What pieces of software can you recommend that's free, efficient and does not bullshit around?
What pieces of software can you recommend that's free, efficient and does not bullshit around?
Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you'll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I've ever written and no matter how many tabs - it's all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you'll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it's uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it'll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn't shit like this more implemented in software?
KeePassXC, or any kind of KeePass-compatible client. It uses strong encryption to store passwords, passkeys, and arbitrary data. Also does TOTP. Not using a password manager in current year is stupid.
QOwnNotes - a note-taking app that uses plain markdown files. None of that stupid metadata-inside-markdown-inside-database bullshit.
LocalSend - like AirDrop, but cross platform
yt-dlp can download videos from most sites. Comes with a lot of advanced features if you need them.
Lots of great software already posted, but with some complaints about windows inefficiencies I can't believe no one has posted:
Microsoft PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
Basically, it's a suite of tools that windows devs have made to make their lives easier while working in windows. Some features have made it into actual windows releases over the years, but most not.
It has an always on top, batch rename, customisable window snapping, better search, keyboard key remapper, mouse across multiple devices, colour eyedropper, and many many more.
Absolute must have for anyone that uses windows regularly.
No one mentioned SolveSpace, so... SolveSpace. Solvespace is a fully functional 3D parametric CAD solver in a free, cross-platform, open-source, portable, single self-contained executable 10 MB file.
I do a fair amount of hobby 3d printing and SolveSpace makes design and CAD stupid easy. The interface is perfectly laid out, the hotkeys are intuitive, and the capabilities make small-scale projects a breeze.
Now, the program has its limitations, but if I just want something quick and simple, there is nothing better.
EMACS:- No I'm not kidding, Yes it has a learning curve but the real fun is AFTER you figure it out & find out that it can do more than just edit texts
- You can play music
- You can turn it into an Email client
- Browse the internet
- A fully-fledged IDE
- There's Tetris in it
- A File-Manager
- Even a Chat Client
- Remote-Server interaction
- Even have it function like Obsidian
- Have Vim-keybindings (For VIM-users)
- A Git interface
- Even use it as a Linux Distro
KiCad - electrical engieneering
FreeCAD - mechanical engieneering
Blender - 3d modeling, rendering, animation
Krita - raster painting
Kdenlive - video editing
LMMS - music creation
Ardour - sound processing
Nheko - Matrix client
Xonotic - FPS game
KDE - K Desktop Enviroment
Hotspot - GUI for perf sampling profiler
KCachegrind - GUI for valgrind cache simulator
QT Creator - C(++)/QML(and prob JS) IDE
Graphvis - graph visualizer
Well !foss@beehaw.org and !linux@programming.dev for more, but off the top of my head:
Linux, VLC, FFMPEG, HandBrake, KDE (everything KDE), qBittorrent, Momentum (Flipper0 firmware), CHIRP, Vim, and more!
TestDisk and PhotoRec. TestDisk can recover broken drive partitions, PhotoRec can recover deleted files even if the partition table is borked.
Wireguard, I find it both simpler and easier to use than OpenVPN.
dd. No other iso writing utility has worked as consistently, even if my usb devices would gain weird glitches after using it.
Believe it or not I am a person who goes out of their way to avoid using the terminal, so this is very much vouching for the software itself rather than the ux it's based on.
Bitwarden
It's a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.
Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I've been using it for years and I love it, it's the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.
I logged in just to answer this:
Stellarium
When it comes to stargazing and learning more about the night sky, there is hands-down no better program. It's available on PC (windows/Mac/Linux) as well as mobile platforms. I used it for months for free before I paid for the premium sub, and the premium sub actually feels additive rather than just gatekeeping essential features. Plus, it's pretty cheap and you can choose to just buy a lifetime pass for $20 and skip the sub. It's the only app I've ever been happy to subscribe to.
Just found qalculate and it's amazing
qBittorrent
Desmos.
Free online really good quality graphing, scientific, etc calculators with no ads or other bullshit.
Notepad++ is also great for searching text strings in many documents and collating the results in a single window.
Since you're saying "pieces of software" and not specifically apps I will mention Node.js, the programming framework for javascript apps that run outside of a browser. You can develop websites and services or standalone apps that just run locally. There's a whole universe of free packages people have created for it.
Ddrescue
Hard to beat for working with dying drives, although it's a bit tricky to get it to just do used data areas instead of the whole drive.
It's a niche thing, but if you play electric guitar and need a virtual amplifier and effects, you'll like Guitarix very much. Just thinking that is a community project blows me away every time
Krita
OnShape for designing 3d objects. I've been using it for 3 or 4 years, after outgrowing TinkerCad (which is also good and beginner-friendly, but limited). It's an online app, nothing to download or install. The free version is fast and full-featured. The only difference between it and the paid version is that in the free version your designs are all public. So if I were doing 3d design for business I probably would use software that resides on my computer. But as a hobbyist IDGAF.
Actual - Accounting/budgeting/etc
Wrote up a python script or three to handle parsing my bank CSV export files into an actually usable form, with automatic categorization, and so now I just do a periodic export and sync, and have all my financial records all in one place with some nice visualization, categorization, and budgeting features from Actual. It saves everything to a local sqlite db, so I can always jump ship to a different system if needed, and also itself provides a CSV export option.
10/10 software, would recommend
kate is similar to npp.
For keeping track of investments I recommend: Portfolio Performance
https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/
Takes maybe 10min to learn the basics in the beginning, but it's worth it. Nice robust open source software which does its job flawless.
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Also great is paint dot net which is a super advanced paint application that is borderline as good as photo shop, particularly when you add on all the community-created functionality.
Revo uninstaller is the first thing I put on a new machine before I delete all the bloatware that comes with a fresh install of windows. You would be surprised what is left over when you only use the built in ‘remove a program’ process.
Lastly, browser based but free and excellent, is sketch up, which is an architectural rendering application great for designing restaurants and retail spaces. A little bit of a learning curve but very smooth and functional once you get the hang of it.
Edit - VLC goes without saying right?
ZoomIt - Sysinternals at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/zoomit
That small free application will notably allow you to press a key combination to "zoom in and out" on your screen and "draw" on your screen with your mouse. When presenting something using an external monitor, you can use that tool to draw attention to specific things or zoom in on tiny details when people are having issues seeing something. The link also show a small preview of what the application does.
I got sick of fucking around with windows administrator tasks so I just wrote my own. It's crude. It's not pretty but I'm sick of having my job undermined by windows settings being forced on me.
Geany,qbtorrent,Vlc Media Player,LocalSend,obs,KdenLive (Atleast in Linux),Cinnamon (Forked from gnome 3 With a traditional Ui)
- VLC media player is the gold standard
- Open broadcasting software / stream labs for broadcasting and studio management
- Ffmpeg for video editing
- Yt-dlp for downloading video
- audacity MP3 editing
- Plex / jellyfin / Stashapp for media server
- Pixlr for cloud photo editing
- Yarn / chocolatey / Asdf / node / poetry - package management
- Flaresolver, pihole, home automation, nginx
- Qbit-*arr for file sharing
- Massgrave for windows activation
- Filezilla for ftp (upgrade hosting)
- Depending on bullshit level: discord, Google workspace offers custom domain Google accounts
- Anything past that I write for myself or find a project with a dockerfile
If you're looking for a temporary email service for anonymous online registration, tempmail.so is a decent choice. https://www.tempmail.so/
Speedcrunch!! Speedcrunch is a text based calculator that I just recently found, and already cannot live without. The syntax is very intuitive. If you're a programmer, you will feel right at home. Now, I do all my bit twiddling in speedcrunch before it gets to code.
It also works on Windows. At work, I have a Windows and Linux machine, and it is pinned to the taskbar on both.
MPD and whatever front end you like for what's the best music player going, imo. You can tweak your player to your liking, MPD will play any format supported by ffmpeg, has some forks for further functionality, handles big libraries like a champ (I'm sitting at 54,758 files in mine without issue), can serve music streams online and be remotely controlled, and even has ridiculous features like the ability to handle gopher urls for media/streaming.
It's also as lightweight as you want it to be. MPD+ncmpcpp for playback use a whopping 66MB of ram for me.