8 ms·
Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?
- joshdance 9y agoFor me Handbrake is very impressive. When I was ripping DVDs frequently it worked great, and the queue feature is super.
- electic 9y ago- Visual Studio Code. - iTerm2
- Mononokay 9y agoKrita. It has the best brush engine by farrrrrrrrrrr. You generally have to use custom brushes though, the default ones are mediocre at best.
- slazaro 9y agoHow would you compare it to Photoshop and what would you say to a Photoshop digital painter to get them to switch to Krita (or at least try it out for a while)?
- Mononokay 9y agoThe Good in Comparison: It's incredibly faster. It does a spectacular job at emulating how real painting feels. The color picker is a lot better in Krita, in my opinion. Krita can use (some) Photoshop brushes out of the box, just add them in. It has an (arguably) better interface, and four color schemes out of the box. The Bad in Comparison: It doesn't have the non-painting effects of Photoshop, which can be a huge downside if you tend to use those on your projects.
- brettkromkamp 9y agoBlender. It is probably one of the most versatile 3D suites available.
- glandium 9y agoInterestingly, Blender was originally proprietary, and was open-sourced after its parent company went bankrupt, and only after money was raised from the open-source crowd (before crowdfunding was a thing).
- gupi 9y agoFreenas, for sure!
- ioddly 9y agoPodcast Addict. I paid like $1.99 to remove the ads from it, I feel super guilty that I can't somehow give more.
- pourty 9y agoAgree, this is an awesome app. You can give the dev more BTW - they have PayPal and other ways you can give them more money. Send them an email
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eksemplar 9y agoTrello, draw.io, visual studio code.
- nixpulvis 9y ago+1 for Trello, I've been a very happy user for years now.
- tmnvix 9y agoThanks for mentioning draw.io. After a quick look around I can see that it will be very useful. I especially like the interface. If it wasn't for my browser interface above I would swear this is a very well made desktop app. Standard OS inputs used well are hard to beat. This really makes me think twice about using some of the fancy UI libraries out there.
- Ace17 9y agogcc and llvm!
- nixpulvis 9y agoAnd the myriad of languages build on top of them, mainly Rust these days ;)
- nixpulvis 9y agoLinux... but I guess I'm not really surprised. Most of what's so good about it is a result of it being free.
- jakoblorz 9y agoWell obviously not free but waaay to cheap: sublime For free: visual studio code
- arthurcolle 9y agosublime is overpriced by a factor of 2-3 especially with competition from atom + with electron improvements leading to atom not having totally garbage performance
- Radim 9y agoScikit-learn. The guys have done, and are continuing to do, an amazing job and the output is completely free. There is some funding involved, but the ultimate value/cost ratio is ridiculously high. "How Open Source is Really Maintained" comes to mind: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1280/1*Q_8HbGbbfEmAjwPqB8D60A.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1280/1*Q_8HbGbbfEmAjwPqB...
- Jedi72 9y agoFfmpeg & vscode
- appwiz 9y agoemacs, especially with butterfly mode (https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/)
- tmnvix 9y agoVLC. Pretty much my entire development stack. The programming community in general is bloody amazing. I feel very grateful to be a part of it.
- nixpulvis 9y agoI remember downloading VLC for the first time and being overjoyed with the ease, reliability and compatibility. Nothing has changed in the years since then, something most software can't say.
- omegote 9y agoAnd libVLC for that matter. I had to embed some media viewers in a Qt app and libVLC made it a breeze.
- KerrickStaley 9y agoSignal (https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/)
- taeric 9y agoIt was said in jest, but emacs really is amazingly good for what it costs. Even more so if I consider each of the individual contributions that I take advantage of from so many other contributors. Helm, org-mode, use-package, paredit-everywhere, ace-isearch, magit, undo-tree, ... The list really is quite impressive. And then there are the things I don't use, but still impress the hell out of me. Skewer mode being the frontrunner there. Then there is Firefox. Easy to complain about memory usage and whatnot, but it really is an impressive piece of engineering for what I paid for it.
- satanic_pope 9y agoPycharm (community edition) - you gotta use it to believe it. Incredible piece of software. Dropbox (basic) - Support across platforms with cli.
- LittlePeter 9y agoCount me in for PyCharm Community Edition
- senatorobama 9y agoNot all of us have 32G RAM.
- gotrecruit 9y agonot sure if this counts, but as long as you have a .edu account, all of JetBrains stuff is technically free. i've been using all their IDEs since school, and continue to renew my licenses with my .edu email no issues.
- qalmakka 9y agoKDE Plasma for me, it's amazing how good it is and how stable it has become. I've been using KDE for years and I've recommended it to almost anyone I could - and they always stuck with it, because it was simply too much well done. Compared to gnome 3 and other new desktop environments, KDE has always been so easy to use, predictable and customisable, a very joy to use.
- jaimehrubiks 9y agoI don´t want to enter the eternal debate but predictability is definitely not the greatest kde features.
- mnm1 9y agoWhich kde distro would you recommend for stability?
- emilsedgh 9y agoI'm personally on Debian. Some times it lags behind a couple of releases but I'm happy with it as it's very stable. Some people are extremely happy with KDE Neron though. The core stays on the latest Ubuntu LTS but the KDE is updates real quick to the latest version.
- eitland 9y agoI'm on KDE Neon. Built by KDE developers on top of Ubuntu.
- kbouck 9y agoElasticsearch
- lowry 9y agoUtter crap, look at their source code. Lucene, on the other hand, is really good.
- zachrose 9y agoOpenSCAD. It’s not feature rich but it does its thing very well with a clean user interface AND a nice language to work in.
- methyl 9y agoFigma
- fsloth 9y agoWolframalpha.com
- z92 9y agotesseract-ocr CMU-sphinx and such.
- amriksohata 9y agoKazaa lite codecs, classic media player, Vs code, Google docs and most Google products, freely, android
- amriksohata 9y agoFeedly
- bonzini 9y ago> Google It's paid by advertisers. Docs and mail are just the Trojan horse to get you to use Google for searching.
- nixpulvis 9y agoI'm not a huge fan of google practices, but I'm pretty sure I'd use search regardless of where my email is hosted.
- matt_the_bass 9y agoI think their value to google is to hook users into googles paid services. We spend $60 year per user at my company.
- tmikaeld 9y agoGroup Office https://sourceforge.net/projects/group-office/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/group-office/ Amazingly complete CRM system with a robust and fast web based IMAP client.
- interfixus 9y agoAny number of programming languages and their implementations. My personal favorites being Nim, Lua, and the sadly forgotten Tcl/Tk. Linux. Arch for my fancy stuff, Alpine for my servers. SQLite and Fossil, from the inimitable D. Richard Hipp, plus rsync and rclone to keep everything in its place. Yes, I'm a minimalist. Of course, good is so intrinsically tied up with free that we cannot pry them apart. Not for the sake of money (I do contribute, I do donate), but for the convenience and accessability, and of course the principle. Oh, and GIMP. How could I forget?
- JensRantil 9y agoMySQL
- mintplant 9y agoTreeSheets: http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/ - infinitely nestable spreadsheets, great for organizers TreeProjects Personal Database: http://personaldatabase.org/ http://personaldatabase.org/ - searchable, inter-linkable, hierarchical notes and media tracking for projects Godot Game Engine: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ - the scene graph system wherein a "scene" is just a saved subtree of nodes and can be instantiated at any point within a parent scene is so far beyond the clumsy scene/prefab split in eg. Unity
- Kraftwurm 9y agoThanks! Very interesting software.
- eitland 9y agoThe free (as in free beer) version of Manic Time.
- csharpminor 9y agoMetabase: https://www.metabase.com https://www.metabase.com
- jakebasile 9y agoWell there's Vim. OBS[1] is pretty rad, too. If we're including programming languages under "software": Clojure. If we're including libraries under "Software": Lacinia[2] and Reagent[3]. If we're including databases: ArangoDB[4]. 1: https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ 2: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia 3: https://holmsand.github.io/reagent/ https://holmsand.github.io/reagent/ 4: https://www.arangodb.com/ https://www.arangodb.com/
- dudado 9y agoMac OS X
- sametmax 9y agoPostgres and redis.
- lessclue 9y agoNo piece of software has surprised me like Redis has. The sheer elegance, performance, and reliability is mind boggling. Long live antirez!
- sametmax 9y agoHave you tried to compile it ? This is the easiest compilation experience I had in my life. Hell, sometime I just compile it for sheer pleasure.
- eitland 9y agoVisual Studio Code
- eitland 9y agoNetbeans, Eclipse
- blesswinsamuel 9y agoTelegram.
- ahendy 9y agolichess.org
- sgillen 9y agoValgrind and gdb for me.
- sgillen 9y agoOpenCV? Basically the de facto standard in computer vision.
- sgillen 9y agoAlso all of python (absolutely beautiful language) and the associated eco system. I’m thinking mostly of numpy/scipy/matplot lib etc, but there are so many more.
- leleItaly 9y agoemacs
- neilharbinger 9y agoAdobe Brackets
- jpavlick 9y agoChrome
- fellellor 9y agoPython. I'm not really surprised it's free, but it is good.
- oxplot 9y agoMetabase. https://metabase.com/ https://metabase.com/
- iurisilvio 9y agoNew Relic. Unfortunately it reduced their free plan (and the paid plan is expensive), but I was always amazed about their free features. I'm still didn't find a good alternative. :(
- T3RMINATED 9y agoxhamster
- kawera 9y agoPostgreSQL, Redis and SQLite.
- carlosgg 9y agoR
- Kraftwurm 9y agoNot free, but much too cheap for what you get :) Affinity Photo + Affinity Designer: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/
- adimitrov 9y agoWell, if you want something for editing photos that is truly free as in beer and speech, try the awesome darktable: https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/ I'm also always blown away by how incredibly easy to use and at the same time how powerful hugin is. In this long list of for-pay stitching applications, Hugin is the only one of two which are free (again, beer and speech) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_stitching_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_stitching_...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- RobGav 9y agoDefinitely Publii - open source Static CMS with GUI and themes. Https://getpublii.com
- threatofrain 9y agoIt's not open source, but I'm surprised that world-class software like Google Drive / Docs are free.
- scarface74 9y agoI'm still in awe that no matter what coding stack you use, you can almost always do everything you need without paying a dime. With Microsoft, even Visual Studio Team Services is free - private Git hosting for up to five users, a decent CI/CD orchestration platform, a private Nuget feed, project planning, etc.
- zantana 9y agoKodi. It's amazing how far that project has come since xbmc.
- japaget 9y agoZim Desktop Wiki (http://zim-wiki.org/ http://zim-wiki.org/). It is great note taking application that supports Rich Text features such as bold, italic, checkbox and bullet lists. It also supports Greek letters, subscripts, superscripts, and Unicode, making it very useful for entering mathematical equations.
- purplezooey 9y agocowsay
- kisstheblade 9y agoOn a related note I have been wondering why artist's never provide quality content for free. You know graphics/images for games etc and music/sound effects for example. Coders provide software worth billions in man hours for free and trying to find quality "artistic" content is impossible. Every little clip art image costs many dollars. Why do coders provide their services for free so generously while artists are mainly worried about their copyrights?
- detaro 9y agoNot true in that absolute: There is tons of freely licensed music out there. You can find free game assets for genres that are somewhat "generic". But still it is a thing, a few theories on contributing factors: a) More typically an individual work, with one person having a vision that they do not want to have compromised by others. Arguably harder to have contributions in a way that doesn't stand out in many cases, which means one work made by a small army of contributors sharing the workload doesn't happen often. b) the "work for me for free" demands are worse for artists than for coders. "Freeloading" is seen a lot more critically/abusive than in software circles. (although it does happen with open-source projects as well of course, and long-term maintainers burn out accordingly as well). c) approximately nobody pays artists to produce freely licensed works d) free work by artists might be in direct competition to their ability to make money from their art. e) Parts vs final product: a lot of open-source development is in pieces that other projects build on. Similarly, you can find quite a lot of "pieces" of art for free: sound templates, stock/reference images, textures, ..., which is not very visible to someone looking for "free graphics". Similarly to how many people not involved with software do not understand on what mountain of free libraries a lot of software stands. f) More visible if reused, which leads users of graphic resources to want individual ones instead of the same as everyone else. E.g. games will more likely stand out by graphics but use the same engine as X other games.
- yesenadam 9y agoMaybe OS/FS programmers have a day job, while for the artists, that's their day job.
- gschrader 9y agoThere was a recent reddit post about this as well here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7x639l/what_free_software_is_so_good_you_cant_believe https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7x639l/what_free...
- RickJWag 9y agoLinux, of course.
- mindcrash 9y agoI'm working on some BYOH cloud based data processing lately soooo....: - Everything sponsored by the CNCF (https://www.cncf.io/ https://www.cncf.io/) - Everything Hashicorp (https://www.hashicorp.com/ https://www.hashicorp.com/) - OpenStack (https://www.openstack.org/ https://www.openstack.org/) And a small bonus: - Dotmesh (https://dotmesh.com/ https://dotmesh.com/), snapshot awesomeness
- sdfjkl 9y agoFreeBSD. The quality of the code (and documentation!) is a notable step up from Linux.
- nojvek 9y agoVscode
- matt_the_bass 9y agoInkscape for vector graphics. I feel it firmly competes with illustrator.
- ivcha 9y agoEclipse -- one of the best and most versatile IDEs, especially for JVM languages
- gmiller123456 9y agoCygwin. Yea, it's mostly just a collection of other free tools, but most of us in corporate America still find ourselves using Windows, and Cygwin is the only thing that makes the Windows command prompt bearable.