Whats your must-have FOSS app?

Bitwarden

I've seen Bitwarden show up in this thread a few times. I've been a longtime user of KeePassX. Is there any particular reason I should consider switching?
- What made me choose bitwarden is the emergency access feature.
  It allows to designate someone as an emergency contact. This person can request access to your vault and if you don't deny the request then they will have access after x days.
  This way, if something happens to me then someone in my close family can still access my account.
  I got the case recently with my brother in law who got into an accident and thanks God his laptop was not locked so my sister could access his accounts.
  Because if not it can be a nightmare ! Having to deal with all the utilities company, harassing you because you did not pay the bill that arrived on a locked email account, then not being able to pay the bill anyways because you have to connect on they website ... on top of getting your husband and the father of your child in the hospital in a coma.
- There is a new maintained fork of keepassx called keepassxc as well if you want to stick with keepass
- Yeah, It's no longer being developed. See: https://www.keepassx.org/index.html%3Fp=636.html
- A big benefit for me (as a person using their cloud hosting option) is that the Organizations feature is free for up to 2 people so my fiancee and I can share logins and credit cards without a subscription.

Fedilab for Mastodon (an alternative to Tusky)
Jerboa for Lemmy
LibreTube for usable YouTube without an account
FluffyChat for Matrix (an alternative to Element)
FairEmail for mails
Molly for Signal (pretty much the same as the original app)
Forkgram for Telegram (also pretty much the same as the original open source version)
Aurora for PlayStore apps
F-Droid
Fennec for browsing (the opener version of Firefox)
Aegis for 2FA (an alternative to Google Authenticator)
KeePassDX for passwords (an alternative to Keepass2Android)
OpenKeychain for PGP Keys
Orbot for connecting to Tor and running a Snowflake proxy
RethinkDNS as DNS with blocklists, firewall and routing to Orbot via Proxy for all TCP connections
Tutanota as synchronized calendar
Osmand~ for navigation (an alternative to Google Maps)
Transportr for public transport (an alternative to DB Navigator in Germany)
In general the "Simple ..." apps on F-Droid are also nice

I'll be in Germany next month, so I'll have to try out Transportr
- Transportr is not covering all cities in Germany, while DB does. So do have both :)

Ankidroid— Create, share, borrow and study with flash cards

Firefox— Web browser

Rethink Firewall— Best firewall for android

Infinity— Gonna miss this one (Reddit client)

Libretube— Modern Youtube client using Piped

Obtainium—Keeps track of all my foss apps from their git repositories + them

Gnu IMP— Desktop photo editor

Aurora Store— Download apps from the play store

Thanks for recommending Libretube. I just switched to GrapheneOS and was looking for a FOSS revanced replacement without the need for Play Services or MicroG. Libretube is absolutely perfect.

vim

F-Droid for FOSS apps
Aurora for Google Playstore apps
OSMAnd for navigation
Oeffi for public transport
many Simple Mobile Tools apps
K-9 Mail
Tor browser
Shelter for isolating apps
Tusky for Mastodon
Jerboa for Lemmy
Nunti for RSS feeds
Molly for Signal
Telegram FOSS
Aegis for 2FA
QickDic (dictionary)
TinyWeather
Threema Libre (not free)

For the map I prefer Organic Maps, it has a cleaner UI
- Just having a look at it, ty.

Some from the ones I use:

F-Droid
Fennec (firefox variant that supports custom addon collections)
K-9 Mail
Termux (terminal + Linux environment)
Jerboa for Lemmy
Wikipedia

You should check out iceraven if you want even more addons. Iceraven
- Apperantly the addons are taken from this collection, which can be set up on fennec as well
- I use Mull which is hardened for privacy. All Fennec derivatives support custom addons and setting the collection yourself is possible.
Fennec is such a godsend

cant choose one because i enjoy using a lot of them:

bitwarden
inkscape
kdenlive
nextcloud
organic maps
signal games
shattered pixel dungeon
openttd

LineageOS: my Android ROM of choice
LineageOS for MicroG: the ROM on my second phone where I quarantine my use of apps that refuse to work without Google services (mostly stuff I need for business travel e.g. Amtrak, Google Maps)
Aurora Store: allows installation of most Play Store apps without login. I mainly use this on the MicroG phone, but it's also needed to get the ProtonMail and ProtonCalendar apps (only ProtonVPN is on F-Droid)
TrackerControl: allows fine tuned domain blocking on a per-app basis. Often allows you to block just ads and trackers but still be able to use an app or at least many of its features.
Arcticons: monochrome line art icons (because I hate fun and want my GUIs to look like a terminal)
AsteroidOS Sync: WearOS replacement. AsteroidOS still has a long way to go, but I doubt WearOS would play nicely with LineageOS and I don't want all the tracking anyway.
Bubble: bubble level by woheller69 (a true F-Droid GOAT)
FlorisBoard: afaik, only FOSS gesture typing Android keyboard (besides AnySoft, which doesn't seem to work consistently)
GMaps WV: fairly locked-down web viewer for Google Maps (sadly OSM just doesn't have a usably complete business directory where I live)
Lawnchair: launcher with all the features I want except being up to date on F-Droid
Librera: the PDF reader on F-Droid that I hate the least. (Anyone got any better recommendations?)
NewPipe: ad-free Youtube player with locally stored subscriptions and playlists. An IzzyOnDroid fork with SponsorBlock is also available.
QKSMS: my SMS app of choice
Signal: because I can't convince my friends to switch to Briar
SpoTube: pirate ad-free Spotify that works by looking up tracks on Youtube. Is therefore limited by what's available on YT and sometimes plays wrong tracks, but you can't beat the price :] Even interfaces with a Spotify account to play and edit playlists.
Standard Notes: E2E encrypted cloud-synced notes. Also accessible by web browser, which has saved my ass a few times while phoneless
Weather: by BeoCode on F-Droid
VLC: everyone's favorite traffic cone boi

Thank you for adding descriptions. Just lists of random projects are a lot to go through.
I'd also recommend ViMusic. It is similar to SpoTube but in my opinion it's more user friendly.
sadly OSM just doesn't have a usably complete business directory where I live
Its up to you to change that to the better
- this is true

@tiring7616 firefox

emacs

YyyyyyyyyyuuuuuuuuuuuuuP.
Yes, ++. Emacs is by far the App I use the most. While my system runs, I never close it. I live in it.

Emacs, that's all I need!

Inkscape for me :)

Blender

Godot

Gimp

Probably the nicest Foss stack for game development.

FairEmail is a great email client. Also everytime I reinstall my phone, I get the SimpleMobileTools line of apps, their apps like gallery or calendar are nice-looking and useful.

Seconding Fairemail! It's great, though it was a bit challenging for me to set up as a newb to foss apps. I also use signal, bitwarden, aegis, and newpipe a lot.

Fairmail
keepass
firefly iii
Firefox
sumatrapdf

Bitwarden, Signal, Firefox, Sumatra PDF, Standard Notes, andOTP, and VLC Media Player

Love all of these, but really happy to see Sumatra PDF because that thing is just incredible and is a day 1 install on a fresh OS.
- Its one of the first things I install too! A really efficient piece of software!
Love Sumantra so much. When I've had to do Linux installs, the lack of Sumantra was my biggest disappointment.
ha ... I was going to post my list but it's basically this! The only difference is I don't use andotp, but I should migrate to something like it.
Isn't andOTP basically dead? The app is unmaintained at this point and last update was 2 years ago.
I think something like Aegis Authenticator is a better option nowadays.
- Yes, I should really switch to Aegis. andOTP has been working well for me though.

Aegis Authenticator
Antenna Pod
Unciv
Shelter

Wow, I LOVE Civ 5 but never knew about Unciv. Looks really cool!
Every time Unciv updates I lose 2–6 hours of my day. 10/10

Firefox.

Also:

Thunderbird Gimp Audacious

Here are my go to apps.

Droid-ify - Fdroid client
Mull - firefox mobile fork
KeePassDX - password manager
Tracker Control - VPN based, blocks trackers for installed apps
Nebula (F-droid) - DNS based, can be used alongside tracker control
Infinity for reddit - sad
FlorisBoard Beta - keyboard but no development update for months now
Notally - simple notes app
Simple Calendar - part of simple tools/suite of apps
Open Camera
Fair Email - email client
Moshidon - forked from an app I cant remember, nice material u design and fast
Arcticons Icons - line icons for your homescreen
SimpleLogin - create anonymus emails and disable them, helps prevent spam and address privacy control
Tutanota - mail app for tutanota
Jerboa - lemmy client
Paisa - expenses manager app
My Expenses - expenses manager app
ExifEraser - removes metadata for the pictures

Moshidon - forked from an app I cant remember, nice material u design and fast
It's a fork of Megalodon, and Megalodon is a fork of the Mastodon app ( ᐛ )b

Bash

Can I ask where do you get your RSS from? It's hard to find RSS in sites and topics I'm interested in.
- If you're asking what I think you are, I get mine by searching "best RSS feeds" and then manually looking through the list. Then, if I ever find myself going to a site a lot, I'll see if they have one or if someone has created an RSS for it.
- i get mine from Ars, The Register, The Verge, NPR, and Computerworld so far.

I will go with (neo)vim. Must have for me, use it for everything imaginable, writing emails,code, notes ...

+1 for k9. Lightweight nd functional.

Firefox, LibreTube, Kaiteki

I'm beginning to migrate from Windows to Linux, here are some foss apps I use:

Blender -for 3d modelling
Godot - Because im working to be a game dev
Incscape and paint.net - for general raster artwork
Brave - My primary browser
VScode - I just prefer C# over godot's built in GDscript (Not to say GDscript is bad its a nice language but I just prefer C# as I used to use unity)

Edit, you said "must have" oops, but still like to share this anyways :))

VSCode is not fully FOSS, you should consider using VSCodium instead, which is a fork with removed proprietaty blobs.

These two are now the first apps I install on any new device:

Kiss launcher (simple and fast)
Articons icon pack

Basically, my approach is to (mostly) prioritize text over icons, and reduce the colors I need to process.

Other apps:

Brave browser (for YouTube and built-in anti-tracking features.)
Librera (ebook/PDF reader with lots of features)
Odyssey (local music player optimized for speed. My library is so large that all the other players were having trouble finding songs.)
Graph 89 (TI graphing calculator emulator)
Feeder (RSS feed aggregator)

Brave has always felt sketchy to me with all the built-in crypto junk.
- Yeah that stuff is a bit obnoxious, but once you get browsing it doesn't come up, at least for me. Well worth it for no YouTube ads and making tracking more difficult.

Blender and Firefox for me have always been the apps that have their shit together the most. Both I perceive as insanely complicated pieces of software with a lot of features that work really well and compete with for profit corporations with way more resources.

I’m really impressed with how far Blender has come. Some seriously good stuff. Doesn’t feel like it has stagnated at all, good UI changes, cool new tools… I’m not a big user of it lately, but it’s cool to see how much progress it has made over the years.

Assuming I'm using Android:

Mull or Fennec
SkyTube
Tusky
Jerboa
UntrackMe
Orbot
SicMu Player (or any good music player app)

-Tachiyomi for manga -personal Dns filter for blocking ads system wide -Aegis for two factor authentication -NewPipe x Sponsorblock for youtube -Fritter for Twitter without an account -Librera for reading my ebooks -Feeder for RSS -Quillpad for a Google Keep like local alternative

KDE Connect
LibreTorrent for Android
Droid-ify for F-Droid
Orbot for Android (I use it mainly for running the snowflake proxy)

Linux, Qtile, Firefox, Bitwarden, neovim, espanso, and others. So many great tools for those willing and able to do a little digging.

OpenVPN. I can self-host a lot of different things for my own personal internet/cloud thingy - Bitwarden, Pi-Hole, etc; but to actually use it when I'm not home? I either pay for a VPS or I just have a VPN back to my home network. So much becomes possible with that; like I have the contents of my entire NAS at my fingertips even if I'm not home; I can render projects on a VM at home and manage it from my phone, etc.

OpenVPN is, without a doubt, the most important part of my infrastructure.

Calibre-Ebooks managment Libre Office- instead of MS Office Bitwarden- password manager Mozilla Firefox- browser IceCube, Pixefed app and Mlem for Fediverse Joplin- notes BookPlayer app for Audiobooks Nextcloud for storage

The list is too long. If I'm forced to choose 5, I guess they'll be,

Linux
Syncthing
qBittorrent
Neovim
PhotoPrism

Syncthing - for sycing what pretty much amounts to /home between my mobile and laptop
Bitwarden - password manager
ProtonVPN - VPN
Trail Sense - Hiking tools, most frequently for barometric readings
Proton Mail - email
Coffee - keeps the screen on through a button in my notifications. Mostly used when cooking for recipes
NewPipe - YouTube and downloading
Droid-ify - Better UI for fdroid
Aegis - OTP manager
VLC - needs no introduction
Kore - remote for Kodi
Geometric Weather - simple weather app
Noteless - markdown notetaker. I've mostly moved everything over to Obsidian, but I like my grocery list here still...

These are some great suggestions, I use several of these already but I hadn't heard of Coffee, Droid-ify or Geometric Weather and all three have been added to my phone. I really appreciate Coffee because I've been manually updating the screen timeout each time I cook and it's a pain to switch it each time, this quick toggle is a definite quality of life improvement. Droid-ify and Geometric weather are slick and I really like their look. Thanks!
- Cool! I use coffee all the time and can't imagine cooking without it now.

LibreWolf (+UBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, and many other extensions)
Visual Studio Code
VLC Media Player

VSC is open source? I had no idea!
- Code is open-source but it isn't quite fully open-source. It has some proprietary stuff in it. For it to be fully open-source, check out VS Codium
- AFAIK, it's like chrome/chromium, so.. yes, but complicated.

Firefox
Nextcloud
Home Assistant
Bitwarden
Tusky
Jellyfin
Pihole
Jerboa
As well as several others that I can't think of at the moment.

Bitwarden-password manager Joplin - notes Kde Connect- laptop connections for file transfer, notifications etc Syncthing- file syncing

All of these are available of F-droid.

The humble grep.

Signal
vinyl for music
AnkiDroid for flashcards. I use it for languages, but i believe there are repositories for other subjects.

KDE Connect means that I can ping my phone that's usually presumably somewhere behind my bed or on a counter somewhere, without having to sheepishly walk to the nearest person and ask "can you call my phone I lost it :c"

jtx board for tasks and notes

Some more I did not see others mention. For Linux:

Geany
Python
Meld
Nextcloud
Reminna and TightVNC
Thunderbird
Zim

For Android:

Just Weather
Joplin
OpenSync
Tasks
OSMAnd
Nextcloud
SMSBackp
Connect Bot

I also recommend the site: https://alternativeto.net/ . You can just search and it will tell you the most used FOSS apps in any category you want.

Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one using geany. Nice to see it mentioned.
- Yes, I am more in favor of basics. Emacs and VIM are just to complicated. IDEs, well sometimes I use but usually I start in Geany or nano and only use an IDE if it makes sense. Often not.

For me it's ViMusic. I was stuck with a shitty Spotify subscription that I couldn't afford until I found Vi. It has pretty much all the bands I like and it passed my moms rigerous examination (she listens to all of of really obscure stuff) so when her Amazon subscription ran out, I got her to start using that instead. Suck it jezzy b!

Joplin, Aegis, Bitwarden

Quillpad (offline notes)
MuPDF mini (Great simple PDF reader)
Unit Converter Ultimate (lots of various conversions)
Retro Music (fdroid repo for pro version, best music player hands down)
OSMAnd (Great for fancy mapping features)
Mull (hardened Firefox with the quickest updates of all Firefox based browsers)
AntennaPod (best podcast app)
Obtanium (install apps easily from sources such as Github)
Droid-ify (better fdroid)

NewPipe and FireFox, at minimum.

Osmand - I use this along Google maps, but it's nice to have entire regions downloaded and it shows more information than Google maps, specifically for back country stuff where you need to see every type of trail

Home Assistant

Wireguard - I love that the protocol is lightweight and secure, makes it really easy to access my home network without needing to expose self hosted stuff to the internet

Bitwarden - self hosted with vaultwarden/SQLite, changed my life and it's really easy to share logins with my partner

Immich - self hosted, the first real replacement for Google photos I've found. It has autobackup and it's really easy to share albums.

Kiss Launcher - I like how simple it is. My home screen ends up disorganized anyway so it's honestly just faster to have a recents list and a quick search feature.

have you tried Organic Maps? it uses OSM as well, but the UI is much more pleasant to use than OSMAnd's.

Mull
K-9 Mail
LibreTube
Quillpad
Droid-ify

Firefox
Signal
FFUpdater
Red Moon

Firefox
libre office
obs studio (free, not 100% sure if os)

The O in OBS stands for open :)
OBS is open source!
- ok cool. that what I thought the "open" in open broadcaster studio meant lol

Recently id say OsmAnd~. GPX tracks are great for long bicycle trips and the drinkng water overlay is a lifesaver!

trips can be planned and saved as gpx with https://gpx.studio/ !
- Ive been using brouter.de but i will check out gpx studio

i3. Once I got used to tiling window managers I just can't use anything else.

My top Must have FOSS app:

Bitwarden - password manager

Other indispensable FOSS apps:

FairEmail and Proton Mail - email
SimpleLogin - email aliases
Joplin - notes
Aves Libre - image gallery
Droid-ify - FOSS app store
FediLab - Fediverse client
Medilog - health metrics log
OctoDroid - GitHub viewer/manager

Antenna-pod if you like podcasts is fantastic relative to google podcasts (but maybe that's a low bar)

Syncthing is the one, I could probably replace any one but this one.

I really hope the Infinity dev starts working on a Lemmy/kbin app.

I dont think they will, but they did say lemmys api is similar enough that it wouldnt be complicated to fork infinity to work with lemmy if anyone else wants to do it so it may well come about. I think im happy enough with jerboa for now