I want to know what kind of apps/programs y’all recommend to people or just use personally. This is just in general, could be anything from a game to a media codec. I personally use Linux but stuff for other operating systems is welcome too.
I have a few to recommend…
Firefox - Stop giving an ad network all of your data on a silver platter.
Affinity Photo - Good photo editing software with perpetual licensing.
digiKam - FOSS photo organizing software
Strawberry Music Player - A fork of a fork of amaroK, good music player!
VLC - Watch any video file.
Kodi - Consume your media library, in style!
OpenRA - Play the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert as well as Dune 2000 on modern hardware/software for free.
Unreal Tournament 2004 - I have bought this game three times, the original CD release on 6 discs, Steam and GOG. This is to my mind the best arena shooter ever, the original CD release even came with an official Linux installer.
I hope you don’t mean stock firefox.
What is wrong with stock Firefox?
I hope you are not calling it worse than Chrome, because that would be insane.
Hmm yeah. Not as bad as chrome but not that better. At this point, I use Librewolf because it allows uBo and has mozilla spyware removed. Mozilla pretends to be privacy-friendly. They aren’t your friend.
Well yeah, they are a company, I have never thought of them as a friend.
I would like it if they released an annual “Firefox Pro” version, the only difference would be that Pro version would be branded as “Firefox Pro” and a badge in the about dialog.
You would pay €20 for it, and Mozilla could rely less on ads, and focus more on privacy.
Why not just a donation?
Why not get rewarded for it as well?
yeah ok. It’s not like nobody rewards donators
telemetry is not spyware.
Google collects data because their business model depends on them knowing as much about you as possible. Mozilla collects the data they need to fix bugs.
Mozilla collects the data they need to fix bugs
Funny
You should look at their privacy policy. You’ll be shocked at how privacy invasive they really are.
i have. which part do you find objectionable?
Well then, you should know that they aren’t any better. They track and spy on users, and also put ads into the browser itself.
Minor warning about Strawberry Music Player:
If you are looking for a completely free local music player on windows or mac without paying, I’d skip this because both versions are tied to patreon last I checked. I know as a fact the windows version is, but not 100% sure on the mac version since I don’t have a mac.
I personally think it’s good enough if you feel like paying for it so they can keep developing it, but it’s good to keep this kinda stuff in mind.
Tied to patreon how?
I was on Clementine before but development seems to have stalled
Currently, at least for the windows version, you need to be part of the patreon if you don’t want to have to build from source. Right now I can get on my desktop and load Strawberry (which I got before this started happening) and it’ll tell me there’s an update for the windows version, the one I have because my desktop currently runs win10. If I click the button to update, it’ll take me to their patreon account and ask me to support them if I want the precompiled update.
I’d build from source on windows, but that sounds like a nightmare, so I just haven’t been able to update.
Ah, I had no idea, thanks for letting me and others know!
That is a horrible abuse of the term “arcade shooter”
You are completely right!
UT2004 is not an arcade shooter, it is an arena shooter, sorry about that, thank you for correcting me
Newpipe, KDEconnect, Vlc, KeepassXC, Syncthing, convert (CLI program for converting files eg jpg to PNG ), Yakuake (a dropdown terminal)
LocalSend. File transfer between any devices with (almost) any OS over LAN. No account required. The best file transfer app I’ve ever encountered by far.
StreetComplete. Get motivated to go outside with quests to help complete OpenStreetMaps. Surprisingly addictive. Requires an OpenStreetMaps account.
f.lux. Remove the blue light from your computer monitor in the evening to help you fall asleep more easily. Redshift. As above. Not quite as good, but works on some OS/System configurations that f.lux can’t handle.
Pulsar. A community version of the discontinued Atom text editor. Highly extendable and configurable. Great for small programming tasks or opening text files with an obscure syntax. Has most of the packages built for Atom.
Home Assistant. For automating your house and more (controlling smart lights and appliances, monitoring solar panel output, weather forecasts, printer diagnostics, delivery tracking…). A dedicated device (Raspberry Pi, old laptop) is highly recommended. A bit of a learning curve, but hard to live without after using it.
Do you mean on phones? Windows? Macs? Watches?
I like Merlin on iOS cos it identifies birds by their calls.
Android users can use ‘BirdNET’ it’s FOSS and works most of the time.
Merlin is also on Android too for anybody looking for it
Aegis, Bitwarden, Librewolf, Mullvad and MEGA on my desktop
Voidtools Everything is a gamechanger on Windows. It can search my entire PC instantly opposed to Windows Explorer taking minutes. You can also configure it to work with 3rd party file managers like Freecommander and eliminate Explorer from your workflow entirely.
Don’t really have that problem on my Linux distro but that would’ve helped so much when I was on windows. Idk how many times I searched for something and just left the room to wait.
Yea, I don’t have to do anything special on Linux. Although if I used it more I’d probably be looking for some kind of file manager app.
I love Krita with the AI Diffusion plugin for image generation
Maybe you could post some of your results on !imageai@sh.itjust.works :)
Any more of a clue? What is your focus right now?
There isn’t a specific thing I’m looking for, that the point of the post.
(not sure what’s going on with Lemmy. I’m getting message/comment notification well after reasonable times. Yours has taken 21 days to appear.)
Fair enough.
Having enjoyed the open source Logseq to make a proper archive of the bits of knowledge I accumulate, I reluctantly moved on to Obsidian, which is proprietary.
Obsidian is much the better product, Logseq feels lacking and in need of a guiding hand and significant funding.
That said I used Logseq for over a year and enjoyed my time.
Both products work on Markdown files which are plain text and are useful in a standard editor and therefore will outlive Logseq and Obsidian.
For drawing, definitely Paint Tool SAI! When I began drawing digitally, a friend gifted me two programs for me to use, Illustrator and Paint Tool SAI. I ended up settling on the latter. It is a very old program that got released in 2008, but it is lightweight, fast, stable, and has really good blending and pen stabilization options!
Scoop is my favourite package manager on Windows. I’m also familiar with Winget and Chocolatey, but something has always felt off with them.
AltSnap is something that lets you drag and/or resize a window by holding the Win key and then clicking anywhere on the window instead of having to reach for the edges or the titlebar.
ClickMonitorDDC is my go-to for controlling brightness of desktop monitors. Also, on my work laptop I’ve set it to sync the laptop display brightness with the brightness of the external monitors. In combination with a macropad/keyboard with rotary encoders it is pretty good. Sadly, it’s practically abandonware at this point - the original site is down and there are only a few mirrors - but it still works fine for the most part.
Clink + Clink completions + oh-my-posh + fzf is my favourite combo for the command line. The cool thing about oh-my-posh is that it’s multiplatform and that its configuration is portable, so I can also install it on top of bash/zsh and have the same prompt I’m used to.
FanControl is something that I can’t believe exists as a free app. It’s so much better than motherboard vendor software for the same purpose - not only works reliably, but also lets you do things that the motherboard software usually does not - e.g. linking a case fan curve to the GPU temp. Last time I used GNU/Linux I had to manually write configs for lm-sensors, which works, but is a tedious process. I just found out about CoolerControl - looks promising, but haven’t tried it myself.
+1 for scoop. I’ve got a windows PC that I keep around for certain programs I can’t use with wine and scoop makes it bearable.
I mostly use this on my desktop running win10, but GridPlayer for playing shows off an external hard drive.
At one point had it on my laptop running a Debian based OS, but I must have uninstalled/removed it somehow because I couldn’t find it a few days ago when I needed it. Thankfully I found an appimage as I couldn’t find it in the repos. And as I am writing this comment, I checked to see if it was available through flatpak and it is.
Love it because I can have my shows take up the full program area and stay that way when I change program resolution. I try that with other programs and it either doesn’t fit the whole program area or doesn’t take up the area when I change program size.
Only thing I wouldn’t really recommend it for is shows with subtitles since I have yet to figure out if it even supports subtitle files. Couldn’t watch the latest season of a show on it and had to switch to VLC because of that.
Snagit, it’s like Windows snipping tool on steroids. I was introduced to it at work and loved it so much I bought a license for my personal computer.
I’m also a huge fan of Dashlane for managing my passwords. It’s one of the pricier options, but it works so much better than everything else I’ve tried (and has a nicer UI, too)
Here’s a mixture of applications, some for Linux, some for Android, some for both. And some of them might work on other platforms as well, but I’m not sure.
Borg for making backups. For the first glance it could look overwhelming, but after reading through the quick start guide, it’s really easy to use.
VeraCrypt for encryption of removable media.
Megalodon as a Mastodon client.
Voyager as a Lemmy client. It has a very weird and unintuitive UI, but there are no ads and the content is well readable, well presented.
OsmAnd for offline navigation. It’s especially great for cycling and hiking, as even the most insignificant trails are on the map. It isn’t free, but it’s cheap.
Thunderbird for emails. Until recently I just used the online interface for my emails, but ever since I got a Proton subscription and multiple aliases with it, I started to use Thunderbird so I can see everything in one place, and also it has advanced filtering capabilities (the best of any email client I’ve ever used).
Proton Calendar, just for the sake of not to use Google.
Firefox with uBlock Origin. These two together is the bare minimum nowadays if you are thinking about browsing the internet.
VS Code for smaller stuff. Not gonna list my extensions here, but there are a few less known ones that I always install.
Zed is in early development, but if it gets as mature as VS Code, I’ll consider using this instead.
JetBrains IDEs for software development. It makes me cry every year when I spend a buttload of money on renewing my license, but for me it’s worth it. No other IDE ever made it so easy for me to set up and work with projects.
Dia for UML or database schema diagrams, and bunch of others. Sadly it’s a bit outdated, but it’s simple and easy to use.
Mullvad, Ente Auth, VS Codium, Librewolf, VLC, Steam
Krita (without any kind of unnecessary unsupported and unofficial AI plugins btw). It’s one of the few free programs that I like so much I paid for them.
I’ve also been getting a lot of mileage out of Tiny Media Manager.
Would you say that Krita is suitable for a beginner, especially with a little knowledge of traditional drawing?
I wouldn’t recommend learning to draw from scratch digitally no matter what software, but if you’re not a complete beginner and you’re willing to experiment with its functions, I don’t see why not. There’s a large helpful community and lots of tutorials too.
