I want to know what kind of apps/programs y’all recommend to people or just use personally. This is just in general, could be anything from a game to a media codec. I personally use Linux but stuff for other operating systems is welcome too.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        You are completely right!

        UT2004 is not an arcade shooter, it is an arena shooter, sorry about that, thank you for correcting me

    • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      Minor warning about Strawberry Music Player:

      If you are looking for a completely free local music player on windows or mac without paying, I’d skip this because both versions are tied to patreon last I checked. I know as a fact the windows version is, but not 100% sure on the mac version since I don’t have a mac.

      I personally think it’s good enough if you feel like paying for it so they can keep developing it, but it’s good to keep this kinda stuff in mind.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Tied to patreon how?

        I was on Clementine before but development seems to have stalled

        • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 month ago

          Currently, at least for the windows version, you need to be part of the patreon if you don’t want to have to build from source. Right now I can get on my desktop and load Strawberry (which I got before this started happening) and it’ll tell me there’s an update for the windows version, the one I have because my desktop currently runs win10. If I click the button to update, it’ll take me to their patreon account and ask me to support them if I want the precompiled update.

          I’d build from source on windows, but that sounds like a nightmare, so I just haven’t been able to update.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 month ago

        What is wrong with stock Firefox?

        I hope you are not calling it worse than Chrome, because that would be insane.

        • asudox@discuss.tchncs.deM
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          12
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          Hmm yeah. Not as bad as chrome but not that better. At this point, I use Librewolf because it allows uBo and has mozilla spyware removed. Mozilla pretends to be privacy-friendly. They aren’t your friend.

          • stoy@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 month ago

            Well yeah, they are a company, I have never thought of them as a friend.

            I would like it if they released an annual “Firefox Pro” version, the only difference would be that Pro version would be branded as “Firefox Pro” and a badge in the about dialog.

            You would pay €20 for it, and Mozilla could rely less on ads, and focus more on privacy.

  • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

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

    • uniquethrowagay@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      Special shout-out to KDE Connect. You can instantly share files between your phone and your PC, remote control your PC, share your clipboard, notifications and so much more. With two clicks, you can share a link that instantly opens on your PC. It’s all so smooth! And it’s also available for Windows if you need it.

  • Venicon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 month ago

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

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

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • Unknown1234_5@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 month ago

      Don’t really have that problem on my Linux distro but that would’ve helped so much when I was on windows. Idk how many times I searched for something and just left the room to wait.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yea, I don’t have to do anything special on Linux. Although if I used it more I’d probably be looking for some kind of file manager app.

  • Lumidaub@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • PMrain@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      Would you say that Krita is suitable for a beginner, especially with a little knowledge of traditional drawing?

      • Lumidaub@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        I wouldn’t recommend learning to draw from scratch digitally no matter what software, but if you’re not a complete beginner and you’re willing to experiment with its functions, I don’t see why not. There’s a large helpful community and lots of tutorials too.

  • 🐋 Color 🍁 ♀@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 month ago

    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!

    • Lumidaub@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      The latest version is from 2016 and Paint Tool Sai 2 had its most recent update in August, no? I agree, it’s a good program, I’m just worried that “it got released in 2008” might paint the wrong picture :)

      • deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        (not sure what’s going on with Lemmy. I’m getting message/comment notification well after reasonable times. Yours has taken 21 days to appear.)

        Fair enough.

        Having enjoyed the open source Logseq to make a proper archive of the bits of knowledge I accumulate, I reluctantly moved on to Obsidian, which is proprietary.

        Obsidian is much the better product, Logseq feels lacking and in need of a guiding hand and significant funding.

        That said I used Logseq for over a year and enjoyed my time.

        Both products work on Markdown files which are plain text and are useful in a standard editor and therefore will outlive Logseq and Obsidian.

  • kamen@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      +1 for scoop. I’ve got a windows PC that I keep around for certain programs I can’t use with wine and scoop makes it bearable.

  • Like the wind...@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    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

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • wia@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.

  • hoch@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    Snagit, it’s like Windows snipping tool on steroids. I was introduced to it at work and loved it so much I bought a license for my personal computer.

    I’m also a huge fan of Dashlane for managing my passwords. It’s one of the pricier options, but it works so much better than everything else I’ve tried (and has a nicer UI, too)