Ask Lemmy

Voyager.

Krita. I had a uni licence for Photoshop for years, even took a Photoshop course but still kept using Krita. It has an intuitive UI and all the tools I'll ever need.

RStudio+R is way better than any of its proprietary alternatives.

Blender. I'm no 3D modling expert but it does everything I as a hobbyist want to do with it and so much more. Nowadays, the UI is pretty decent, too.

Finally, the Lagrange browser is really good. The gemini protocol is kinda niche though, but if you're interested it's unreasonably pretty, well optimized and has a great UX. The guy who maintains it really puts his heart and soul into it.

Linux.

At least $100 per system, if not more.

ZFS

SSH.

Alternatively, Postgres.

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.

GIMP

Home Assistant

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

PlantNet

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

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.

Retroarch.

God awful complexity but once you figure out how it all works it’s incredible.

LibreOffice (and Open Office). When Microsoft Office is $200 or a monthly subscription.

I just used LibreOffice Writer to update my resume a few minutes ago and it’s a bit to switch to but it makes sense and I loveeeee the UI that caters to both people who prefer classic Office (‘97-2003) or those who prefer the more modern UI (‘07 and newer).

It does get a bit annoying because it is so powerful that it has a mind of its own and tries to do things for you, like formatting, but if you’re patient (like I was just now), it’ll work out for you and be really great.

May be a bit out there, but on Android, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a rogue lite game that is free and extremely fun to play. No ads, not very demanding on your phone, still gets updates, and easy to pick up and play when you're out traveling.

Its a very hard game, where knowledge is very important, as well as experimentation.

Emacs

Photopea Fully functional Photoshop in your browser. Amazing.

Pretty much every major open source project at this point. I need to start looking into donating to the programs I use the most.

Lichess :) (FOSS Chess server, no account needed to play, second biggest chess server overall)

The folks behind it are one of my admirations

VSCode. I don't get why Microsoft hasn't monetized it but I'm glad it is free. Has so many extensions and gets great updates, even if I don't understand half of the stuff in their patch notes when I open up the program.

Another one is a little program called Stacher that basically serves as GUI for yt-dlp. It's a very pretty one though! And all the settings and buttons are super great. I'm not very good with CLI stuff so I'm glad it exists for free, saves so much time.

Libby ebook reader/browser

Apples
Edit: I steal my neighbours apples

audacity

neovim

calibre

mpv

It depends on how you define "app" and "free". But for free (as in beer) smartphone apps I really like.

• tidy
• Librera Reader
• these pre-packaged apks for the onnx text to speech engine which uses the piper voices that can be used in conjunction with the above Librera Reader to turn any compatible text doc to an audio book.

for windows:

• WizTree - Disk space visualizer
• Everything (& EverythingToolbar) - Search tool
• Playnite - Game library

for android:

• Mihon/Tachiyomi - Manga reader
• Obtanium - Manage apps from various sources (github, gitlab, etc)
• Syncthing-Fork - File syncing
• MiXplorer - Feature dense file manager
• Universal Android Debloater Next Generation (technically a windows/linux program) - Remove/disable stock apps

for linux:

• wine/proton - windows translation software
• yazi - File manager
• easyeffects - Audio processing
• mpv - Video player

OctoPrint for 3D printing

Its a bit more than an app, but QGIS is like, actually amazing. Also GDAL (and PDAL).