A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Libre office, a great office option. I've been using it for 15 years. Foreshadowing
VLC, Plays media. It's a tank. Also Highways use VLC to mark many winter potholes.
Linux, It's not that hard to use anymore.( Ν‘Β° ΝΚ Ν‘Β°)
WINE, not just for one night stands! it's great for running Windows Stuff on Linux.
Also, and my personal favorite, your mom is free and open source. Mic Drop going to bed. With your mom. Wasn't expecting that twice were you? Well, neither was your mom. Got 'em.
Also Highways use VLC to mark many winter potholes
I was searching for some kind of VLC based image / video processing algorithm to detect potholes
Was this a joke about how the logo is a traffic cone
Ublock Origin. The amount of people going through life exposing themselves to ads is tragic. It's so unhealthy and most people aren't aware that there is a simple and free way of protecting yourself from the psychological warfare that corpos use against society
I don't understand how people do not get blood red angry at advertising more often. Its the root of a lot of our problems with censorship and they flat out just exploit what little free time we all get.
By the time I get home I got 3 hours to chill. Then these ads take up 1/3 of that selling me shit I never asked for. They indirectly forced every platform I ever enjoyed to become these homogenous boring vanilla time sinks. That's because they pay one content safe creator and then the rest start to copy them. Now if I want to avoid ads, I have to pay extra fees which fuck it, the content creators circumvent by putting ads directly into the media.
We should all be more hostile to any encroachment of ads into our lives. Its weird that instead I see people embracing it like it isn't a cancer. We've lost the freedoms we had on thr internet to these ads and nobody seems to care.
I don't consider myself someone who gets really worked up about much, but goddamn if ads and corporate bullshit isn't a hot button for me. Somehow the fact that it's become so normalized just makes me angrier about it.
Krita π¨ποΈ
It's literally FOSS Adobe Illustrator, why do people don't use it??
I thought Inkscape was FOSS Illustrator
Probably should add darktable in here as FOSS Photoshop Lightroom Classic.
edit: and Scribus as FOSS Adobe InDesign
And also FOSS Photoshop. Without the annoying subscription model and AI scraping. And way more comfortable to use than GIMP.
I would say GIMP (+ extensions) is still the FOSS version of Photoshop.
Of course, i would love to have a fully fledged program without such a steep learning curve.
But i think Krita is fine as it is.
So i wished there was another just as good program that filled that void.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source (open data) project. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative mapping platform that allows users from around the world to contribute, edit, and use geographical data. The data and software behind OSM are open-source, which means they are freely available for anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute under open licenses.
The data contributed to OpenStreetMap islicensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). This license allows for the free use of the data as long as proper attribution is given and any derivative works are also made available under the same open license.
I got addicted to using and contributing on OSM daily and enjoy spending my time improving the map. In fact a lot of closed source maps such as Google Maps and Apple Maps pull from some of the OSM data, so everyone gets to benefit from contributions.
In case you're looking into this out of curiosity, check out the Beginner's Guide and try to verify that the data around your neighborhood is correct and maybe add a point of interest (PoI) or a street name or two. Beware, it gets addictive quite fast.
OSM is also used for humanitarian use thanks to the HOT tasking platform. For example the majority of relief effort in Turkey's February earthquake, Sri Lanka flooding, and the recent Marocco earthquake. Mapping can literally help save lives. It's fun and easy too!
Also OSM usually beats Apple and Google by a mile when it comes to route planning for bicycles. I think it's one part techbros being eternally car brained and one part if you're a cyclist the chance you're the kind of crank to contribute to things like OSM is exponentially increased.
Jellyfin, it's pretty simple and if you have a spare computer, a decent connection (and by decent I don't mean even a decent one by 21th century standards, I still have a 100/10mbps ADSL) and a 2/4tb Hdd, you can host your own FOSS Netflix/Hulu with all the shows you want, if you're in a county where "sailing the seven seas" is a huge deal, the only subscription would be a cheap VPN or even better something like real debrid.
Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anythingβZigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTTβwhile keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).
DAVxβ΅ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.
Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.
Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.
Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.
And many others.
Proton.
I know it might not be in the spirit of the thread because it's not something you download and use as it's own thing but it has allowed me to exclusively run Linux on my gaming PC. I think more folks should try it to slowly tip the scales more on Linux.
Blender is my favorite open source tool I wish I knew how to use :)
Iβd love to use it for creating my own designs and took several attempts at learning it. But I always end up giving up on it due to lack of time and energy.
For anyone doing academic writing, I use a combination of Logseq, Zotero, and Zettlr. All open source. Collect articles in Zotero. Annotate and take notes on those articles in Logseq with absolutely amazing PDF annotation tools. Write draft in Zettlr which allows me to enter Zotero citations and reference Logseq notes.
Bonus shoutout to LibreOffice for exporting and formatting the final draft. And thatβs your recipe for one all-natural, organic, FOSS thesis!
free streaming app, works with SFlix, Sodastream, PH and other legally dubious streaming providers. Takes some trickery to set up though. 2. Osmand
OpenStreetMap client with offline (optional online) navigation and plenty of plugins; loads of customisation 3. Material Files
nicest file manager, especially for rooted devices 4. Showly
freemium open-source TV and film tracker. Syncs with Trakt.tv 5. Simple Gallery
out of all Simple Apps by this developer, this is the only one which is in fact superior to its alternatives. Highly customisable, powerful, lightweight gallery app
Every other classic board game should have a game client as good as lichess.
But, speaking of games, Simon Tatham's puzzle collection.
I'll skip the common ones that are frequently mentioned to give Zim some love! Zim is a desktop wiki app which, as implied, allows you to make your own private wiki which is invaluable for my writing and worldbuilding hobby.
Blender. Maybe not everyone needs to try it but it it's great if you like 3D.
I can suggest everyone to try Bitwarden if they don't have a password manager yet. I use Pass now (because UNIX^TM^) but was a Bitwarden fan before.
Lemmy
A little different from many of the things mentioned, but...
Lemmy
Only because CTRL+F had zero results: Krita. Everyone complains about GIMP having a bad name and Krita is actually good!!
Firefox+uBlock (web browser)
MEncoder (video encoder)
OBS (screen recording and streaming software)
Inkscape (vector illustration software)
Mumble (VoIP chat room server/client/protocol)
Julia (programming language great for scripting and mathematics)
For Unix systems:
Wezterm (terminal multiplexor)
i3 (window manager)
Besides software mentioned by others:
NeoVim: The single most perfect editor of all time.
QOwnNotes: A pretty good note taking app for markdown notes with tons of extension and options. But tbh Obsidian is still the gold standard.
SSH: It's everywhere. Controlling my servers from remote is a trivial task. Also, it does tunneling.
Syncthing: Syncing files around has never been easier than with syncthing. And it's decentralized, encrypted, private.
Kitty: A great Terminal Emulator
Obtainium - - app with which you can download & update apps (apk's) directly from github/gitlab/etc. (and even f-droid).
Absolutely awesome π
Big fan of Krita as a painting program. You've gotta learn some different hotkeys and all that, but it's better laid out and easier to learn than like, GIMP or Blender ime. Lots of good tutorials, plenty of free brushes, quite customizable. I really like its alpha-locking and groups as an alternative system to clipping masks.
MPV player. Super lightweight, minimalist, literally runs anything you throw at it, keyboard focused, hyper customizable, loads of plugins for anything you can think of, supports all the meme filters and best of all, multiple frontends available.
i have a few all time favourites on android:
-Aves, a really good gallery app
-openboard, awesome keyboard without tracking software
-fairmail, really good email app
-liftoff for lemmy
-dolphin emulator, if your phone can run it
-SD maid SE, one of those storage cleaner thingys
-syncthing, for making backups over WiFi
there's even more i use on windows. if you look hard enough, you will find an alternative to every program you're using.
I'm not as well versed in FOSS as other posters but FOSS Android apps that I learned about on Lemmy/kbin and am enjoying:
AntennaPod (podcast player)
Inoreader (RSS reader)
Newpipe (YT player)
Bitwarden (password manager)
LibreraFD (PDF and other format reader, substitute for OverDrive)
kbin (I subscribe to Lwmmy communities thru kbin, also)
And I rely in Firefox with UBO, as other posters have mentioned.
From the top of my head, I would name Okular. No other FOSS pdf reader is as complete and easy to use.
KeePassXC, it is a client for KeePass password management, works great
Krita, KDE's awesome drawing program
I adore VLC.
I've been using Linux Mint for almost a year and a half now: would recommend it to anyone ready to make a jump into Linux and away from Windows. It's quite friendly.
I'm also quite enjoying Sonarr to keep track of some older television shows that I enjoy.
LogSeq for taking notes.
It is a markdown editor and has a lot of features i didn't know I wanted. Like you can mark in PDFs and those marks will be made into notes with shortcuts to that place right into your other notes.
blender's beginner friendly enough for me to universally recommend it at this point - you might bounce off, or you might, like me, be a half-decent visual artist 3 years later!