8 ms·
Ask HN: What free-to-use software inspires you?
- nvr219 9y agoHere are the free (as in beer, sometimes FOSS) applications that really amaze and inspire me. In no particular order - pi-hole - irssi - plex
- xstartup 9y agoqtox, arch, vscode, ufw, golang, httpie, mongoDB
- iammiles 9y agoAll the free editors (e.g. VS Code, Emacs, Vim) and especially their respective plugins. I'm always amazed at the breadth and quality among them.
- reddit_clone 9y agoEmacs especially with likes of Magit, Orgmode etc.
- fosco 9y agoI just started using org-mode and I wish I started years ago. Inspirational, motivational, customizable and extremely efficient.
- I_complete_me 9y agozim, autokey, duplicati, draftsight, sublime text (ish), sketchup, vim.
- knaik94 9y agoVLC
- dlahoda 9y agohttps://github.com/WebMemex https://github.com/WebMemex
- matthberg 9y agoLineage OS android. It's amazingly polished for an open source, community run system, and the breadth of devices supported is phenomenal.
- cgi-joe 9y agoBlender
- kiddico 9y agoOBS is pretty amazing considering it's feature set, and adoption in the streaming community.
- herogreen 9y agoTeamViewer because it is cross plateform, super simple to use and works very well. I wish there was a good open-source competitor¹ because I feel ill at ease giving a private company root access to my computers. ¹ it should be able to traverse NATs. I could deal with having to set up a main server. edit: typos
- jimmies 9y agotry nomachine. coupled with wireguard for vpn to a middleman broker computer, it works very well for me.
- truth_seeker 9y agoLibre Office - alternative to MS office VLC - Video/Audio player, encoder, decoder etc. Wine (on Linux) - for playing games especially VSCode - Intelligent editor with good community support Signal - Private messenger app
- yupasama 9y agoditto VLC!
- yupasama 9y agofree but powerful game engines, Unity (not truly free) and Godot (free free), amongst others
- bernardino 9y agoTexShop: http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/ http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/
- kang 9y agobitcoin
- jimmies 9y agowireguard: so good, so fast, and everything a vpn software should be openwrt: works on many devices and so impressively stable xbmc/kodi: although I don't use it daily, it is a complex yet very functional piece of software winamp: simple, easy, functional, light go+liteide: simple, easy, no nonsense nomachine: not open source, but good
- dverma 9y agoSonarQube, SonarLint - has helped me improve as a developer a lot.
- billconan 9y agosublime text,
- xtreak29 9y agoEmacs Redis PostgreSQL VLC Perl GNU tools like grep, xargs, find etc.
- Iceland_jack 9y agoGHC
- jasonkostempski 9y agoLinux
- kornnflake 9y agoLinux PostgreSQL Redis Blender
- seesawtron 9y agoyoutube-dl (to download youtube content without adds painlessley)
- weinzierl 9y agoTeX, because it's software that has been considered feature complete for nearly 30 years and despite it's successors' additional features its original feature set is still quite usable today.
- anarazel 9y agoAnd by being considered feature complete and being pretty decent back then, it has held back the entire field for a generation.
- andrei_says_ 9y agoI’d like give a shout out to the multiple free (mostly open source) eco-systems and frameworks for web development available nowadays. The tooling is fantastic and getting better all the time.
- tkjef 9y agovim, bash, puppet, chef, kitchen, terraform
- mcknco 9y agoOpenBSD, of course :)
- ccajas 9y agoBlender
- nextos 9y agoNixOS, XMonad, Emacs and Firefox. Actually, that's my whole environment discounting libraries and utilities which include Julia, Scheme and C++. On Emacs, I adore org, magit, notmuch, eshell, calc and dired.
- stellajohn 9y agoThis helps me, but free only for 30 days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800756
- kenjikato 9y agoThe software you are probably using right now to view and/or edit this post. The web browser. It's the most amazing piece of free software that we all use almost every day, regardless of the platform or browser you use. Web browsers across the board are an amazing piece of software that's been in development in one way, shape, or form since the early '90s. Thousands of people have worked on them or contributed code, and they provide access to the bounty of the internet for nothing. Show me something more inspiring than that.
- farseer 9y agoSQLite