What app is so useful, you can’t believe it’s free?

VLC is a big one for me.

some new weird video format opens windows stock media player because it's not yet associated with vlc
"Hey.. it looks like your going to have to buy a codec..."
manually open in vlc where it runs seemlessly
- I'll take "things that haven't happened to me in years for a dollar Alex".
- People buy codecs?
+1 VLC will dutifully try to play even corrupted to hell files that any other media player would just fail with some form of "can't play, file is corrupt"
VLC is pretty great. I would say IINA is at least a close second on Mac. Haven’t had a problem playing anything in it yet.
- VLC runs great on Mac and Android as well
- Yeah I personally prefer IINA on the Mac because of how native the interface is. Neither VLC or IINA has had trouble paying any video files I have.
Wasn't there some big thing where they tried to buy it and the person that made it was just like "nah"
VLC just managed to get some newer video files to play for me on a 10 year old tablet that wouldn't play them with it's included video player. It was also one of the only apps on the play store that would still work on that old tablet as well. It's been my go-to video player for years now, terrific software 🥂
I agree that it's cool and all, but I just really don't like VLC. It's ugly, bad UX and misses some major features. I love other similar and also free ones thoigh, like PotPlayer, MPC and MPV.
It won't keep track of my place in a Playlist to resume so I trashed it.

Wikipedia

Don’t forget to donate!
- But then it's not free anymore /s
That reminds me, I should donate
Wikipedia
app
Reee
- To be fair, they have an app

7zip

I haven't used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere...why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we're on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?
I'm always amazed when I'm following a tutorial written for windows and it says "download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip". I just right click the file and extract it...
- Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.
- Windows can do that, but opens archives as folders and will run executables by extracting them to a temp folder without dependencies. And the unpack dialogue is cumbersome, with 7zip you get a simple right click -> extract here / to folder dialogue, that somehow still is too much to ask of the main OS.
WinRAR anyone ? 🤭
- What do you mean? I paid \s

Organic Maps

Organic maps is great bit I wish it had real time traffic data. For that reason I normally use magic earth instead.
- Thank you very much for pointing out that app exists
- Also on iOS—looks promising
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-earth-navigation-maps/id1007331679
Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
- It's a beautiful, FOSS, offline/local Google maps-like app for Android that uses Open Street Map data.
  There are plenty of other offline/local map apps, some paid, some free, but they are nowhere near as polished.
  https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/
Organic maps is so good
there's been many a time i've been out in the middle of nowhere with a friend or family member and google maps stops working on their phone, and i get to pull out OM and save the day :^)

Voyager.

Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
- Lemmy mobile client
- Check out !voyagerapp@lemmy.world.
  It’s a fantastic Lemmy client for mobile, and the devs are quite active and responsive.
  e: link format
It’s my favorite client I’ve been using since it was a web app
- Have you tried phtn.app? It's gorgeous.
Up. Sent from Voyager.
That reminds me to send them a few bucks anyway, done ✅
I like the mlem testflight and arctic for iphone, mlem sometimes cant display an image tho

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.

The fact that you put those examples together with this Lagrange browser made me curious enough to check it, I had never heard of Gemini protocol before. So, simply put, thank you for sharing about this, I'm going to be installing Lagrange and start checking out geminispace.
- Cool! Every once in a while, I open the browser and check what's going on in the gemini://midnight.pub
- It's a lot of fun. It only took me a couple of hours to figure out how to make a "site".
  gemini://motion.chrisco.me
  Our local community is getting into it.
Was not aware about the Gemini protocol so thank you for pointing that out!
Freaking LOVE Lagrange, super glad to see it mentioned here
- I mean spss and stata are Rstudio+R alternatives

Linux.

At least $100 per system, if not more.

ZFS

Yeah man zfs Same with snapraid and mergerfs

I can suggest LogSeq as a nice alternative for Obsidian. Notes are all in Markdown too!
- It's good, but it does not allow for a free file structure. Used it for months but now back to obsidian. Also plugins
Some of your data flows through Syncthing servers (but I agree that's a great product, I use it myself) LibreOffice works for entry-level users, but it does not have the same functionality as MSOffice. And the UI sucks as much as MSOffice.
Syncthing is awesome for home devices backups like phone pictures and videos and computer documents that can be version controlled. I also use Local Send app to share files between phones and computers in the house.
You can buy office separately these days again. Not sure if Libreoffice is feature complete these days, but last time I tried it, it was missing a lot of the more advanced featureslike Solver/Powerquery/certain advanced formulas.
I recommend it for everybody and if it is not for you, you wil realise it in a couple of minutes of working with it if you are a oower user
Nice I'll definately check those out. For office I use OnlyOffice
I use near the same stuff. But I don't like these all-in-one centers like umbrel and Casa. I simply use dockge.
And happy cake day.
Cashew - Feature rich financial app
How does Cashew compare to GnuCash?
Came here to recommend those first two exactly
Great list, post saved

SSH.

Alternatively, Postgres.

Came for these, leaving satisfied.

uBlock Origin leading the pack by at least a furlong.

firefox

considering the big monopoly of chrome based is not really free, it's paid by google or microsoft mining user data

In fairness, Firefox is also paid for by Google.
Firefox gets like 90% of its funding from Google for making Google the default search.
- That's funny, that's the first thing I change when I set it up on a new device.
Yes, google pay for being the default search engine, but that doesn't mean they collect your information. And even better, there are also Firefox forks security oriented.

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.

Could you expand on what you mean by ‘complex virtualization needs’ - I read this phrase sometimes but would appreciate an expert’s perspective 🙏
- My only point was to explain that proxmox is great free software because it supports both simple virtualization needs, such as having several different VMs or containers running on one headless system with very little overhead, and complex multi-system setups that include multiple machines running proxmox and clustered together for both reliability and redundancy with distributed services and applications.

Godot

I cant believe it has a better user experience than unity, an app that has a 412 USD/month paid plan

I was waiting for that.
Thanks, checking this out.
- One story that I should write down because I always tell it when discussing Godot since it's a great example of why Godot is better than other engines is that a while back I was doing a single player game for a game jam, because I was testing it with multiple controllers I wanted that it would pick any controller (it's a single player game after all, no one cares which controller I'm using) and was annoyed at the fact that every game engine requires you to create mapping for all controllers individually to do this, e.g. "controller 1 button A", "controller 2 button A", etc. So I went into the code for Godot and added a couple of lines that allowed me to create a mapping for all controllers, i.e. "Any controller Button A". This felt so useful that I wondered why no engine has it, so I submitted a PR and last I checked Godot is still the only engine that allows for "any controller" style mapping.

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.

Gimp is a bit of a stretch.
I've used it a lot, but unlike most of the others on this list, the commercial product (Photoshop) is so much better that I'm willing to shell out the monthly fee to use it over Gimp.
- Back when Photoshop was $300 (600 todays money) It was fine for non-professional work.
  It could use a little UI finesse, a content aware fill without plugins, and a regular human usable macroining system.
  But for 90% of non-professional work clone, dodge, smudge, burn, masking and curves are perfectly serviceable.
- I’m not sure what field you’re in and photoshop certainly is the standard but Affinity has been great for my needs and is pay once if you’re looking to avoid SAAS
- I’ve found a nice workflow in gimp to touch my photos. It works wonderfully

Linux, Firefox, virtualization, Blender, KDE Plasma, ffmpeg, Krita, Inkscape, yt-dlp, Godot, programming language toolchains

blender for sure, its amazing, especially when every comparable software is an expensive subscription
add Graphite to the list
- woah, ive never heard of this one. it looks awesome. thanks for sharing!!
Also got back into 2d after many years, didn't want to pirate illustrator, tried inkscape and its all ill ever need

Fucking entire Fedivere with No ads.

Wikipedia. Not an app but still deserves a mention.

Vim. Every computer I've owned since the early 1990s has had some version of Vi on it.

I've grown to hate vi as I'm building an Ubuntu server, but it's begrudgingly better than the other text editors I've dealt with so far
Or Emacs, if you want a full operating system as your text editor!

Can't believe no one has mentioned Home Assistant. Automation engine for home and have local control over almost everything "smart" at home.

You got a link to that? It has a pretty generic name so I want to make sure I look up the right product. 😅
This one? https://www.home-assistant.io/
- Yeah that one
Home Assistant is awesome! It's the only way to control your house without giving out all your data to Amazon, Google or apple.

OBS, and Blender. Two industry shaping software solutions that ere fully open source and free.

GIMP

And inkscape

Home Assistant

YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.

New pipe, I didn't see anyone mentioned it

Besides, I use Linux, Organic maps, Signal, VLC, KDE on daily basis and THANK YOU good people on internet for making my life happier!

Linux

Get outta here you Hedge Fund Manager! Leave our apps alone!!

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).

Blender is widely used in many industries. digital images, movies, TV series, games, marketing material, and many more.
There are most definitely studios (indie and corporate) doing cool stuff in blender
- This is why Blender is truly the best of us.
"everything everywhere all at once" was made largely in Blender I think, it's the most popular film from a studio using Blender that I know of
You'd be surprised how many animations on youtube (done by small creators are done in Blender ;)
- I would guess a lot.

7-zip
VLC
Signal
Currency
Handbrake
Fennec (in lieu of Firefox)

Those are the free ones I use very frequently at least, I'm sure there's more.

I just arrived in Norway and was about to search for a simple currency converter. Handy!
- Perfect timing, enjoy! My favorite country, used to live there for a while some years ago.

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

DaVinci Resolve is professional grade video editing software that's completely free to use. It lacks some features that the paid version has but this probably doesn't effect the vast majority of casual users.

Second this. Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is amazing. Probably my favorite video editor (although I usually have to use Adobe Premiere for work). It’s fast, fairly easy to use and probably has everything you need unless you’re doing very specific and high end professional work. It’s also rock solid. The only time I had problems was when I tried to render a few dozen (simple) timelines in one queue on a MacBook with 8GB of memory. Can’t exactly blame DaVinci for crashing on me there.
And as a bonus: it even runs on Linux. Although kdenlive is also a surprisingly good alternative there.
And even better, hiring companies for people who are video pros like myself are starting to ask if you're familiar with it. They've realized they don't have to pay Adobe's stupid fees.
The industry should resort to Resolve as a default. Tired of Adobe's bullshit.
Will always mention its mildly scummy they put user created free addons behind the paid studio version, you can buy some of their equipment and it comes with the studio version to save money (one time fee)
- Recent change like 1-2 months ago, if you're still on an older version you wouldn't notice

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.

Libre Office

Anki flash cards. I use it everyday and commercial programs can't hold a candle to it.

That would have been my addition to the list too.
You use it for studying, right?
- Are you implying there are other ways to use it? I only know it for studying / learning languages so I'm curious
- I use it for learning english and german words
Unfortunately the iOS app is kinda expensive, $35 CAD. 😵‍💫

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!)

Neat!
One of my few remaining Google dependencies is maps and timeline. I just like having that data somewhere and most of the FOSS stuff I've seen previously is piecemeal at best. Will have to play with this.
- Yay, I'm not the only one!
  When was the last time we went to Disney? Wait let me open my timeline.
  Hell, I don't even need it to be as fancy as Google maps. Just give me dots on a map and let me filter by date.

Audacity. How the hell is Audacity free?

Since the Muse Group has acquired Audacity and its following telemetry/spy-ware case, it has a little bitter aftertaste, there are good alternatives though like Ardour
Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it's basically free (presuming you're not a business).
- and Ardour
I'm glad Audacity is free, but as an audio (and video) professional, it's a giant pain in the ass.
Oh, so thats where the phrase "the audacity of it" comes from
- The term came long before the program...
I know, right? The audacity!

F-droid is amazing and distributes amazing software that many people already mentioned.

In order to write software, developers need software. I think we should also mention the GNU packages and LLVM.

Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.

OrganicMaps, all the trails I've been to so far in the US are available for offline navigation. No need to precache via gmaps and pray it won't get deleted

Edit: OpenStreetMap which powers this is what AllTrails uses, but I'm not sure if they contribute back or not

Blender

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

Hear hear! I'm living in Fedora-land for school and gaming, and I run into way less trouble than my classmates!
- My computer isn't good enough for gaming, but I use the steam deck for that. I'm accidently 100% Linux (well, and android, which doesn't really count). Lol. But, man, I was nervous about making the switch to completely Linux. The only time I'd done that before was back in like 09 when I had this shitty Acer laptop that I swapped to Ubuntu because it simply would not run windows. That wasn't a great experience, but things weren't as polished then, plus it was the world's worst laptop. Now I feel like I've upgraded to something that should cost 5 times the price. Like, it feels like I should be embarrassed by how good it is, like it was a splurge or an irresponsible financial decision. And it's free!
- Do you face many compatibility issues when gaming?
Fedora is awesome. I use the immutable version Kinoite, and it's fork with non-free extras Aurora. Dev container is with Arch just because there are a ton of packages. All the GUI apps from Flathub.
I need to add KDE to this mix. What a wonderful desktop it is. Like what Windows should be but is not.
- I'm running Bazzite right now, because I wanted to test it out, but normally I run Silverblue. When I first went to Linux years ago it was all Ubuntu, so I got used to GNOME and unity. Since then, I've never really been able to get into KDE. It feels too windowsy to me, and I fell in love with the quick keyboard controls and the smoothness on gnome. I fully get why someone might not like it, but for me it's a near perfect fit.
  That's honestly the best thing about Linux. With windows or Mac you're stuck with how they want things to function. I love being able to change my DE, even if I never do it

Right now, it's Calibre because I just got a Kobo eBook reader and it's so great to be able to install pretty much any format of book onto my device and convert it if it's a format the device can't use. And even convert it if the book works better in a different format.

Caliber is truly amazing, but Kobo support is… Odd. I love my Kobo for comics because of the color screen, but uploading .cbz files is an obtuse process. Kobo readers won’t natively read metadata from .cbz files, but you can manually push the metadata to the device’s database. But in order to do that, you need the file to actually be in the database, which doesn’t happen until after you unplug the device.
So to get a .cbz file working, you need to plug your Kobo in, upload the .cbz file(s), disconnect your Kobo, let it index the file(s), and then hope to god that it actually shows up on the device’s library when you plug it back into your computer so you can manually update the metadata.
- Truly odd. The process sounds painful to troubleshoot and find out.
I was just looking into getting this setup for my partner
- I cannot recommend it enough.
Yeah calibre is amazing, and also integrates anti-drm plugins nicely. Recently I've been reading more and more on my phone so file formats don't matter anymore, but it's still a great software just for managing your ebook archive.
As a mobile reader I can also really recommend ReadEra (free and ad free), they do have a premium version, but all that adds is synchronize books via cloud storage to other devices and sync reading progress.

PlantNet

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

Similarly, Seek.
Thanks for this. I was looking to get away from iplant and Google lens.

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.

If we’re talking CLI I’ll add Chdman. Like magic for compressing ISO’s.

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.

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

QKSMS isn't maintained anymore. There is an active fork called: QUIK
https://github.com/octoshrimpy/quik
FUTO voice and keyboard are open source, but not free... Just sayin'
- Payment is optional.
I love Aves' functionalities and speed, but I can't stand its UI design. Who TF thought it would look good to have a bright and glowing ring around photo folder thumbnails in an otherwise minimalistic UI?
- The dev is also a dickhole
- I really didn't like the UI too at first. It felt odd since no app looks like that.
  Now that I'm used to it's functionality, I am totally blind to the colorful rings. I barely notice the colors.
  Oh I just noticed I can turn it off.
  But it still has a white ring on every folder which is ugly.
Davincis great, they lost some hype for me since you now need premium for the free user created addons

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.

Bro, give Only office a try. I have a friend who uses it for his business and he claims it has the best compatibility when going from Foss and of MS Office.

Retroarch.

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

- It’s shitty until you realize how it’s put together and what operates what. It makes a lot more sense since I watched Russ’ video on shaders and overlays at Retro Game Corps.
- I've been a retro gamer since retro gaming meant Pong and I've used a lot of fiddly emulators in my time but I've never quite figured out RetroArch's interface.
I'm still trying to figure it out. It's not easy when you have ADHD and get frustrated easily.

Organic Maps. After switching to graphene, I quickly found plenty of apps replacing the "defaults" I had on stock android, however, a good app for maps was impossible to find until I stumbled over that one. Great UI, local maps, even has a navigation feature. Completely replaces google maps for me.

LocalSend, Immich, Signal, Aurora store, Radio Garden, Gray Jay, yt-dlp, and Bitwarden just to name a few

Emacs

Org-mode is life
- Life actually runs on org-mode
- And Orgzly for Android just completes it nicely
- And Magit
Bbbut I use a PC!

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.

Pathos: Nethack Codex (though it's not just Nethack) is also very good in a similar vein
I always get hungry when I play pixel dungeon! What an addictive grind!

I still can't get used to calling programs apps

Librewolf, FFmpeg, Vim, Wine

OnlyOffice. Great office suite. Also any app from FUTO

Photopea Fully functional Photoshop in your browser. Amazing.

I just wish I could download and install it, rather than have it require a constant Internet connection.
Not free as in freedom

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

and Audacity

Libby ebook reader/browser

Libraries for that matter.
Was gonna mention Libby. We need to empower our libraries now more than ever, and Libby is a fantastic start.
Go get a library card ASAP!
And maybe reserve the 2 hour audiobook "On Tyranny" while you're at it.

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.

Vscodium exists
- I use it daily. There's no reason to use VSCode when this is there
you are the product 😉

I dislike the implication that the most useful apps are not free.

I always feel more comfortable using FOSS software, even if it doesn't look as nice as the commercial option.

I dislike the implication that FOSS software doesn't look nice.
There are plenty of beautiful apps on f-droid.
- Vinyl media player is very pretty.
I dislike the implication that the most useful apps are not free.
People have to live somehow, without money - difficult... Unfortunately the will to donate to such projects is still pretty low...
- I understand that people need money to live, but a lot of the "most useful" software (as in... almost every part of the web) is open source software built by well paid developers.
  Your comment might be applicable to an android lemmy client for example, but not to software generally.

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

The folks behind it are one of my admirations

audacity

neovim

calibre

mpv

Audacity is terrible.
REAPER is evaluationware akin to WinZip, and much more robust than Audacity. The trial and full version are the same. You can buy apropos licenses whenever you feel the desire.
- it's worth bearing in mind that comparing audacity and reaper is like comparing notepad++ to libreoffice- in many cases libreoffice is a much more robust program but in others all the extra bells and whistles are bloat. you wouldn't want to program in libreoffice!
  that said audacity has some wildly bizzare design, and any forks are either even worse with this or incredibly unstable, so audacity being terrible isn't wrong sadly
- +1 for reaper. Its free to "demo" forever with no limitations and is much closer to a traditional DAW than audacity. So many plugins and scripts to customise too, such a great tool I can never recommend it enough to anyone wanting to do anything from simple audio edits/conversions to full fat tracking and mixing sessions.

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.

Apples
Edit: I steal my neighbours apples

Jellyfin.

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.

Linking for anyone else interested; Zim

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

love mihon I use the yokai fork on my tablet, got me back into comics, mixplorer is also nice but zarchiver while uglier always works, mixplorer sometimes doesn't for me, so I keep both.

I miss when apps were specific to phones and we kept desktop computers out of it.

OctoPrint for 3D printing

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.

Nice set of local AI apps

Watch duty

AntennaPod

Signal

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

For me: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Keepass, and Aegis

What is aegis in this case? (It's way too generic to successfully search for)

I couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to play nice with my networked drive; Apparently Docker just refuses to use networked drives as mapped locations. Since all of my audiobooks are stored on my NAS, it was a non-starter for me.
Prologue is a nice alternative though; It integrates with Plex to stream audiobooks. Plex doesn’t have native audiobook support, but Prologue simply uses Plex to actually access the files. Then it can read the chapter and metadata directly from the files. And since Plex’s remote access is fairly easy, it means Prologue’s remote access is fairly easy too.
The big downside is that you’re tied to Plex instead of Jellyfin. I already had a lifetime PlexPass license, so it’s not a problem for me to just spin up a Plex server with an “Audiobooks” library.
Simply wanted to leave the comment for anyone else who may be in the same boat I was in a few weeks ago with Audiobookshelf.
- Apparently Docker just refuses to use networked drives as mapped locations. Since all of my audiobooks are stored on my NAS[...]
  Mount the NAS share to whatever machine is hosting the Docker instance, then point your docker containers at that mount point.
- Jellyfin is awesome, I also use it to serve my music and audio books. It's a bit more quirky than plex but I like that it's not tied to some company server in any way.
- Have you tried properly mounting the network drive? Another option would be to just install audiobookshelf on the NAS.
- Also had issues with mapped NFS shares in Docker.
  In the end I just mounted it to my host

YouTube clients like NewPipe

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)

(Such as "Destruction of Evidence" charges)
Just checked my state's law. It specifies "intentionally" destroying the evidence. If you have it set up to do it after a certain amount of inactivity, your intent is not to destroy evidence. By all means a corrupt judicial system or police force could still abuse it. But it shouldn't be illegal (at least in my state).
Warning: IANAL
It's only destruction of evidence if it's evidence of a crime. You can destroy data for countless reasons that are not crimes, but it might be up to you to show that it's unrelated to a crime. Most large companies have a data destruction policy for that reason. If it gets called out in court (usually in civil cases), they can point to that policy. The docs weren't shredded/erased to hide wrongdoing; they just haven't been used in 24 months and that's when our policy says to delete.

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

Also PROJ
Not an app but open street maps is a wonder of the world
I second QGIS sooo much. I would even count it as an app because its shipped integrated (same as blender).
Its ridiculous how many people use QGIS and what amount of responsibility they carry. Its like actually the pro option in the gis space as its much more flexible than the proprietary counterparts.

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.

The various wireguard mesh VPNs (along with Wireguard itself) such as tailscale/headscale, netbird, etc

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.

Also shout-out to airwindows. Absolutely fantastic plugin collection, and entirely free!!!!
Edit: also, while I'm at it, Orca is a great, though very weird, sequencer.
check out ardour

Krita

Syncthing

Dosbox

ScummVM

GZDoom

DevilutionX

Wargus

JDownloader

Stremio + torrentio plug-in.

My wife and I haven't paid for a subscription in 5 years and watch everything we want

ffmpeg

KiCad. GNU Linux. Blender. Gqrx. Rclone. Syncthing

Off the top of my head:

Krita

Handbrake

LibreOffice

Let me hijack your comment mentioning Krita with another KDE app: Okular!
I simply can't believe a PDF app can be this performant, this fully featured, and entirely free. It even works on Windows, if you're trapped in that nightmare.
Adobe Acrobat Reader, from the people who created the PDF format, is unbelievably slow, it takes a thousand steps through an ugly UI to do anything useful, and any feature you actually care about is locked behind payment. Okular, a free tool, will load PDFs instantly, render previews flawlessly, let you edit, sign, merge, add text, select text, whatever you wish.
And KDE creates this app and a thousand others for less money than Mozilla wasted on some random bs last year. Long live KDE.
- Tagging onto this comment to say that I'm also very impressed by stirlingpdf.com for pdf stuff.
  I've recently started using KDE for the first time, so I'll see how I get on with Okular
- Thanks, I'll check that out.
Shutter Encoder is good too

Signal. Highly secure communication. No ads. Easy to use.

/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.

Linux Mint did this out of the box for me with zero effort
In fact, I'm about to install it on my second PC in two months 👹
windows drivers. i've been doing this work for decades: i quit chasing down every driver update from all the various manufacturers years ago. windows is actually really good at fleshing-out necessary drivers and putting them on, and has been for awhile. gamers and others that 'need' gpu driver updates, sure. get 'em from the source. same with things that windows didn't have for some odd reason.
my own 'gaming rig' in use now (zen3, 3060, w11) is just using the gpu drivers from windows update. they work just fine. i've never even loaded nvidia's control panel on that pc and accepted its eula so i could make what few adjustments it has (very limited compared to the 'full' driver pack). they're actually more stable, even: when the system updated to w11, i did try the 'latest and greatest' but the system crashed daily. rolled back (ty, reflect) and kept the wu-supplied drivers, and been smooth sailing ever since.
- Microsoft excels at driver compatibility, and has for a long time. It's their strongest suit.

7 zip, VLC, Paint.net, proxmox, home assistant

There are so many complex applications that I can't believe are free: KDenLive, Gimp, Audacity, Firefox, Discord, Calibre, Jellyfin, Rainmeter, Godot, Retroarch

Discord isn't free, you're paying with your data. 😅

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

systemd

revanced app is mobile

NAPS2. I go paperless as much as possible, but still have to scan stuff sometimes. It's the GOAT for scanning.

Kodi

I use cygwin a lot. I fine it extremely convenient. Most of my personal software development is done in gvim and compiled in cygwin. I wven dosome of my professional work, particularly unit testing in it.

Anything which is Libre/OpenSource

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.

Never heard of it before, but used to use Virtualbox quite a bit. What makes this much better?
- Super easy to use and the guest distro just works. Minimal interface which looks nice, but misses some features such as network settings.
  Qemu is great though. Linux virtualization is the best in class. Basically the whole Internet runs on top of KVM. Boxes is just a UI on top of KVM.
- Virtualbox is owned by Oracle. Oracle has a nasty habit of being a real shitty company.

Damn near every tool I use on PC, really. Audacity, OBS, VLC, all the random bits of software I need to run my jank-ass FBT setup...

Google Maps

A bit more niche, is Weasis - Dicom Browser for medical images. Alternative is also ImageJ which is used a lot in for scans too.

Shosetsu. It lets you download book seriisls off many different sources. I like to keep my royal road books up to date there.

CalTopo - free, with paid option worth every penny. Exceptionally good (intuitive, simple, utilitarian) wilderness mapping platform.

Voyager and pipepipe

WinRAR

Read Era. They also have a paid option but the free is great as it is!

Language Transfer

Acode. Amazing code editor with a very intuitive design and tons of features. Best phone implementation of a code app I've ever seen.

fall guys

Rif is fun

Brave

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.

Fuck apps. Real people use programs.

Google Maps

google products aren't free, you pay with your soul.
Well, jokes aside, they are useful but if you are dependent on them google has way too much power over you. Personally, I would be fucked if google decided to ban my account for some reason. And they have demonstrated they will not unban you even if they make mistake.

Chrome