We all love open-source software, but there are so many amazing projects out there that often go unnoticed. Let’s change that! Share your favorite open-source software that you think more people should know about. Here’s how you can contribute:
- Single Option Per Comment: Mention one open-source software per comment to be able to easily find the most popular software.
- No Duplicates: Avoid duplicating software that has already been mentioned to ensure a wide variety of options.
- Upvote What You Love: If you see a software that you also appreciate, upvote it to help others discover it more easily.
Check out last year’s post for more inspiration: Last Year’s Post
Let’s create a comprehensive list of open-source software that everyone should know about!
VLC (VideoLAN media player): play media files, DVDs, network streams and more. Just works,
LibreOffice - simply the best office suite there is (IMHO). I was a MS-office user for years, but since I switched, I haven’t looked back…
Inkscape - the best vector graphics program out there. So easy to use, and so powerful.
GIMP - unlike Krita - which is made for drawing - this is made for photo-editing. It’s like Photoshop. The learning curve is a bit steep, but it is really powerful.
Krita is a fantastic program for drawing. It’s made for making beautiful paintings and animations.
Firefox - the original private webbrowser. Even though some people don’t like the options in it (like those that let you stream Netflix and other DRM content). If people care about privacy, they use this browser, or one that is made from it…
Thunderbird - a brilliant e-mail program, which also handles contacts, newsfeeds, calender and more. It’s available for multiple platforms, like Android, Windows, Linux and so forth…
Learned about the mentos thing in 2006. Saw a list of things to flavor coke. This was #4 on the list and I decided to try it (yay mint coke) - at a dollar tree parking lot, in my car. Went off in my mouth and I maintained the pressure until I got the door open and my head out. Thankfully little mess on me or the car. Learned the internet can be full of sneaky assholes that day.
strudel. From the website:
With Strudel, you can expressively write dynamic music pieces.
The best place to actually make music with Strudel is the Strudel REPL
It’s really fun to make music in it, I recommend trying it out!
aria2. From the website:
aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces.
qBittorrent: only for your legal torrenting needs from e.g. archive.org :>
librewolf a privacy-focused fork of the latest stable firefox (win,linux,mac)
Calibre: great e-book manager
krename is another excellent, but not as well known as it should be, KDE app.
krename can rename files and directories, and directories recursively, to almost anything. You can rename:
- using information from the files or about the files (image info, date / time info, etc)
- with templates (like #### for incrementing 0001, 0002, 0003, etc)
- by adding parts of the original file name (first three characters then the last 4 characters, for example)
- using find and replace (spaces to underscore, remove special characters, etc), including regular expressions
- by changing case
or with a mix of everything.
krename has a simple mode and an advanced mode for renaming, so you don’t have to jump into the deep end with the features.
You do have to be careful with some of the file info functions - it will happily try to rename a movie or a pdf with (non-existent) image EXIF info, for example. That would result in a file with a name you did not intend.
Vassal - an open-source (LGPL-2.1) boardgame engine. basically, people build different modules for each game they want to play, then they can play that game over the internet or solo. Mostly focused on “chit-and-hex” style wargames.
