developers would prefer and browsing is exactly the same. Hell, even gaming which was peoples major "missing piece" has made leaps and bounds last year alone.
the word "Support" includes already-answered questions readily available on the internet, eg. stack overflow. There are no unanswered questions about using/developing with windows
Your dialer may already be monetized! If you get a call from a company and see their logo chances are they paid for that. It's not enshittified yet, but it definitely could be. Source: I maintain a codebase that does this for a major device manufacturers dialer.
God... Imagine being in the middle of an important call for say discussing family affairs for a dying family member and you just hear "there will be a 30 second advertisement break in 1 minute."... I'd probably pop a blood vessel.
I think Blender is a very honorable mention, especially since the team that makes the software has also used it to make some really impressive short films, such as Big Buck Bunny. Who knows, maybe some indie studio can use it to make some truly wonderful stuff (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case).
DaVinci Resolve is professional grade video editing software that's completely free to use. It lacks some features that the paid version has but this probably doesn't effect the vast majority of casual users.
And even better, hiring companies for people who are video pros like myself are starting to ask if you're familiar with it. They've realized they don't have to pay Adobe's stupid fees.
Second this. Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is amazing. Probably my favorite video editor (although I usually have to use Adobe Premiere for work). It’s fast, fairly easy to use and probably has everything you need unless you’re doing very specific and high end professional work. It’s also rock solid. The only time I had problems was when I tried to render a few dozen (simple) timelines in one queue on a MacBook with 8GB of memory. Can’t exactly blame DaVinci for crashing on me there.
And as a bonus: it even runs on Linux. Although kdenlive is also a surprisingly good alternative there.
Will always mention its mildly scummy they put user created free addons behind the paid studio version, you can buy some of their equipment and it comes with the studio version to save money (one time fee)
I use Tiny media manager to get tv show episode and movie info like fan art, actors and show synopsis and organize my movies, shows, music and audiobooks I get from CDs, DVDs, Blu Rays and downloads. Sonarr and Radarr only snatch files from torrents, and not the rest of the info that is needed for offline mode
Opnsense. Been running it in my router with all the treats for years. Updates frequently and easily. You can do things like tailscale, wireguard, traffic shaping, or adblock in the firewall level pretty easily with it.
I've been debating on trying out offense instead of OpenWrt. My server has a dual NIC with one interface going to my modem the other to a wireless access point. Openwrt is a bit clunky as I have to boot it in Virtual box. Any difference between PFsense and opensense?
I went for opnsense without even trying pfsense - purely because I don't trust the company behind pfsense, and came across some mentions of their dubious behavior. No regrets, opnsense is pretty great.
For me docker runs my software in independent containers like jellyfin. For me it helps with migrating the software to different computers, operating systems and os upgrades without completely having to reconfigure the software each time.
Not sure about the fuck docker comment. I'm always open to alternatives, not everyone has the same software needs.
Basically like a sort of mini-VM.
What it solves (for me) is dependency hell.\
No need to install a quadrillion dependencies and solve if two different programs want the same package but maybe different versions.
Instead of fiddling with that, the image isolates the components.
This way I could run 5 different web servers on different ports.\
Yes they complicate troubleshooting but the upsides are way more valuable to me.
For me it actually sinplifies troubleshooting by a lot. No worries when messing around inside the container. Maintainers are looking at the same picture as you and can reproduce everything more easily.
Without docker I could never run all the services I am currently.
Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it's basically free (presuming you're not a business).
Since the Muse Group has acquired Audacity and its following telemetry/spy-ware case, it has a little bitter aftertaste, there are good alternatives though like Ardour
It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it's a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.
My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we've both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.
Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there's heaps more)
So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.
Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.
(Just noticed my wife's left her phone behind when she went off riding... I guess no system's perfect!)
One of my few remaining Google dependencies is maps and timeline. I just like having that data *somewhere* and most of the FOSS stuff I've seen previously is piecemeal at best. Will have to play with this.
OrganicMaps, all the trails I've been to so far in the US are available for offline navigation. No need to precache via gmaps and pray it won't get deleted
Edit: OpenStreetMap which powers this is what AllTrails uses, but I'm not sure if they contribute back or not
I've just arrived in Norway (literally waiting as passport control) at the start of a three-week hiking-heavy Interrailing trip around Scandinavia and Central Europe. You better believe that I've got all of Europe downloaded in Organic Maps. Also, Organic Maps is a client for OpenStreetMaps which, for detailed foot-level maps, beats Google/Apple hands down and is, of course, open source.
Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.
Fedora. Switched to Linux full time over a year ago, after years and years and years (like... 06/07?) of dabbling. It blows my mind how polished and wonderful it is to use. It's completely everything I need, and it always blows my mind that it's fucking *free*
My computer isn't good enough for gaming, but I use the steam deck for that. I'm accidently 100% Linux (well, and android, which doesn't really count). Lol. But, man, I was nervous about making the switch to completely Linux. The only time I'd done that before was back in like 09 when I had this shitty Acer laptop that I swapped to Ubuntu because it simply would not run windows. That wasn't a great experience, but things weren't as polished then, plus it was the world's worst laptop. Now I feel like I've upgraded to something that should cost 5 times the price. Like, it feels like I should be embarrassed by how good it is, like it was a splurge or an irresponsible financial decision. *And it's free!*
There are some games that run anti-cheat that just don't run. I don't play any of those at the moment, but other than that, no.
The odd thing has quirks, but between Steam and Lutris, I'm good. Not a heavy duty gamer though.
Fedora is awesome. I use the immutable version Kinoite, and it's fork with non-free extras Aurora. Dev container is with Arch just because there are a ton of packages. All the GUI apps from Flathub.
I need to add KDE to this mix. What a wonderful desktop it is. Like what Windows should be but is not.
I'm running Bazzite right now, because I wanted to test it out, but normally I run Silverblue. When I first went to Linux years ago it was all Ubuntu, so I got used to GNOME and unity. Since then, I've never really been able to get into KDE. It feels too windowsy to me, and I fell in love with the quick keyboard controls and the smoothness on gnome. I fully get why someone might not like it, but for me it's a near perfect fit.
That's honestly the best thing about Linux. With windows or Mac you're stuck with how they want things to function. I love being able to change my DE, even if I never do it
I also didn't like it for years. I used a tiling window manager (first i3, then sway), but tried the new plasma 6 and really liked it. Dolphin file manager was the thing that converted me.
Right now, it's Calibre because I just got a Kobo eBook reader and it's so great to be able to install pretty much any format of book onto my device and convert it if it's a format the device can't use. And even convert it if the book works better in a different format.
Caliber is truly amazing, but Kobo support is… Odd. I love my Kobo for comics because of the color screen, but uploading .cbz files is an obtuse process. Kobo readers won’t natively read metadata from .cbz files, but you can manually push the metadata to the device’s database. But in order to do that, you need the file to actually be in the database, which doesn’t happen until after you unplug the device.
So to get a .cbz file working, you need to plug your Kobo in, upload the .cbz file(s), disconnect your Kobo, let it index the file(s), and then hope to god that it actually shows up on the device’s library when you plug it back into your computer so you can manually update the metadata.
Yeah calibre is amazing, and also integrates anti-drm plugins nicely. Recently I've been reading more and more on my phone so file formats don't matter anymore, but it's still a great software just for managing your ebook archive.
As a mobile reader I can also really recommend ReadEra (free and ad free), they do have a premium version, but all that adds is synchronize books via cloud storage to other devices and sync reading progress.
It’s shitty u til you realize how it’s put together and what operates what. It makes a lot more sense since I watched Russ’ video on shaders and overlays at Retro Game Corps.
I've been a retro gamer since retro gaming meant Pong and I've used a lot of fiddly emulators in my time but I've never quite figured out RetroArch's interface.
LibreOffice (and Open Office). When Microsoft Office is $200 or a monthly subscription.
I just used LibreOffice Writer to update my resume a few minutes ago and it’s a bit to switch to but it makes sense and I loveeeee the UI that caters to both people who prefer classic Office (‘97-2003) or those who prefer the more modern UI (‘07 and newer).
It does get a bit annoying because it is so powerful that it has a mind of its own and tries to do things for you, like formatting, but if you’re patient (like I was just now), it’ll work out for you and be really great.
Bro, give Only office a try. I have a friend who uses it for his business and he claims it has the best compatibility when going from Foss and of MS Office.
I love Aves' functionalities and speed, but I can't stand its UI design. Who TF thought it would look good to have a bright and glowing ring around photo folder thumbnails in an otherwise minimalistic UI?
Organic Maps. After switching to graphene, I quickly found plenty of apps replacing the "defaults" I had on stock android, however, a good app for maps was impossible to find until I stumbled over that one. Great UI, local maps, even has a navigation feature. Completely replaces google maps for me.
I understand that people need money to live, but a lot of the "most useful" software (as in... almost every part of the web) is open source software built by well paid developers.
Your comment might be applicable to an android lemmy client for example, but not to software generally.
Yeah they're paid *but* not for open source, but from a company.
I'm no exception, as I do a lot of open source, I would go full-time open-source if I'd knew that I can live from it. But this is just not the case for say ~99% of open source, donations/funding is extremely rare and often bound to specific needs of the company that funds it.
And my answer was exactly pointing towards this, i.e. free software/open source, not software in general.
What you also have to consider is apps vs libraries, libraries are more often funded, but apps often not (and this was what we were talking about).
There are plenty of useful opensource applications, as evidenced by this thread.
Yes and now please count the amount of useful applications that *aren't* open source. Spoiler: They dwarf open source applications by quantity and quality by far.
How you make a living isn’t really relevant.
I'm repeating myself: I'm doing a lot of open source in my leisure time, this is absolutely relevant, I would be able to invest a lot more time into it if I didn't have to make a living somehow else. I directly see this with other people that were funded and aren't anymore, so they have to use their time to make money... (and the other way around)
My point is, implying that one should be surprised to find that an app is both useful and opensource is a misconception.
May be a bit out there, but on Android, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a rogue lite game that is free and extremely fun to play. No ads, not very demanding on your phone, still gets updates, and easy to pick up and play when you're out traveling.
Its a very hard game, where knowledge is very important, as well as experimentation.
VSCode. I don't get why Microsoft hasn't monetized it but I'm glad it is free. Has so many extensions and gets great updates, even if I don't understand half of the stuff in their patch notes when I open up the program.
Another one is a little program called Stacher that basically serves as GUI for yt-dlp. It's a very pretty one though! And all the settings and buttons are super great. I'm not very good with CLI stuff so I'm glad it exists for free, saves so much time.
REAPER is evaluationware akin to WinZip, and much more robust than Audacity. The trial and full version are the same. You can buy apropos licenses whenever you feel the desire.
it's worth bearing in mind that comparing audacity and reaper is like comparing notepad++ to libreoffice- in many cases libreoffice is a much more robust program but in others all the extra bells and whistles are bloat. you wouldn't want to program in libreoffice!
that said audacity has some wildly bizzare design, and any forks are either even worse with this or incredibly unstable, so audacity being terrible isn't wrong sadly
I will never understand how it's the thing so many people suggest to edit audio. the UI is so obtuse and unlike every other piece of software that does the same things.
IMO Reaper is fantastic and simply a better drop-in replacement for audacity. Audacity—despite the wonderful name, second only to Alacritty (maybe the greatest program name ever)—is wildly difficult to use, buggy as all hell, and insanely inefficient. Reaper, on the other hand, works for simple things and for complex synthesizer and wacky editing stuff perfectly. I still remember how surprised and bemused I was that the Electro-Akustik department in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin uses basically-free Reaper for their recording needs.
The only argument for audacity is the slightly faster start-up time, and the absence of a "buy-me" pop-up (if you haven't purchased one of the very affordable licenses). Seriously though, since I discovered Reaper I've basically used it for everything not related to work et al. Fantastic software.
+1 for reaper. Its free to "demo" forever with no limitations and is much closer to a traditional DAW than audacity. So many plugins and scripts to customise too, such a great tool I can never recommend it enough to anyone wanting to do anything from simple audio edits/conversions to full fat tracking and mixing sessions.
KiCad. It's an electronics design tool on par with commercial options in the industry, which cost a ton of money. Ever since the UI facelift it got a few years ago, it has become my go-to option. They are even working on integrating circuit simulation and finite element analysis, which is just crazy.
鴉PieFed
TehBamski
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Voyager and pipepipe
Language Transfer
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?
default behaviour of Windows Media Player.....
Oof
Yep. You need to pay for the patent with certain codecs, that's why operating systems with a company behind them usually do not distribute them. Same with a few Linux distros, such as Fedora.
You can install them and the packages for your os are freely available. Just not from the company making the product in the fear of patent trolls.
Literally never heard of the end user being billed for the codecs.
Always have been. It's either included in licensing a software or operating systems. VLC ffmpeg and other open source software are a bit of a grey area since they don't make money from the software strictly speaking.
behold: https://lemmy.world/comment/14678864
I wonder what are the ToS, is this $0.79 all that you have to pay to use it for commercial purposes?
+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"
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.
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
It even runs on iOS. It's one of the only ways to play videos that aren't in Apple's bullshit proprietary format.
Yeah I personally prefer IINA on the Mac because of how native the interface is. Neither VLC or IINA has had trouble paying any video files I have.
Wasn't there some big thing where they tried to buy it and the person that made it was just like "nah"
VLC just managed to get some newer video files to play for me on a 10 year old tablet that wouldn't play them with it's included video player. It was also one of the *only* apps on the play store that would still work on that old tablet as well. It's been my go-to video player for years now, terrific software 🥂
It won't keep track of my place in a Playlist to resume so I trashed it.
Wikipedia
Don’t forget to donate!
But then it's not free anymore /s
That reminds me, I should donate
Reee
To be fair, they have an app
That's true
7zip
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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.
Recently? Feels like it's been more than a decade now...I could be wrong though
You are wrong. Until recently Windows did not natively support 7z or unrar.
Looks like just 2 years ago. My bad!
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.
It’s likely for 'user friendliness’. Most people don’t even know what an archive is and that it should be extracted so a folder is much more intuitive and familiar to them.
7zip is usually faster, as well
WinRAR anyone ? 🤭
What do you mean? I paid \s
So it was you
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
Also on iOS—looks promising
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-earth-navigation-maps/id1007331679
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.\
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/
Practically all of the free map services use OSM.
Is open street map data pretty accurate? I don't expect google mas level of accuracy but I think its important that I can rely on the maps when I don't know anything about where I'm at
I did a month long trip around western Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden) and used Organic Maps as my only navigation app. Worked well for everything I used it for. Even the metro data was accurate. Also, in my home country, Estonia, it's even better than Google Maps, because it has bike navigation integrated.
That's very promising to hear!
Depends on the dedication of local maintainers, but it often is more detailed than Google maps.
It's way more accurate that google map. But it lacks a lot of stores and opening times in less touristy countries.
If you want to contribute check out StreetComplete for an easy way.
Organic maps is so good
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.
And they recently added user tagging like on RES for Reddit. It’s so useful. Been using it like mad lately to identify trolls and sealions.
Check out [email protected].\
It’s a fantastic Lemmy client for mobile, and the devs are quite active and responsive.\
e: link format
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
Up. Sent from Voyager.
That reminds me to send them a few bucks anyway, done ✅
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.
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
Plugins are also keeping me on Obsidian as opposed to using LogSeq, but I'm essentially keeping it in my back pocket as a "fire exit" in the case of Obsidian enshittifying, since of course all Obsidian notes are in markdown and cross-compatible.
For free file structure you could also checkout Silverbullet.
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
Syncthing is awesome for home devices backups like phone pictures and videos and computer documents that can be version controlled. I also use Local Send app to share files between phones and computers in the house.
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.
Great list, post saved
Nice I'll definately check those out. For office I use OnlyOffice
How does Cashew compare to GnuCash?
Came here to recommend those first two exactly
uBlock Origin leading the pack by at least a furlong.
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.
Firefox gets like 90% of its funding from Google for making Google the default search.
That's funny, that's the first thing I change when I set it up on a new device.
:) me too, still using google as search engine, but behind startpage
Yes, google pay for being the default search engine, but that doesn't mean they collect your information. And even better, there are also Firefox forks security oriented.
Off the top of my head from daily use;\
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.
Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, OBS (open broadcast software), Linux distros of various sorts, openHAB, LibreOffice, Firefox (and plugins like uBlock), PiHole, VirtualBox, Notepad++, Paint.NET, VLC, 7-Zip, FileZilla…
I’m sure there’s more.
Gimp is a bit of a stretch.
I've used it a lot, but unlike most of the others on this list, the commercial product (Photoshop) is so much better that I'm willing to shell out the monthly fee to use it over Gimp.
Back when Photoshop was $300 (600 todays money) It was fine for non-professional work.
It could use a little UI finesse, a content aware fill without plugins, and a regular human usable macroining system.
But for 90% of non-professional work clone, dodge, smudge, burn, masking and curves are perfectly serviceable.
I’ve found a nice workflow in gimp to touch my photos. It works wonderfully
I’m not sure what field you’re in and photoshop certainly is the standard but Affinity has been great for my needs and is pay once if you’re looking to avoid SAAS
https://www.photopea.com has everything I need for daily graphic touch ups.
Only problem I have with it is the potential situation of (seemingly) uploading pictures which is bad for confidential stuff.
It may be local but I don't trust it that much.\
Now for personal projects: Absolutely. I even used it once on my phone. Great page!
Yeah, it does all i need and uses a format that will be compatible long into the near future, very useful.
Vectorpea is available too.
Godot
I cant believe it has a better user experience than unity, an app that has a 412 USD/month paid plan
I was waiting for that.
Thanks, checking this out.
One story that I should write down because I always tell it when discussing Godot since it's a great example of why Godot is better than other engines is that a while back I was doing a single player game for a game jam, because I was testing it with multiple controllers I wanted that it would pick any controller (it's a single player game after all, no one cares which controller I'm using) and was annoyed at the fact that every game engine requires you to create mapping for all controllers individually to do this, e.g. "controller 1 button A", "controller 2 button A", etc. So I went into the code for Godot and added a couple of lines that allowed me to create a mapping for all controllers, i.e. "Any controller Button A". This felt so useful that I wondered why no engine has it, so I submitted a PR and last I checked Godot is still the only engine that allows for "any controller" style mapping.
Fucking entire Fedivere with No ads.
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
add Graphite to the list
woah, ive never heard of this one. it looks awesome. thanks for sharing!!
It's very new, it lacks a native client for the moment, but it's super promising.
Same, looks interesting the way it combines nodes and layers
Also got back into 2d after many years, didn't want to pirate illustrator, tried inkscape and its all ill ever need
Wikipedia. Not an app but still deserves a mention.
I'd say the same about archive.org too.
Wikipedia is free because it's wrong a lot.
People pay for facts, not opinion. When it comes to "news."
Well... that's not true exactly...
Besides... innit like 1 guy runnin' all o' Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is as accurate as printed encyclopedias, in at least one study.
The Wikimedia Foundation only has one CEO, but many members, and Wikipedia has tens of thousands of contributiors that are not foundation members.
Vim. Every computer I've owned since the early 1990s has had some version of Vi on it.
I've grown to hate vi as I'm building an Ubuntu server, but it's begrudgingly better than the other text editors I've dealt with so far
Or Emacs, if you want a full operating system as your text editor!
Can't believe no one has mentioned Home Assistant. Automation engine for home and have local control over almost everything "smart" at home.
You got a link to that? It has a pretty generic name so I want to make sure I look up the right product. 😅
This one? https://www.home-assistant.io/
Yeah that one
Home Assistant is awesome! It's the only way to control your house without giving out all your data to Amazon, Google or apple.
OBS, and Blender. Two industry shaping software solutions that ere fully open source and free.
Blender is incredible. I am no master by any means, but I use it all the time for 3d printing. And I'm blown away by what actually-talented people can do with it.
GIMP
And inkscape
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.
New pipe, I didn't see anyone mentioned it
Besides, I use Linux, Organic maps, Signal, VLC, KDE on daily basis and THANK YOU good people on internet for making my life happier!
Basically every decent free thing that runs on Linux, including Linux itself - it's amazing that it's all free.
Any reason to use newpipe over YouTube vanced?
Linux
Been trying it for years and it's just a low-powered windows? I'm not sure what the benefit is. There's no support, warrantees of any kind, no useful software packages, and everything I would use it for (development, browsing) has a better windows alternative? Sorry for the hate but enjoy your free stuff I guess
Linux is the most used os around the world and almost every website and service uses it, not to mention half the phones and apple computers.
If you are on lemmy, you are on linux.
set up and left alone as a server is not the same thing as a person using it for discrete tasks. where on earth did you get such an idea? you think that just because my files are stored on a linux box somewhere that I'm a linux user? frankly it doesn't sound like you're in the industry...
You just did a discrete task of writing a reply to some rando on the internet about how you're not on linux while you were using a word processor hosted on linux to send the message to another user on linux. Ain't technology wonderful?
On the support side, there are enterprise distros (red hat) but the community support honestly is top notch. I know windows has support but I’ve never really needed it day-to-day or had a situation where having access to support on Linux really would have been helpful.
Development side - I find Linux outpaces windows for what I do, plus a number of tools are just built in. Plus Jetbrains IDEs are Java anyway and run fine there.
Browsing, i assume you mean the web? This is functionally identical.
I personally like Linux cause it’s tracker-free and more customizable. I prefer ZSH to power shell and I like that my desktop and server are running the same platform preventing strange bugs between environments.
sounds like an edge case tbh..
lol have you ever tried to use windows baked-in support or MS forums with "expert answers"?
And low-powered doesnt even make sense, there is less bloat and bing/copilot shit dragging the system down, my system on the exact same specs and drive boots into Linux in like 1/10 the time as windows.
As for useful software packages, services like Flatpak, snap, and deb are a breeze -and not being able to use enshittified adobe software instead of their now better free and open source alternatives is ridiculous - Linux on any distro is what most developers would prefer and browsing is exactly the same. Hell, even gaming which was peoples major "missing piece" has made leaps and bounds last year alone.
the word "Support" includes already-answered questions readily available on the internet, eg. stack overflow. There are no unanswered questions about using/developing with windows
Get outta here you Hedge Fund Manager! Leave our apps alone!!
The Dialer.
All kidding aside, I'm routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.
Wow you’re right. How can we enshittify this? Perhaps you should hear an ad first before we connect you to the other side?
Shit I shouldn’t give them ideas
Your dialer may already be monetized! If you get a call from a company and see their logo chances are they paid for that. It's not enshittified yet, but it definitely could be. Source: I maintain a codebase that does this for a major device manufacturers dialer.
I'm them-adjacent and I'll keep my mouth shut
God... Imagine being in the middle of an important call for say discussing family affairs for a dying family member and you just hear "there will be a 30 second advertisement break in 1 minute."... I'd probably pop a blood vessel.
Until you said kidding I was sold. "Where can I find this elusive beast??"
Those are the free ones I use very frequently at least, I'm sure there's more.
I just arrived in Norway and was about to search for a simple currency converter. Handy!
Perfect timing, enjoy! My favorite country, used to live there for a while some years ago.
I think Blender is a very honorable mention, especially since the team that makes the software has also used it to make some really impressive short films, such as Big Buck Bunny. Who knows, maybe some indie studio can use it to make some truly wonderful stuff (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case).
Blender is widely used in many industries. digital images, movies, TV series, games, marketing material, and many more.
There are most definitely studios (indie and corporate) doing cool stuff in blender
This is why Blender is truly the best of us.
"everything everywhere all at once" was made largely in Blender I think, it's the most popular film from a studio using Blender that I know of
You'd be surprised how many animations on youtube (done by small creators are done in Blender ;)
I would guess a lot.
DaVinci Resolve is professional grade video editing software that's completely free to use. It lacks some features that the paid version has but this probably doesn't effect the vast majority of casual users.
And even better, hiring companies for people who are video pros like myself are starting to ask if you're familiar with it. They've realized they don't have to pay Adobe's stupid fees.
Second this. Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is amazing. Probably my favorite video editor (although I usually have to use Adobe Premiere for work). It’s fast, fairly easy to use and probably has everything you need unless you’re doing very specific and high end professional work. It’s also rock solid. The only time I had problems was when I tried to render a few dozen (simple) timelines in one queue on a MacBook with 8GB of memory. Can’t exactly blame DaVinci for crashing on me there.
And as a bonus: it even runs on Linux. Although kdenlive is also a surprisingly good alternative there.
The industry should resort to Resolve as a default. Tired of Adobe's bullshit.
Will always mention its mildly scummy they put user created free addons behind the paid studio version, you can buy some of their equipment and it comes with the studio version to save money (one time fee)
Recent change like 1-2 months ago, if you're still on an older version you wouldn't notice
Adding the following that i have not seen mentioned yet:
Docker - I literally run most of my server programs with docker now. Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and many others.
Tiny Media Manager that I use to scraper and organize my media library
Tiny Tiny RSS to combine my news sites into one aggregator. I actually saw this post on it since Lemmy has RSS feeds!
Openwrt I run as my home router.
I2P but it's still pretty clunky.
Nomachine I use as a remote desktop client.
RocketDock I still use on my windows desktop after windows removed the programs toolbar.
ImageJ/Fiji I use for image processing, it's from the NIH, with a bunch of Java plugins.
Gluetun I use to run my vpn client
Kodi for multimedia
Why tinyMediaManager over other options like Sonarr and Radarr?
I use Tiny media manager to get tv show episode and movie info like fan art, actors and show synopsis and organize my movies, shows, music and audiobooks I get from CDs, DVDs, Blu Rays and downloads. Sonarr and Radarr only snatch files from torrents, and not the rest of the info that is needed for offline mode
That's what Jellyfin can do for you (if you store the nfo files along the media).
Pfsense
Opnsense. Been running it in my router with all the treats for years. Updates frequently and easily. You can do things like tailscale, wireguard, traffic shaping, or adblock in the firewall level pretty easily with it.
Awesome project.
I especially love the new Wireguard ui. Made it so much easier to understand how to set it up.
I've been debating on trying out offense instead of OpenWrt. My server has a dual NIC with one interface going to my modem the other to a wireless access point. Openwrt is a bit clunky as I have to boot it in Virtual box. Any difference between PFsense and opensense?
I went for opnsense without even trying pfsense - purely because I don't trust the company behind pfsense, and came across some mentions of their dubious behavior. No regrets, opnsense is pretty great.
fuck Docker.
Whats wrong with docker?
For those who don't even know what it is, why?
For me docker runs my software in independent containers like jellyfin. For me it helps with migrating the software to different computers, operating systems and os upgrades without completely having to reconfigure the software each time.
Not sure about the fuck docker comment. I'm always open to alternatives, not everyone has the same software needs.
Also asking ~ any other great app for 3-5 person video call/conferencing for making music together (in sync :)?
Jitsi is awesome jitsi.org
Basically like a sort of mini-VM.
What it solves (for me) is dependency hell.\
No need to install a quadrillion dependencies and solve if two different programs want the same package but maybe different versions.
Instead of fiddling with that, the image isolates the components.
This way I could run 5 different web servers on different ports.\
Yes they complicate troubleshooting but the upsides are way more valuable to me.
For me it actually sinplifies troubleshooting by a lot. No worries when messing around inside the container. Maintainers are looking at the same picture as you and can reproduce everything more easily.
Without docker I could never run all the services I am currently.
Libre Office
Anki flash cards. I use it everyday and commercial programs can't hold a candle to it.
That would have been my addition to the list too.
You use it for studying, right?
Are you implying there are other ways to use it? I only know it for studying / learning languages so I'm curious
Just wanted to make sure haha. I assumed it's only for studying
I use it for learning english and german words
Unfortunately the iOS app is kinda expensive, $35 CAD. 😵💫
Audacity. How the hell is Audacity free?
Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it's basically free (presuming you're not a business).
and Ardour
Ardour is a DAW though, isn't it?
So is reaper
Would you call Audacity a DAW?
Since the Muse Group has acquired Audacity and its following telemetry/spy-ware case, it has a little bitter aftertaste, there are good alternatives though like Ardour
I'm glad Audacity is free, but as an audio (and video) professional, it's a giant pain in the ass.
Oh, so thats where the phrase "the audacity of it" comes from
I know, right? The audacity!
Traccar - a GPS tracker.
It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it's a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.
My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we've both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.
Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there's heaps more)
So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.
Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.
(Just noticed my wife's left her phone behind when she went off riding... I guess no system's perfect!)
Neat!
One of my few remaining Google dependencies is maps and timeline. I just like having that data *somewhere* and most of the FOSS stuff I've seen previously is piecemeal at best. Will have to play with this.
Yay, I'm not the only one!
When was the last time we went to Disney? Wait let me open my timeline.\
Hell, I don't even need it to be as fancy as Google maps. Just give me dots on a map and let me filter by date.
OrganicMaps, all the trails I've been to so far in the US are available for offline navigation. No need to precache via gmaps and pray it won't get deleted
Edit: OpenStreetMap which powers this is what AllTrails uses, but I'm not sure if they contribute back or not
I've just arrived in Norway (literally waiting as passport control) at the start of a three-week hiking-heavy Interrailing trip around Scandinavia and Central Europe. You better believe that I've got all of Europe downloaded in Organic Maps. Also, Organic Maps is a client for OpenStreetMaps which, for detailed foot-level maps, beats Google/Apple hands down and is, of course, open source.
I love OSM, the best part is I can add whatever is missing :) have a good trip!
There is a new park near me and I mapped the walking trail there.
I'm doing my part
I've just tested it based on your recommendation. It is amazing. I'm going to do trekking for the next 3 weeks and it is a godsend. Thank you.
Nice!
F-droid is amazing and distributes amazing software that many people already mentioned.
In order to write software, developers need software. I think we should also mention the GNU packages and LLVM.
Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.
Not an app, but a whole ass OS.
Fedora. Switched to Linux full time over a year ago, after years and years and years (like... 06/07?) of dabbling. It blows my mind how polished and wonderful it is to use. It's completely everything I need, and it always blows my mind that it's fucking *free*
Hear hear! I'm living in Fedora-land for school and gaming, and I run into way less trouble than my classmates!
My computer isn't good enough for gaming, but I use the steam deck for that. I'm accidently 100% Linux (well, and android, which doesn't really count). Lol. But, man, I was nervous about making the switch to completely Linux. The only time I'd done that before was back in like 09 when I had this shitty Acer laptop that I swapped to Ubuntu because it simply would not run windows. That wasn't a great experience, but things weren't as polished then, plus it was the world's worst laptop. Now I feel like I've upgraded to something that should cost 5 times the price. Like, it feels like I should be embarrassed by how good it is, like it was a splurge or an irresponsible financial decision. *And it's free!*
Do you face many compatibility issues when gaming?
There are some games that run anti-cheat that just don't run. I don't play any of those at the moment, but other than that, no. The odd thing has quirks, but between Steam and Lutris, I'm good. Not a heavy duty gamer though.
Fedora is awesome. I use the immutable version Kinoite, and it's fork with non-free extras Aurora. Dev container is with Arch just because there are a ton of packages. All the GUI apps from Flathub.
I need to add KDE to this mix. What a wonderful desktop it is. Like what Windows should be but is not.
I'm running Bazzite right now, because I wanted to test it out, but normally I run Silverblue. When I first went to Linux years ago it was all Ubuntu, so I got used to GNOME and unity. Since then, I've never really been able to get into KDE. It feels too windowsy to me, and I fell in love with the quick keyboard controls and the smoothness on gnome. I fully get why someone might not like it, but for me it's a near perfect fit.
That's honestly the best thing about Linux. With windows or Mac you're stuck with how they want things to function. I love being able to change my DE, even if I never do it
I also didn't like it for years. I used a tiling window manager (first i3, then sway), but tried the new plasma 6 and really liked it. Dolphin file manager was the thing that converted me.
Right now, it's Calibre because I just got a Kobo eBook reader and it's so great to be able to install pretty much any format of book onto my device and convert it if it's a format the device can't use. And even convert it if the book works better in a different format.
Caliber is truly amazing, but Kobo support is… Odd. I love my Kobo for comics because of the color screen, but uploading .cbz files is an obtuse process. Kobo readers won’t natively read metadata from .cbz files, but you can manually push the metadata to the device’s database. But in order to do that, you need the file to actually be in the database, which doesn’t happen until after you unplug the device.
So to get a .cbz file working, you need to plug your Kobo in, upload the .cbz file(s), disconnect your Kobo, let it index the file(s), and then hope to god that it actually shows up on the device’s library when you plug it back into your computer so you can manually update the metadata.
Truly odd. The process sounds painful to troubleshoot and find out.
Yeah calibre is amazing, and also integrates anti-drm plugins nicely. Recently I've been reading more and more on my phone so file formats don't matter anymore, but it's still a great software just for managing your ebook archive.
As a mobile reader I can also really recommend ReadEra (free and ad free), they do have a premium version, but all that adds is synchronize books via cloud storage to other devices and sync reading progress.
I was just looking into getting this setup for my partner
I cannot recommend it enough.
Blender
PlantNet
It identifies the species of the plant in a given photo.
One of my favourites.
The more people that use it, the better it gets
Remember to donate a couple of Euros occasionally!
Similarly, Seek.
Thanks for this. I was looking to get away from iplant and Google lens.
There are some excellent apps already listed that I won't repeat, but I'll add FFmpeg. Not sure it's quite what you're after, but it's incredible.
If we’re talking CLI I’ll add Chdman. Like magic for compressing ISO’s.
Proton. Literally makes any of the big linuxes into the streamos people are waiting for
Retroarch.
God awful complexity but once you figure out how it all works it’s incredible.
I wouldn't say it is complex but rather they have the shittiest UI I have ever seen, which makes it so difficult to use.
It’s shitty u til you realize how it’s put together and what operates what. It makes a lot more sense since I watched Russ’ video on shaders and overlays at Retro Game Corps.
I've been a retro gamer since retro gaming meant Pong and I've used a lot of fiddly emulators in my time but I've never quite figured out RetroArch's interface.
I'm still trying to figure it out. It's not easy when you have ADHD and get frustrated easily.
LibreOffice (and Open Office). When Microsoft Office is $200 or a monthly subscription.
I just used LibreOffice Writer to update my resume a few minutes ago and it’s a bit to switch to but it makes sense and I loveeeee the UI that caters to both people who prefer classic Office (‘97-2003) or those who prefer the more modern UI (‘07 and newer).
It does get a bit annoying because it is so powerful that it has a mind of its own and tries to do things for you, like formatting, but if you’re patient (like I was just now), it’ll work out for you and be really great.
Bro, give Only office a try. I have a friend who uses it for his business and he claims it has the best compatibility when going from Foss and of MS Office.
Windows
Android
I'd add to both of these - KDE Connect - for sending files and clipboard between phone, tablet and PC
That or Local Send.
QKSMS isn't maintained anymore. There is an active fork called: QUIK
https://github.com/octoshrimpy/quik
Davincis great, they lost some hype for me since you now need premium for the free user created addons
FUTO voice and keyboard are open source, but not free... Just sayin'
Payment is optional.
I love Aves' functionalities and speed, but I can't stand its UI design. Who TF thought it would look good to have a bright and glowing ring around photo folder thumbnails in an otherwise minimalistic UI?
The dev is also a dickhole
I am not surprised but please elaborate.
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I really didn't like the UI too at first. It felt odd since no app looks like that.
Now that I'm used to it's functionality, I am totally blind to the colorful rings. I barely notice the colors.
Oh I just noticed I can turn it off.
But it still has a white ring on every folder which is ugly.
Organic Maps. After switching to graphene, I quickly found plenty of apps replacing the "defaults" I had on stock android, however, a good app for maps was impossible to find until I stumbled over that one. Great UI, local maps, even has a navigation feature. Completely replaces google maps for me.
Organic Maps is great, but see also OsmAnd.
The former is faster and easier to use but the latter has a lot more features.
Also costs 20$ with a discount on Playstore. Seems extremely util though.
just donate to the developer and use the f-droid version for free
Ballin
Home Assistant, not only an App but it changed the way i look at IoT/Smarthome and in that way it brings me a lot of comfort.
I’m going to add frigate to this one. Going with frigate for my home camera solution brought me to Home Assistant.
LocalSend, Immich, Signal, Aurora store, Radio Garden, Gray Jay, yt-dlp, and Bitwarden just to name a few
Localsend is a real godsend. Getting stuff from my phone to my pc without having to search the files.
and bro that shit transfers in the blink of an eye! It's crazy good!
With the ease of us and speed it's actually faster than wired for small to medium sized files.
I still can't get used to calling programs apps
It is a little strange. But even way back in the day we called PC software meant for user interaction "software applications".
Yeah I think people started calling software applications "programs" because that's easier to say.
And then Steve Jobs' made his biggest contribution to civilization and popularized the term app, which is even easier to say.
I dislike the implication that the most useful apps are not free.
I always feel more comfortable using FOSS software, even if it doesn't look as nice as the commercial option.
I dislike the implication that FOSS software doesn't look nice.
There are plenty of beautiful apps on f-droid.
Vinyl media player is very pretty.
People have to live somehow, without money - difficult... Unfortunately the will to donate to such projects is still pretty low...
I understand that people need money to live, but a lot of the "most useful" software (as in... almost every part of the web) is open source software built by well paid developers.
Your comment might be applicable to an android lemmy client for example, but not to software generally.
Yeah they're paid *but* not for open source, but from a company. I'm no exception, as I do a lot of open source, I would go full-time open-source if I'd knew that I can live from it. But this is just not the case for say ~99% of open source, donations/funding is extremely rare and often bound to specific needs of the company that funds it.
And my answer was exactly pointing towards this, i.e. free software/open source, not software in general.
What you also have to consider is apps vs libraries, libraries are more often funded, but apps often not (and this was what we were talking about).
There are plenty of useful opensource applications, as evidenced by this thread.
How you make a living isn't really relevant.
My point is, implying that one should be surprised to find that an app is both useful and opensource is a misconception.
Yes and now please count the amount of useful applications that *aren't* open source. Spoiler: They dwarf open source applications by quantity and quality by far.
I'm repeating myself: I'm doing a lot of open source in my leisure time, this is absolutely relevant, I would be able to invest a lot more time into it if I didn't have to make a living somehow else. I directly see this with other people that were funded and aren't anymore, so they have to use their time to make money... (and the other way around)
My point is, that time is in fact *limited*...
May be a bit out there, but on Android, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a rogue lite game that is free and extremely fun to play. No ads, not very demanding on your phone, still gets updates, and easy to pick up and play when you're out traveling.
Its a very hard game, where knowledge is very important, as well as experimentation.
Pathos: Nethack Codex (though it's not just Nethack) is also very good in a similar vein
I always get hungry when I play pixel dungeon! What an addictive grind!
Emacs
Org-mode is life
Life actually runs on org-mode
M-x life
And Orgzly for Android just completes it nicely
I like orgzly. But if you get a keyboard with a Ctrl key you can also run Emacs on android too.
And Magit
Bbbut I use a PC!
Librewolf, FFmpeg, Vim, Wine
Photopea Fully functional Photoshop in your browser. Amazing.
Not free as in freedom
I just wish I could download and install it, rather than have it require a constant Internet connection.
Pretty much every major open source project at this point. I need to start looking into donating to the programs I use the most.
OnlyOffice. Great office suite. Also any app from FUTO
VSCode. I don't get why Microsoft hasn't monetized it but I'm glad it is free. Has so many extensions and gets great updates, even if I don't understand half of the stuff in their patch notes when I open up the program.
Another one is a little program called Stacher that basically serves as GUI for yt-dlp. It's a very pretty one though! And all the settings and buttons are super great. I'm not very good with CLI stuff so I'm glad it exists for free, saves so much time.
Vscodium exists
I use it daily. There's no reason to use VSCode when this is there
The practical differences from the two are so minor that you can practically switch it out and use vscodium and not see a difference
you are the product 😉
and Audacity
Audacity is wild to me. It does so much on so many platforms.
FYI Audacity got bought.
Apples
Edit: I steal my neighbours apples
I miss when apps were specific to phones and we kept desktop computers out of it.
I miss when phones rang because lightning struck.
Jellyfin.
Lichess :) (FOSS Chess server, no account needed to play, second biggest chess server overall)
The folks behind it are one of my admirations
audacity
neovim
calibre
mpv
Audacity is terrible.
REAPER is evaluationware akin to WinZip, and much more robust than Audacity. The trial and full version are the same. You can buy apropos licenses whenever you feel the desire.
it's worth bearing in mind that comparing audacity and reaper is like comparing notepad++ to libreoffice- in many cases libreoffice is a much more robust program but in others all the extra bells and whistles are bloat. you wouldn't want to program in libreoffice!
that said audacity has some wildly bizzare design, and any forks are either even worse with this or incredibly unstable, so audacity being terrible isn't wrong sadly
I will never understand how it's the thing so many people suggest to edit audio. the UI is so obtuse and unlike every other piece of software that does the same things.
I almost disagree with this.
IMO Reaper is fantastic and simply a better drop-in replacement for audacity. Audacity—despite the wonderful name, second only to Alacritty (maybe the greatest program name ever)—is wildly difficult to use, buggy as all hell, and insanely inefficient. Reaper, on the other hand, works for simple things and for complex synthesizer and wacky editing stuff perfectly. I still remember how surprised and bemused I was that the Electro-Akustik department in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin uses basically-free Reaper for their recording needs.
The only argument for audacity is the slightly faster start-up time, and the absence of a "buy-me" pop-up (if you haven't purchased one of the very affordable licenses). Seriously though, since I discovered Reaper I've basically used it for everything not related to work et al. Fantastic software.
+1 for reaper. Its free to "demo" forever with no limitations and is much closer to a traditional DAW than audacity. So many plugins and scripts to customise too, such a great tool I can never recommend it enough to anyone wanting to do anything from simple audio edits/conversions to full fat tracking and mixing sessions.
KiCad. It's an electronics design tool on par with commercial options in the industry, which cost a ton of money. Ever since the UI facelift it got a few years ago, it has become my go-to option. They are even working on integrating circuit simulation and finite element analysis, which is just crazy.
Libby ebook reader/browser
Libraries for that matter.
Was gonna mention Libby. We need to empower our libraries now more than ever, and Libby is a fantastic start.
Go get a library card ASAP!
And maybe reserve the 2 hour audiobook "On Tyranny" while you're at it.
It depends on how you define "app" and "free". But for free (as in beer) smartphone apps I really like. - tidy - Librera Reader - these pre-packaged apks for the onnx text to speech engine which uses the piper voices that can be used in conjunction with the above Librera Reader to turn any compatible text doc to an audio book.
Nice set of local AI apps