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.
Practically every single FOSS application I use is highly useful to me, and of course, free, so I'll just list them all here.
- Immich - A full-featured replacement for Google Photos, has a sleek UI, face detection, albums, a timeline, etc.
- Paperless-ngx - Document management system, saves me a ton of paper hoarding, and makes everything easily searchable with OCR.
- Syncthing - Simple file synchronization between my devices, on my terms. Doesn't share data with big tech companies about my files, and hooks up extremely fast P2P connections that beat cloud-based services by a long shot.
- Metube & Seal - Simple interfaces for downloading with yt-dlp, can download from YouTube, but also many other sites. Doesn't spam you with popup ads or junk redirects like those "youtube downloader" type sites. Seal is my favorite of the two, but is only on Android.
- Image Toolbox - Insanely feature-packed app for doing practically anything you could want to an image. Converting formats, clearing EXIF data, removing backgrounds, feature-packed editing, OCR, convert to SVG, create color palettes, converting PDFs to images, decode and encode Base64 to and from images, extract frames from gifs, encrypt & decrypt files, make zip files, and a lot more. All local.
- Rustdesk - No-nonsense remote desktop, tons of features, simple file transfer, cross-platform compatibility, and P2P communication without needing a third party server if you so choose.
- LibreOffice - Essentially everything you'd get with Office 365 (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but without the $150 price point. Compatible with the same file formats, and has the same functionality.
- Cashew - Feature rich financial app for budgeting, tracking purchases, saving for goals, etc. Doesn't have automatic import, but I find that manually putting every transaction in keeps me aware of my spending much better than before, so for me it's quite worth it. Install directly from the APK, or use on web though. The version on the app stores has some features locked behind a paywall.
- Linkwarden - Bookmark manager with cross-platform support, a web interface, automatic tagging, automatic archiving of any saved links in multiple formats, collaborative sharing capabilities, and more. It's free, but you can also pay $3/mo if you want them to host it for you.
Edit: And Umbrel (on Raspberry Pi) if you want to host things more easily. Basically just a much more hands-off, user-friendly docker for people who don't want to tinker as much.
Edit 2: Non-FOSS, but Obsidian is the best note taking app I've ever used. Great selection of community-made plugins (which are FOSS) for additional functionality, and all notes are in standard cross-software-compatible Markdown. No locked-in proprietary formats.
uBlock Origin leading the pack by at least a furlong.
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.
Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, OBS (open broadcast software), Linux distros of various sorts, openHAB, LibreOffice, Firefox (and plugins like uBlock), PiHole, VirtualBox, Notepad++, Paint.NET, VLC, 7-Zip, FileZilla…
I’m sure there’s more.
Fucking entire Fedivere with No ads.
Vim. Every computer I've owned since the early 1990s has had some version of Vi on it.
GIMP
I think Blender is a very honorable mention, especially since the team that makes the software has also used it to make some really impressive short films, such as Big Buck Bunny. Who knows, maybe some indie studio can use it to make some truly wonderful stuff (and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case).
The Dialer.
- Comes with every phone
- 10+ digit number instantly connects you with millions of people, services, and institutions
- 3 digits connects you with life-saving emergency support
- Very low-latency voice support
- High quality audio (most of the time)
- No ads
- No obnoxious UI
All kidding aside, I'm routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.
Adding the following that i have not seen mentioned yet:
Docker - I literally run most of my server programs with docker now. Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and many others.
Tiny Media Manager that I use to scraper and organize my media library
Tiny Tiny RSS to combine my news sites into one aggregator. I actually saw this post on it since Lemmy has RSS feeds!
Openwrt I run as my home router.
I2P but it's still pretty clunky.
Nomachine I use as a remote desktop client.
RocketDock I still use on my windows desktop after windows removed the programs toolbar.
ImageJ/Fiji I use for image processing, it's from the NIH, with a bunch of Java plugins.
Gluetun I use to run my vpn client
Kodi for multimedia
Libre Office
Traccar - a GPS tracker.
It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it's a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.
My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we've both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.
Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there's heaps more)
So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.
Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.
(Just noticed my wife's left her phone behind when she went off riding... I guess no system's perfect!)
It identifies the species of the plant in a given photo.
Blender
Windows
- MPV - Video Player
- DaVinci Resolve - Best Free Video Editor
- Audacity - Audio Recorder
- TeraCopy - File Copy Tool
- Rufus, BalenaEtcher, Ventoy - Bootable USB Creator
- Wireguard, OpenVPN - VPN Client
- ShutterEncoder - Media Converter
- Revo Uninstaller - App Uninstaller
- Throttlestop - CPU Tweaker
- Peace, EqualizerAPO - Audio Equalizer
- Voicemeter - Virtual Audio Mixer
- Qbittorrent - Torrent Client
- Raindrop - Bookmark Manager
Android
- Aegis - Authenticator
- Wireguard - VPN Client
- NextDNS Manager - DNS Manager
- MPV - Video Player
- NewPipe, GrayJay, LibreTube - YouTube Client
- FUTU Voice Input
- FUTO Keyboard
- Aves Gallery
- Delta Icon Pack
- K9 Mail - Mail Client
- QKSMS+ - SMS App
- Perplexity Ai - GPT
- Wavelet - Audio Equalizer
- SafeSpace - Encrypted Vault
- AppOps - App Permission Manager
- Shizuku - Required by AppOps
Home Assistant, not only an App but it changed the way i look at IoT/Smarthome and in that way it brings me a lot of comfort.
Librewolf, FFmpeg, Vim, Wine
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.
OnlyOffice. Great office suite. Also any app from FUTO
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.
Pretty much every major open source project at this point. I need to start looking into donating to the programs I use the most.
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.
Apples
Edit: I steal my neighbours applesJellyfin.
Lichess :) (FOSS Chess server, no account needed to play, second biggest chess server overall)
The folks behind it are one of my admirations
KiCad. It's an electronics design tool on par with commercial options in the industry, which cost a ton of money. Ever since the UI facelift it got a few years ago, it has become my go-to option. They are even working on integrating circuit simulation and finite element analysis, which is just crazy.
Quite a few of my favorites have already been mentioned, so I'll add some that live on my toolbar:
Zim, a desktop wiki with markdown and a lot of plugins. Great for organizing all of your notes with links and a fast search function.
Heroic launcher, for organizing your Epic, GOG and Prime collection.
Geany, an extremely configurable and light editor that can be as simple or as full featured as you want, via plugins.
Terminator, a solid multi terminal emulator where I spend most of my time at work.
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
YouTube clients like NewPipe
Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it'd be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.
SmartTube—It's an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it's YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.
Discord bots—I've setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I've also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.
Wasted (Android Only)
Can nuke your phone's data if not unlocked for X amount if time, along with many other triggers for a wipe.
Very useful considering the political climate of one of the most powerful nations in the world has someone done a nazi salute behind the presidential podium.
Warning: I am not a lawyer. You might get in legle trouble for using this app (Such as "Destruction of Evidence" charges)
The various wireguard mesh VPNs (along with Wireguard itself) such as tailscale/headscale, netbird, etc
Krita
Syncthing
Dosbox
ScummVM
GZDoom
DevilutionX
Wargus
JDownloader
Aside from the obvious FOSS offerings, there is a ton of free music software out there, including plugins for your favorite DAW.
While we are at it, Reaper is not free but they are also not going to bug you to pay for it. It is so good and inexpensive that they mostly rely on the honor system for payment.
ffmpeg
KiCad. GNU Linux. Blender. Gqrx. Rclone. Syncthing
Google Maps
/e/OS, Fedora, Fediverse, many apps from the F-Droid store.
I recently learned about an app called Snappy Driver Installer Origin. It's a minimal FOSS program that checks our PC for the drivers it has, needs installed, or updated and goes about it quickly. It's also portable so it's great if you want it on a install thumb drive.
There are so many apps out there that try to get you to buy or pay a subscription for this feature and others, so it's been a breath of fresh air for me to have learned about and use it.
7 zip, VLC, Paint.net, proxmox, home assistant
Signal. Highly secure communication. No ads. Easy to use.
Spacemonger and jellyfin
Im going to throw libre office in. Spreadsheets are so versatile. You always here about this is done so badly they are using spreadsheets but that just shows how friggin powerful and versatile they are and the other parts of the suite are nice to.
Image Toolbox, full of useful feature for image editing
systemdfall guys
Kodi
NAPS2. I go paperless as much as possible, but still have to scan stuff sometimes. It's the GOAT for scanning.
Lithium EPUB reader
Brave
Kotatsu
For work, entire ecosystems of dependencies. For every language, there’s so much you can do by just including a free module.
My company has some decent policies about giving back, but only on a case by case basis. I’ve been encountering resistance from both sides trying to formalize it.
- WTF is that developer saying he doesn’t want to scan his opensource projects or take advantage of automated builds and testing, as well as regular dependency updates?
- WTF is management so concerned about security and confidentiality but want to just ignore an entire category of components?
We have the tools, we have the process: everyone would be happier of opensource were a first class citizen with well understood rules and practices
GNOME Boxes, works much better than stuff like virtualbox and uses Qemu under the hood.
A bit more niche, is Weasis - Dicom Browser for medical images. Alternative is also ImageJ which is used a lot in for scans too.
CalTopo - free, with paid option worth every penny. Exceptionally good (intuitive, simple, utilitarian) wilderness mapping platform.
Chrome
Shosetsu. It lets you download book seriisls off many different sources. I like to keep my royal road books up to date there.
Language Transfer
I'm very interested and involved in the free software space. I wouldn't say I'm surprised by any being free.
There's some powerhouses of great or big or powerful free software, but I know that and know why they are or can be free.
Usefulness does not correlate with price.
Voyager and pipepipe
Read Era. They also have a paid option but the free is great as it is!
Acode. Amazing code editor with a very intuitive design and tons of features. Best phone implementation of a code app I've ever seen.
