Libre office, a great office option. I've been using it for 15 years. Foreshadowing

VLC, Plays media. It's a tank. Also Highways use VLC to mark many winter potholes.

Linux, It's not that hard to use anymore.( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

WINE, not just for one night stands! it's great for running Windows Stuff on Linux.

Also, and my personal favorite, your mom is free and open source. Mic Drop going to bed. With your mom. Wasn't expecting that twice were you? Well, neither was your mom. Got 'em.

Ublock Origin. The amount of people going through life exposing themselves to ads is tragic. It's so unhealthy and most people aren't aware that there is a simple and free way of protecting yourself from the psychological warfare that corpos use against society

Krita 🎨🖌️

It's literally FOSS Adobe Illustrator, why do people don't use it??

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source (open data) project. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative mapping platform that allows users from around the world to contribute, edit, and use geographical data. The data and software behind OSM are open-source, which means they are freely available for anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute under open licenses.

The data contributed to OpenStreetMap islicensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). This license allows for the free use of the data as long as proper attribution is given and any derivative works are also made available under the same open license.

I got addicted to using and contributing on OSM daily and enjoy spending my time improving the map. In fact a lot of closed source maps such as Google Maps and Apple Maps pull from some of the OSM data, so everyone gets to benefit from contributions.

In case you're looking into this out of curiosity, check out the Beginner's Guide and try to verify that the data around your neighborhood is correct and maybe add a point of interest (PoI) or a street name or two. Beware, it gets addictive quite fast.

OSM is also used for humanitarian use thanks to the HOT tasking platform. For example the majority of relief effort in Turkey's February earthquake, Sri Lanka flooding, and the recent Marocco earthquake. Mapping can literally help save lives. It's fun and easy too!

Jellyfin, it's pretty simple and if you have a spare computer, a decent connection (and by decent I don't mean even a decent one by 21th century standards, I still have a 100/10mbps ADSL) and a 2/4tb Hdd, you can host your own FOSS Netflix/Hulu with all the shows you want, if you're in a county where "sailing the seven seas" is a huge deal, the only subscription would be a cheap VPN or even better something like real debrid.

Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).

DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.

Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.

Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.

Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.

And many others.

Proton.

I know it might not be in the spirit of the thread because it's not something you download and use as it's own thing but it has allowed me to exclusively run Linux on my gaming PC. I think more folks should try it to slowly tip the scales more on Linux.

Blender is my favorite open source tool I wish I knew how to use :)
I’d love to use it for creating my own designs and took several attempts at learning it. But I always end up giving up on it due to lack of time and energy.

For anyone doing academic writing, I use a combination of Logseq, Zotero, and Zettlr. All open source. Collect articles in Zotero. Annotate and take notes on those articles in Logseq with absolutely amazing PDF annotation tools. Write draft in Zettlr which allows me to enter Zotero citations and reference Logseq notes.

Bonus shoutout to LibreOffice for exporting and formatting the final draft. And that’s your recipe for one all-natural, organic, FOSS thesis!

PC:

1. Libreoffice -- the best, most customisable and powerful office software available
2. Onlyoffice -- alternative for less-advanced users who are used to the UI of contemporary MSO
3. Zotero -- great bibliography manager useful when writing scientific papers: lets you collect books, journal articles and all other types of sources, automatically finds full text PDFs online, fills in metadata and then inserts dynamic citations in thousands of different, customisable styles. Also generates bibliographies. Works with LO, MSO and GDocs
4. Caprine -- clean Facebook Messenger client (web wrapper based)
5. TeXStudio -- my L^A^T~e~X editor of choice; integral (ha!) when formatting maths-heavy documents

Android:

1. Cloudstream

free streaming app, works with SFlix, Sodastream, PH and other legally dubious streaming providers. Takes some trickery to set up though. 2. Osmand

OpenStreetMap client with offline (optional online) navigation and plenty of plugins; loads of customisation 3. Material Files

nicest file manager, especially for rooted devices 4. Showly

freemium open-source TV and film tracker. Syncs with Trakt.tv 5. Simple Gallery

out of all Simple Apps by this developer, this is the only one which is in fact superior to its alternatives. Highly customisable, powerful, lightweight gallery app

Kdenlive video editor

Every other classic board game should have a game client as good as lichess.

But, speaking of games, Simon Tatham's puzzle collection.

I'll skip the common ones that are frequently mentioned to give Zim some love! Zim is a desktop wiki app which, as implied, allows you to make your own private wiki which is invaluable for my writing and worldbuilding hobby.

OBS for screen recording.

inkscape. awesome vector drawing program

Blender. Maybe not everyone needs to try it but it it's great if you like 3D.

I can suggest everyone to try Bitwarden if they don't have a password manager yet. I use Pass now (because UNIX^TM^) but was a Bitwarden fan before.

Lemmy

Lemmy

A little different from many of the things mentioned, but...

• Tales of Maj'Eyal - an open source Roguelike with a ton of content. There are paid expansions but the engine and base game are FOSS.
• 0 A.D. - AOE-like
• Battle for Wesnoth - a really fun TBS
• gzdoom + freedoom - while the assets aren't quite on par with the commercial Doom assets, this will allow you to play through any Doom mod/TC

• Hugo has been a phenomenal tool for building light-weight, static websites as I've been working to drop WordPress
• KMyMoney is a life altering personal finance manager that has made budgeting and saving so much more achievable
• KeepassXC is what I use for all of my passwords and important information relative to accounts
  • Aegis is also a tool I've been using for 2FA after seeing the benefits of that kind of model

Only because CTRL+F had zero results: Krita. Everyone complains about GIMP having a bad name and Krita is actually good!!

Besides software mentioned by others:

NeoVim: The single most perfect editor of all time.

QOwnNotes: A pretty good note taking app for markdown notes with tons of extension and options. But tbh Obsidian is still the gold standard.

SSH: It's everywhere. Controlling my servers from remote is a trivial task. Also, it does tunneling.

Syncthing: Syncing files around has never been easier than with syncthing. And it's decentralized, encrypted, private.

Kitty: A great Terminal Emulator

Firefox+uBlock (web browser)
MEncoder (video encoder)
OBS (screen recording and streaming software)
Inkscape (vector illustration software)
Mumble (VoIP chat room server/client/protocol)
Julia (programming language great for scripting and mathematics)

For Unix systems:
Wezterm (terminal multiplexor)
i3 (window manager)

MPV player. Super lightweight, minimalist, literally runs anything you throw at it, keyboard focused, hyper customizable, loads of plugins for anything you can think of, supports all the meme filters and best of all, multiple frontends available.

Obtainium - - app with which you can download & update apps (apk's) directly from github/gitlab/etc. (and even f-droid).

Absolutely awesome 👍

i have a few all time favourites on android:

-Aves, a really good gallery app

-openboard, awesome keyboard without tracking software

-fairmail, really good email app

-liftoff for lemmy

-dolphin emulator, if your phone can run it

-SD maid SE, one of those storage cleaner thingys

-syncthing, for making backups over WiFi

there's even more i use on windows. if you look hard enough, you will find an alternative to every program you're using.

Big fan of Krita as a painting program. You've gotta learn some different hotkeys and all that, but it's better laid out and easier to learn than like, GIMP or Blender ime. Lots of good tutorials, plenty of free brushes, quite customizable. I really like its alpha-locking and groups as an alternative system to clipping masks.

Inkscape and GIMP as alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop.

From the top of my head, I would name Okular. No other FOSS pdf reader is as complete and easy to use.

I'm not as well versed in FOSS as other posters but FOSS Android apps that I learned about on Lemmy/kbin and am enjoying:

AntennaPod (podcast player)
Inoreader (RSS reader)
Newpipe (YT player)
Bitwarden (password manager)
LibreraFD (PDF and other format reader, substitute for OverDrive)
kbin (I subscribe to Lwmmy communities thru kbin, also)

And I rely in Firefox with UBO, as other posters have mentioned.

I adore VLC.

I've been using Linux Mint for almost a year and a half now: would recommend it to anyone ready to make a jump into Linux and away from Windows. It's quite friendly.

I'm also quite enjoying Sonarr to keep track of some older television shows that I enjoy.

Termux: A terminal emulator for Android.

• KeePassXC, it is a client for KeePass password management, works great

• Krita, KDE's awesome drawing program

LogSeq for taking notes.

It is a markdown editor and has a lot of features i didn't know I wanted. Like you can mark in PDFs and those marks will be made into notes with shortcuts to that place right into your other notes.

blender's beginner friendly enough for me to universally recommend it at this point - you might bounce off, or you might, like me, be a half-decent visual artist 3 years later!