What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
If you're in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you're doing and click that link.
Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it's so much better than your standard internet citation generators.
Don't forget to share the intel with your classmates!
Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs... with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
- Open source client and server.
- Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
- Cross-platform feature parity.
- Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
- Easy notes syncing.
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
- Ability to publish notes.
- Decent UX.
Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without
PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.
It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!
Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:
Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)
cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)
VLC (media player that plays almost everything)
- URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
- PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.
I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.
This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
I didn't discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn't budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I've gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we're sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
I've known about it for longer but just started using KDE Connect over the last year or so.
It's got some bugs, at least for me. Like sometimes my phone won't connect to my computer or like the SMS feature takes forever to load, but having something akin to Pushbullet but free from enshitification has been really great.
Syncthing
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.
But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust
Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.
Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.
It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.
My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.
Revanced
I don't know if Tailscale counts because it's mostly open source (with options to run your own server), but I use it constantly to connect to Home Assistant and Jellyfin on my home server, as well as pairing it with NextDNS (pihole is possible for those that want to go that route) for ad blocking and Mullvad to use them as an exit node.
Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.
I've had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.
Linux and godot
spotDL. Searches YouTube to download whole Spotify playlists, or individual songs, and includes artwork and metadata.
DeltaChat.
It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Sends downsampled pics, videos or push-to-talk audio by default. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too, as a file.
Integrates with Jitsi Meet to connect video-calls.
It's available on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free-email-address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/ ), or use your own existing email address.
Elegant and robust.
Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.
Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,
Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.
Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.
My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.
"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:
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Kvaesitso, search focused android launcher. I used to really like nova launcher's local search and navigated my phone mostly using that. But once gensture navigation became a thing I had to stop using nova and replicate the experience in Samsung launcher with various local search apps that were lacking in comparison. Tried to go back a couple times once gestures with 3rd party launchers got better but found my old setup still too ugly and sluggish to go back to. Recently I randomly came across Kvaesitso on fdroid and it was everything I ever wanted out of a launcher.
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Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.
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Kid3, audio file tag editor. It has much better workflow/automation than mp3tag that I used in windows, and it seems if you spend some effort on it you could add more automation to make it even better.
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Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.
For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.
Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.
My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.
Now that most of my friends and family are using it, I'm on Briar Messaging every day. Since there are no central servers, is entirely encrypted, and runs on the Tor network, I think it is probably the most secure messaging platform out there. It also has private groups and forums but I am not yet involved in any of those outside of a couple of small ones that are just for sharing family news.
Guix!
That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).
Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.
It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern "media library" interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).
I can live without Logseq but for work and keeping a log of how that worked (other than bash history) It's really useful
Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.
Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like "Press T to open up trainer menu".
Unfortunately it's not available (natively) on Linux. I've used Lutris but I don't believe it has the same customization options. I don't think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven't tried to customize it in several years. I've gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It'sFOSS article about it here.
Magic Wormhole - it's been around awhile but it's super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.
Some great apps on here, downloading some of the suggestions to try out
This was the year I tried out Darcs & Pijul. With conflicts being less problematic & easier to collab without patch order mattering, you gotta wonder why all of this effort is still put into bolting stuff atop Git instead of moving on & helping the tooling in this space.
Second place would be Movim as a decentralized social media platform built atop the XMPP server you are already running.
orange pi running samba as a file server. it's behind a wireguard vpn.
huge improvement in my quality of life.
Audiobookshelf. I've started using it this year, and I've listened to it every day except for a single day since I started lol. Its amazing to keep track of my podcasts and audiobooks. My only complaint is the app doesn't do autoplay for podcasts but headset media controls work, and the web client autoplays podcasts, but my media controls don't work. Even with those minor complaints, its an amazing tool that I don't know how I'd live without again.
Jami, a p2p zoom replacement I am looking to use.
I'll take a slight tangent to this topic and talk about FOSS software I've recently had to give up that I really really miss: Autokey. Autokey is a rough equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows, it can do anything from on the fly text replacement (type teh and it will correct to the, or type *date and it fills in today's date) right up to firing whole Python scripts. it doesn't work on Wayland (apparently there are security features that prevent it from working the same way it does on X11?), and I've yet to find a replacement for it that does.
Image Toolbox Its a photo editor with everything you need. Its really really powerful and so fleshed out. Everytime I use it, I discover something new. The only sad thing is, that I can't donate in XMR otherwise I've would of donated. If you have an android, download it and try it. It's a must have on any phone imo.
Klipper, for 3d printing. Most of current manufacturer use it as primary software for their printers.
CIPP. Its used to manage multiple office 365 tenants so its not really useful to anyone outside of managed service providers. it makes doing shit in 365 wayyy easier than using the Microsoft portal.
I switched to niri about a year ago. It's perfect for those who like tiling WMs but want a more natural flow, without constant window resizing.
Niri with waybar, fuzzel, and tessen give a pretty complete desktop.
I picked up KdenLive for video editing and it's pretty freaking good imo
Timelinize... description from GitHub: Organize your photos & videos, chats & messages, location history, social media content, contacts, and more into a single cohesive timeline on your own computer where you can keep them alive forever.
There's also Delta Chat, FairEmail and DEFINITELY LOCALSEND.
I discovered this more than a year ago, but Fuzzel.
I just wrote about the new release here:
https://mark.stosberg.com/feature-packed-app-launcher-and-fuzzer/
KeepassXC, Syncthing, Orgmode ecosystem.
croc
Nothing. Discovered mine long before.