Ask Lemmy

Off the top of my head from daily use;

• Borg backup, powerful backup software for self-hosted oriented users or enterprise automation.
• proxmox, hypervisor that is performant and easy to setup for simple and complex virtualization needs.
• bitwarden (combined with vaultwarden self-host), password management, secrets management, and available on basically all platforms and browsers. Self hosting your vault gives you peace of mind over who has your most sensitive data.
• obsidian, a great notes app with polished cross platform applications that don’t do any funky proprietary storage shenanigans. Files are files and folders are folders.
• kate (and most of the KDE suite), premiere Linux desktop environment suitable for customization and all the expected luxuries user would expect from windows or macOS. Kate specifically is a noticeable modern upgrade over notepad++ and rivals VSCode for programmers.

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.

Anki flash cards. I use it everyday and commercial programs can't hold a candle to it.

and Audacity

Watch duty

AntennaPod

Signal

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Audacity. How the hell is Audacity free?

• 7-zip
• VLC
• Signal
• Currency
• Handbrake
• Fennec (in lieu of Firefox)

Those are the free ones I use very frequently at least, I'm sure there's more.

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.

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.

Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it'd be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.

SmartTube—It's an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it's YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.

Discord bots—I've setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I've also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.

GIMP

Home Assistant

systemd

I miss when apps were specific to phones and we kept desktop computers out of it.

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

Stremio + torrentio plug-in.

My wife and I haven't paid for a subscription in 5 years and watch everything we want

PlantNet

It identifies the species of the plant in a given photo.

Kodi

Lithium EPUB reader

NAPS2. I go paperless as much as possible, but still have to scan stuff sometimes. It's the GOAT for scanning.

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.

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.

Windows

1. MPV - Video Player
2. DaVinci Resolve - Best Free Video Editor
3. Audacity - Audio Recorder
4. TeraCopy - File Copy Tool
5. Rufus, BalenaEtcher, Ventoy - Bootable USB Creator
6. Wireguard, OpenVPN - VPN Client
7. ShutterEncoder - Media Converter
8. Revo Uninstaller - App Uninstaller
9. Throttlestop - CPU Tweaker
10. Peace, EqualizerAPO - Audio Equalizer
11. Voicemeter - Virtual Audio Mixer
12. Qbittorrent - Torrent Client
13. Raindrop - Bookmark Manager

Android

1. Aegis - Authenticator
2. Wireguard - VPN Client
3. NextDNS Manager - DNS Manager
4. MPV - Video Player
5. NewPipe, GrayJay, LibreTube - YouTube Client
6. FUTU Voice Input
7. FUTO Keyboard
8. Aves Gallery
9. Delta Icon Pack
10. K9 Mail - Mail Client
11. QKSMS+ - SMS App
12. Perplexity Ai - GPT
13. Wavelet - Audio Equalizer
14. SafeSpace - Encrypted Vault
15. AppOps - App Permission Manager
16. Shizuku - Required by AppOps

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.

OnlyOffice. Great office suite. Also any app from FUTO