Ask Lemmy

I love Godot for making video games.

Simple enough for a hobbyist, powerful enough for a developer. Free and open source

I have a few to recommend...

Firefox - Stop giving an ad network all of your data on a silver platter.

Affinity Photo - Good photo editing software with perpetual licensing.

digiKam - FOSS photo organizing software

Strawberry Music Player - A fork of a fork of amaroK, good music player!

VLC - Watch any video file.

Kodi - Consume your media library, in style!

OpenRA - Play the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert as well as Dune 2000 on modern hardware/software for free.

Unreal Tournament 2004 - I have bought this game three times, the original CD release on 6 discs, Steam and GOG. This is to my mind the best arena shooter ever, the original CD release even came with an official Linux installer.

If you have a local transit agency that it works with, the Transit app is great. I wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable taking the bus/subway without it; my city’s website is not great to try to navigate while changing plans on the fly. Transit will give you multiple options and show you on a map how to get there from where you are.

It also lets you gamify taking the bus by giving people a rank in exchange for providing location data while on the bus. I’m top 40 on my local line. 😎 And you can send other people a little generic thank you that makes hearts fly up on their screen if they’re providing location data for a bus on a line you’re viewing.

Overall 10/10, great balance of fun and utility.

A couple of years ago I made a table when switching from OSX to Linux, the table is still quite up to date: https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux

Newpipe, KDEconnect, Vlc, KeepassXC, Syncthing, convert (CLI program for converting files eg jpg to PNG ), Yakuake (a dropdown terminal)

Aegis, Bitwarden, Librewolf, Mullvad and MEGA on my desktop

Do you mean on phones? Windows? Macs? Watches?

I like Merlin on iOS cos it identifies birds by their calls.

foobar2000 is an awesome music player

Got a game on a library other than Steam, but want access to all the Steam workshop mods for said game because nobody posts them anywhere else?

Then you want WorkshopDL. I would be stuck with a minimally modded RimWorld if not for this, because I got the game on GOG, and I'm not paying for it and all the DLC again just to get access to the workshop.

LocalSend. File transfer between any devices with (almost) any OS over LAN. No account required. The best file transfer app I've ever encountered by far.

StreetComplete. Get motivated to go outside with quests to help complete OpenStreetMaps. Surprisingly addictive. Requires an OpenStreetMaps account.

f.lux. Remove the blue light from your computer monitor in the evening to help you fall asleep more easily. Redshift. As above. Not quite as good, but works on some OS/System configurations that f.lux can't handle.

Pulsar. A community version of the discontinued Atom text editor. Highly extendable and configurable. Great for small programming tasks or opening text files with an obscure syntax. Has most of the packages built for Atom.

Home Assistant. For automating your house and more (controlling smart lights and appliances, monitoring solar panel output, weather forecasts, printer diagnostics, delivery tracking...). A dedicated device (Raspberry Pi, old laptop) is highly recommended. A bit of a learning curve, but hard to live without after using it.

Krita (without any kind of unnecessary unsupported and unofficial AI plugins btw). It's one of the few free programs that I like so much I paid for them.

I've also been getting a lot of mileage out of Tiny Media Manager.

Voidtools Everything is a gamechanger on Windows. It can search my entire PC instantly opposed to Windows Explorer taking minutes. You can also configure it to work with 3rd party file managers like Freecommander and eliminate Explorer from your workflow entirely.

Any more of a clue? What is your focus right now?

For drawing, definitely Paint Tool SAI! When I began drawing digitally, a friend gifted me two programs for me to use, Illustrator and Paint Tool SAI. I ended up settling on the latter. It is a very old program that got released in 2008, but it is lightweight, fast, stable, and has really good blending and pen stabilization options!

I like the Arduino framework. GrapheneOS and Portal 2.

GameMaker is awesome for... making games, but also automation and simple apps as well. Excel can be used for automating things and be a useful calculator. I like doing digital art on Artrage as it has realistic tools and has a simpler interface without all that clutter. The Kustom apps (android) are awesome for making live wallpapers, lock screens, smart watch faces, and widgets. GraphicsGale is useful for pixel art. Offline Games (android) is a compilation of... offline games. They're well made and worth the no-ads purchase. I think that's about all my personal favorites unless I include Boost for lemmy

Scoop is my favourite package manager on Windows. I'm also familiar with Winget and Chocolatey, but something has always felt off with them.

AltSnap is something that lets you drag and/or resize a window by holding the Win key and then clicking anywhere on the window instead of having to reach for the edges or the titlebar.

ClickMonitorDDC is my go-to for controlling brightness of desktop monitors. Also, on my work laptop I've set it to sync the laptop display brightness with the brightness of the external monitors. In combination with a macropad/keyboard with rotary encoders it is pretty good. Sadly, it's practically abandonware at this point - the original site is down and there are only a few mirrors - but it still works fine for the most part.

Clink + Clink completions + oh-my-posh + fzf is my favourite combo for the command line. The cool thing about oh-my-posh is that it's multiplatform and that its configuration is portable, so I can also install it on top of bash/zsh and have the same prompt I'm used to.

FanControl is something that I can't believe exists as a free app. It's so much better than motherboard vendor software for the same purpose - not only works reliably, but also lets you do things that the motherboard software usually does not - e.g. linking a case fan curve to the GPU temp. Last time I used GNU/Linux I had to manually write configs for lm-sensors, which works, but is a tedious process. I just found out about CoolerControl - looks promising, but haven't tried it myself.

Dzr is a great accountless player for deezer with a CLI version and GUI version that runs in Visual Studio Code

I mostly use this on my desktop running win10, but GridPlayer for playing shows off an external hard drive.

At one point had it on my laptop running a Debian based OS, but I must have uninstalled/removed it somehow because I couldn't find it a few days ago when I needed it. Thankfully I found an appimage as I couldn't find it in the repos. And as I am writing this comment, I checked to see if it was available through flatpak and it is.

Love it because I can have my shows take up the full program area and stay that way when I change program resolution. I try that with other programs and it either doesn't fit the whole program area or doesn't take up the area when I change program size.

Only thing I wouldn't really recommend it for is shows with subtitles since I have yet to figure out if it even supports subtitle files. Couldn't watch the latest season of a show on it and had to switch to VLC because of that.

I love Krita with the AI Diffusion plugin for image generation

Mullvad, Ente Auth, VS Codium, Librewolf, VLC, Steam

Anyone have a good alternative to photopea for Windows/Linux? Please don't say gimp :(

I love photopea but the subscription model is lame. It turns it into another Photoshop.

I need something to do occasional art in that will survive my slow Linux transition.