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Ask HN: Best open source/free software in their own category?
I recently stumbled upon Krita on HN, which I really like. Would be great to collect the most powerful, feature-rich free software that are among the best in their category, and that get close to or even beat the commercial ones. I know some other great pieces like Gimp, Inkscape, but what's the state of the art for animations, music notations, audio mixing, etc? GUI & CLI should be both ok.
Here is a list of my favorite software that are worth learning:
- Gimp: photo editing
- Krita: digital painting, illustration
- Inkscape: vector drawing
- sox: sound processing (command line)
- ffmpeg: video processing (command line)
- imagemagick: image processing (command line)
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoiOS, take your pick: https://www.cocoacontrols.com https://www.cocoacontrols.com
- orkoden 12y agoThat's not finished software. It's UI components.
- tanderson92 12y agoFFTW -- Fast Discrete Fourier Transform. Reason: it routinely beats proprietary FFT routines on real & complex and single & multidimensional transforms, and with better accuracy.
- cwmma 12y agoQGIS: GIS software that isn't worse then the big closed source programs and is better at certain specific things.
- _jomo 12y agoVideo downloading: youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl
- _jomo 12y agopassword manager: KeePassX[0] (or MacPass[1] on OS X) KeePassX works cross-platform and there are ports for Android and iOS. 0: https://github.com/keepassx/keepassx https://github.com/keepassx/keepassx 1: https://github.com/mstarke/MacPass/ https://github.com/mstarke/MacPass/
- ramtatatam 12y agoThat may sound silly but humble Notepad++ should be a part of your list of great opensource software. Although at first glance it does not require spending time on learning its functionalities it offers a lot of plugins that allow to replace proprietary software (i.e. I'm using XML-plugin and that allows me to work with XMLs without using specialised software like Altova). Also TrueCrypt - I'm using it all the time (although there are changes in maintenance community the last stable version was proven to be clean - I still trust old good truecrypt)
- davismwfl 12y ago+1 Notepad++, I live in it when using a Windows machine. I wish it was available for OSX.
- thenomad 12y agoVirtualDub - video manipulation software that does some things better than 99% of its competitors (including direct-stream processing, which for some reason most commercial editing suites don't). Not a replacement for Avid / FCX / Premiere / whatever by any means, but it does some stuff better than anything else. http://www.virtualdub.org/ http://www.virtualdub.org/ Also, grep.
- lozf 12y agoRadio Station Programming: LiquidSoap http://www.liquidsoap.fm/ http://www.liquidsoap.fm/ Streaming: Icecast http://icecast.org/ http://icecast.org/ Low bandwidth, low latency audio codec: Opus http://opus-codec.org/ http://opus-codec.org/ Lossless audio codec: FLAC http://xiph.org/flac/ http://xiph.org/flac/
- gadders 12y agoVLC for video playback?
- lovelearning 12y agoBlender : for 3D modelling.
- Gurkenmaster 12y agoLibreOffice: word processing
- alexvoda 12y agoNatron: for cross-platform video compositing (Adobe After Effects alternative) at http://natron.inria.fr/ http://natron.inria.fr/ Synfig: for cross-platform 2D vector animation (Adobe Flash alternative) at http://www.synfig.org http://www.synfig.org Scribus: for desktop publishing (Adobe InDesign alternative) at http://www.scribus.net http://www.scribus.net FlashDevelop: for ActionScript development (Adobe Flash Builder alternative) at http://www.flashdevelop.org/ http://www.flashdevelop.org/ MyPaint: for intuitive full screen digital painting (Autodesk Sketchbook alternative) at http://mypaint.intilinux.com/ http://mypaint.intilinux.com/
- brudgers 12y agoEmacs.
- paramk 12y agoSubtitle Edit: for creating/editing subtitles
- idiotclock 12y agoZotero is an excellent EndNote alternative OpenShot is an imovie like video editor, I like it because it's easy to use Rhythmbox is a featureful itunes-like music player. Audacity isn't protools, but it's great for mixing audio
- tokenrove 12y agoI am fond of ardour for mixing audio recordings. Lilypond is my favorite music notation software, but I have a predilection for text-based formats. Of course TeX and its descendents remain world-class for serious document production, even if XSL-FO-based systems have made a big dent there.
- protoduction 12y agoOBS - Cross-platform broadcaster software (for recording and live streaming). Better than any of its competition in my opinion. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/
- michaelbuddy 12y agoyes!!! great callout. this software is amazing. Records better reliable video + audio stream on my machine than 350 camtasia.
- cweagans 12y agovim.
- shpx 12y agoJust wanted to let you know neovim is at a point where you can use it as a drop in replacement and not notice.
- ctb_mg 12y agoCan you elaborate on this? Their FAQ explicitly states: "Although some features are a work in progress, Neovim isn't at a stable point. Using Neovim should be done with caution as things may change."
- jbrooksuk 12y agoIt's my own, but I'd like to think that Cachet (https://CachetHQ.io https://CachetHQ.io), although in beta is a good replacement for StatusPage.io
- ctb_mg 12y ago- Greenshot: Screenshot capture - Audacity: Audio editing
- owly 12y agoI'm happy with https://atom.io https://atom.io
- LarryMade2 12y agoScribus - Desktop Publishing/Layout Blender - 3D design/animation
- galfarragem 12y agoFree software (not open source) but really great stuff (I use them everyday): Music player: http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html Batch rename tool: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk Flashcards learning (open source): http://ankisrs.net/ http://ankisrs.net/