Ask Lemmy

Will put a disclaimer here that it's not going to be for everyone but I use emacs for pretty much everything.

It's a competent code editor with a lot of plugins similar to vscode. It has email, web browsing and IRC built-in out of the box. One of the best of the bundled packages is org-mode which is a fully featured note taking application that can export to HTML and latex. Then there are a wide ecosystem of packages like music players (emms) and visual git interfaces (magit) you can install too. It can even work as a WM!

Before we get into a text editor holy war I still use vim for quick edits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 love Godot for making video games.

Simple enough for a hobbyist, powerful enough for a developer. Free and open source

Got a game on a library other than Steam, but want access to all the Steam workshop mods for said game because nobody posts them anywhere else?

Then you want WorkshopDL. I would be stuck with a minimally modded RimWorld if not for this, because I got the game on GOG, and I'm not paying for it and all the DLC again just to get access to the workshop.

Aegis, Bitwarden, Librewolf, Mullvad and MEGA on my desktop

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.

If you have a local transit agency that it works with, the Transit app is great. I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable taking the bus/subway without it; my city’s website is not great to try to navigate while changing plans on the fly. Transit will give you multiple options and show you on a map how to get there from where you are.

It also lets you gamify taking the bus by giving people a rank in exchange for providing location data while on the bus. I’m top 40 on my local line. 😎 And you can send other people a little generic thank you that makes hearts fly up on their screen if they’re providing location data for a bus on a line you’re viewing.

Overall 10/10, great balance of fun and utility.

rethink is quite good firewall for phone, it lets you actually control programs internet connections and see where they try to connect. doesnt need root.

foobar2000 is an awesome music player

A couple of years ago I made a table when switching from OSX to Linux, the table is still quite up to date: https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux

Newpipe, KDEconnect, Vlc, KeepassXC, Syncthing, convert (CLI program for converting files eg jpg to PNG ), Yakuake (a dropdown terminal)

Anyone have a good alternative to photopea for Windows/Linux? Please don't say gimp :(

I love photopea but the subscription model is lame. It turns it into another Photoshop.

I need something to do occasional art in that will survive my slow Linux transition.

Do you mean on phones? Windows? Macs? Watches?

I like Merlin on iOS cos it identifies birds by their calls.

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.

Any more of a clue? What is your focus right now?

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!

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)

I like the Arduino framework. GrapheneOS and Portal 2.

Mullvad, Ente Auth, VS Codium, Librewolf, VLC, Steam