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?
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
Adding on:
Inkscape - vector graphics program
Meshrom - photogrammetry
Handbrake - video transcoding
MakeMKV - rips DVDs and Blu Ray into video files
7zip - file compression and decompression
Droid48 - Truly excellent HP48 emulator for android
LibreOffice - free word processor & office suite (not without some recent drama though, I guess)
I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty, but hey, more for additional commenters to name.
Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too
Handbrake - video transcoding
FFmpeg.
Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too
Still GPL.
Synfig Studio - 2d animation software
I definitely considered FFmpeg (I mean, it does everything, and pretty much as fast as possible), but the sense I had was that people were mostly posting about tools that were reasonably accessible to novice users, with nice-ish interfaces. FFmpeg is pretty daunting to newcomers.
OpenSCAD (CAD, but with a programming language-style interface) is kind of in a similar category. It’s pretty powerful, and for someone who thinks like a programmer it can be relatively easy to learn, but if you don’t already understand 3d transformations on a pretty intuitive level, the program doesn’t have a lot of features to ease you into that.
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.
SolveSpace… I remember that. Interesting thing, but I ended up using FreeCAD.
I’ve been using FreeCAD, it’s extremely powerful, and just hit 1.0. Might be a bit harder to learn, but worth it.
Yeah, FreeCAD is great, but I can only think of one project that I’ve done where SolveSpace absolutely could not work for the geometry I needed and I had to rebuild it in FreeCAD. But that’s just a product of what I am building: simple things like brackets, knobs, and replacement lids mostly. I don’t need chamfers, drafts, lofts, etc. and I get what I need with minimum of time and effort using SolveSpace.
When I do need those features, complex geometries, or modification of pre-built step files, FreeCAD has never failed me.
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
EMACS is a great OS, all it lacks is a decent text editor.
If I had a nickel for everytime someone said that I’d be a billionaire
Funniest is when a vim user says that, since emacs includes a vim.
I tried Emacs once a long time ago, and recoiled from the weird key combos. Especially how you have to first enter one combo and then a second one for what you actually want to do.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling pretty clunky.Yeah I definitely prefer vim bindings over emacs. Though as other commenters have mentioned, it’s totally possible to use vim bindings with emacs. I’ve never tried it but if the other features attract you it might be worth trying.
Emacs is a part time job!
As a vim user, I’m always super envious of emac’s orgmode.
As a vim user who recently started with Emacs, if you ever want to try it, use evil-mode to get vim motions.
Maybe better to recommend Doom Emacs, if no BS is a requirement. It takes time to make friends with vanilla Emacs.
Why would you want any of that in a text editor…?
Because it all connects together, and you can program them jointly to help solve tasks.
Having email and version control inside emacs makes it easy to set up an email based patch system.
Of course this system will then benefit from the existing code highlighting, introspection, and an integrated debugger.
Integrating it with your time planner means you can automatically add commits to your journal as a way of tracking what you’ve been working on.
The old joke always was emacs is a great operating system, it just needs a good text editor.
The real downside for me is everything is just a little bit janky. It all almost works perfectly and the code is right there to fix it, if you can be bothered. Generally I can’t.
Well it’s not really a text-editor, it’s a productivity environment (That is poor advertisement on GNU’s part)
& these are all extensions, the real question is Why WOULDN’T you want it in a text-editor ?
All that is not in a text editor. A text editor is in all that. A few text editors actually.
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.
Bitwarden’s recent licence “oopsie” has shaken folks trust in them a bit. Not that it’s not a good software currently, but now we know what may happen at a moment’s notice.
Micro-team checking in!
Bitwarden, Kdenlive, Firefox, OBS, Steam.
Steam
Freewhat?
Do you pay for steam?
Yes, about 30% of the purchase price of every game.
Buying games through steam is optional. Steam itself is the game manager. I run many of my non steam games through it and don’t pay a dime for it. Alternatively I can buy steam games through 3rd party stores. The steam client on your machine is free.
They just get statistical data instead, then. I know some folks don’t care about companies knowing your activity and other telemetry data, but I’d probably still count that within the “bullshit around” exclusion criteria that OP defined.
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.
This is amazing. I’ve tried half-assed a few times to find an app better than Sky Map and this is in a different league. Immediately uninstalled Sky Map. Finally.
qBittorrent
Greenshot
Irfanview
Audacity
OBS
Lab Chirp: simple but powerful sound effects generator
Stickies (zhorn software): Networkable sticky notes
Agent Ransack: File content search
Audacity
You may want to switch to Tenacity. Audacity was purchased by a company in 2021 that super promises not to try to sneak telemetry into the program. Again. For the third time.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity without any of that nonsense.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t updated my Audacity version since 2012 😅 but I’ll remember this thank you
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
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.
Since you’re saying “pieces of software” and not specifically apps I will mention liburing.
I love Node for small apps and scripts. It’s become my go-to for quick tasks. I’ve even used it to write some small CLI utilities as standalone executables.
kate is similar to npp.
I’ve recently discovered and made heavy use of xournal++; for stylus-based note taking.
I got heavy use out of that one as a teaching assistant in grad school during the pandemic. I used a cheap wacom drawing pad.
