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LibreOffice (and Open Office). When Microsoft Office is $200 or a monthly subscription.
I just used LibreOffice Writer to update my resume a few minutes ago and it’s a bit to switch to but it makes sense and I loveeeee the UI that caters to both people who prefer classic Office (‘97-2003) or those who prefer the more modern UI (‘07 and newer).
It does get a bit annoying because it is so powerful that it has a mind of its own and tries to do things for you, like formatting, but if you’re patient (like I was just now), it’ll work out for you and be really great.
Bro, give Only office a try. I have a friend who uses it for his business and he claims it has the best compatibility when going from Foss and of MS Office.
A bit more niche, is Weasis - Dicom Browser for medical images. Alternative is also ImageJ which is used a lot in for scans too.
fall guys
WinRAR
Krita
Syncthing
Voyager.
It’s my favorite client I’ve been using since it was a web app
Have you tried phtn.app? It’s gorgeous.
First I’ve heard of it but it looks nice
Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
Lemmy mobile client
It’s the closest thing to Apollo or Narwhal for Reddit, but for Lemmy.
Big thing is that the dev is very active and responsive to feedback. Which is really useful given Lemmy is in its developmental phase for the most part.
Unlike Sync which while good is largely abandoned thses days.
And they recently added user tagging like on RES for Reddit. It’s so useful. Been using it like mad lately to identify trolls and sealions.
Up. Sent from Voyager.
That reminds me to send them a few bucks anyway, done ✅
I like the mlem testflight and arctic for iphone, mlem sometimes cant display an image tho
7zip
I haven’t used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere…why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we’re on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?
I’m always amazed when I’m following a tutorial written for windows and it says “download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip”. I just right click the file and extract it…
Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.
Recently? Feels like it’s been more than a decade now…I could be wrong though
You are wrong. Until recently Windows did not natively support 7z or unrar.
Looks like just 2 years ago. My bad!
Windows can do that, but opens archives as folders and will run executables by extracting them to a temp folder without dependencies. And the unpack dialogue is cumbersome, with 7zip you get a simple right click -> extract here / to folder dialogue, that somehow still is too much to ask of the main OS.
It’s likely for 'user friendliness’. Most people don’t even know what an archive is and that it should be extracted so a folder is much more intuitive and familiar to them.
WinRAR anyone ? 🤭
What do you mean? I paid \s
So it was you
Organic Maps
there’s been many a time i’ve been out in the middle of nowhere with a friend or family member and google maps stops working on their phone, and i get to pull out OM and save the day :^)
Organic maps is so good
Organic maps is great bit I wish it had real time traffic data. For that reason I normally use magic earth instead.
Thank you very much for pointing out that app exists
Also on iOS—looks promising
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-earth-navigation-maps/id1007331679
Can you provide a bit of info on it? What is it for and how does it stand out among the other apps or programs?
It’s a beautiful, FOSS, offline/local Google maps-like app for Android that uses Open Street Map data.
There are plenty of other offline/local map apps, some paid, some free, but they are nowhere near as polished.
Is open street map data pretty accurate? I don’t expect google mas level of accuracy but I think its important that I can rely on the maps when I don’t know anything about where I’m at
I did a month long trip around western Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden) and used Organic Maps as my only navigation app. Worked well for everything I used it for. Even the metro data was accurate. Also, in my home country, Estonia, it’s even better than Google Maps, because it has bike navigation integrated.
That’s very promising to hear!
Forgot to add, that it also gets updated faster than Google Maps. A roundabout that was built, took about a week to be added to Organic Maps, on Google Maps it took more than a month.
Practically all of the free map services use OSM.
SSH.
Alternatively, Postgres.
Came for these, leaving satisfied.
Its a bit more than an app, but QGIS is like, actually amazing. Also GDAL (and PDAL).
Wikipedia
Don’t forget to donate!
But then it’s not free anymore /s
Wikipedia
app
Reee
To be fair, they have an app
That’s true
That reminds me, I should donate
VLC is a big one for me.
+1 VLC will dutifully try to play even corrupted to hell files that any other media player would just fail with some form of “can’t play, file is corrupt”
It won’t keep track of my place in a Playlist to resume so I trashed it.
Wasn’t there some big thing where they tried to buy it and the person that made it was just like “nah”
VLC is pretty great. I would say IINA is at least a close second on Mac. Haven’t had a problem playing anything in it yet.
Yeah I personally prefer IINA on the Mac because of how native the interface is. Neither VLC or IINA has had trouble paying any video files I have.
VLC runs great on Mac and Android as well
It even runs on iOS. It’s one of the only ways to play videos that aren’t in Apple’s bullshit proprietary format.
VLC just managed to get some newer video files to play for me on a 10 year old tablet that wouldn’t play them with it’s included video player. It was also one of the only apps on the play store that would still work on that old tablet as well. It’s been my go-to video player for years now, terrific software 🥂
I agree that it’s cool and all, but I just really don’t like VLC. It’s ugly, bad UX and misses some major features. I love other similar and also free ones thoigh, like PotPlayer, MPC and MPV.
some new weird video format opens windows stock media player because it’s not yet associated with vlc
“Hey… it looks like your going to have to buy a codec…”
manually open in vlc where it runs seemlessly
People buy codecs?
default behaviour of Windows Media Player…
Oof
Literally never heard of the end user being billed for the codecs.
Always have been. It’s either included in licensing a software or operating systems. VLC ffmpeg and other open source software are a bit of a grey area since they don’t make money from the software strictly speaking.
Yep. You need to pay for the patent with certain codecs, that’s why operating systems with a company behind them usually do not distribute them. Same with a few Linux distros, such as Fedora.
You can install them and the packages for your os are freely available. Just not from the company making the product in the fear of patent trolls.
I’ll take “things that haven’t happened to me in years for a dollar Alex”.
A variation happened to me last week that’s why it came to mind. Was opening an mp4 recorded on a digital camera on a new laptop. So the stock player had a go and gave a message similar to the above. vlc was installed moments later and of course had no issue…
Wasted (Android Only)
Can nuke your phone’s data if not unlocked for X amount if time, along with many other triggers for a wipe.
Very useful considering the political climate of one of the most powerful nations in the world has someone done a nazi salute behind the presidential podium.
Warning: I am not a lawyer. You might get in legle trouble for using this app (Such as “Destruction of Evidence” charges)
Warning: IANAL
It’s only destruction of evidence if it’s evidence of a crime. You can destroy data for countless reasons that are not crimes, but it might be up to you to show that it’s unrelated to a crime. Most large companies have a data destruction policy for that reason. If it gets called out in court (usually in civil cases), they can point to that policy. The docs weren’t shredded/erased to hide wrongdoing; they just haven’t been used in 24 months and that’s when our policy says to delete.
(Such as “Destruction of Evidence” charges)
Just checked my state’s law. It specifies “intentionally” destroying the evidence. If you have it set up to do it after a certain amount of inactivity, your intent is not to destroy evidence. By all means a corrupt judicial system or police force could still abuse it. But it shouldn’t be illegal (at least in my state).
I recently learned about an app called Snappy Driver Installer Origin. It’s a minimal FOSS program that checks our PC for the drivers it has, needs installed, or updated and goes about it quickly. It’s also portable so it’s great if you want it on a install thumb drive.
There are so many apps out there that try to get you to buy or pay a subscription for this feature and others, so it’s been a breath of fresh air for me to have learned about and use it.
windows drivers. i’ve been doing this work for decades: i quit chasing down every driver update from all the various manufacturers years ago. windows is actually really good at fleshing-out necessary drivers and putting them on, and has been for awhile. gamers and others that ‘need’ gpu driver updates, sure. get 'em from the source. same with things that windows didn’t have for some odd reason.
my own ‘gaming rig’ in use now (zen3, 3060, w11) is just using the gpu drivers from windows update. they work just fine. i’ve never even loaded nvidia’s control panel on that pc and accepted its eula so i could make what few adjustments it has (very limited compared to the ‘full’ driver pack). they’re actually more stable, even: when the system updated to w11, i did try the ‘latest and greatest’ but the system crashed daily. rolled back (ty, reflect) and kept the wu-supplied drivers, and been smooth sailing ever since.
Microsoft excels at driver compatibility, and has for a long time. It’s their strongest suit.
Linux Mint did this out of the box for me with zero effort
In fact, I’m about to install it on my second PC in two months 👹
It depends on how you define “app” and “free”. But for free (as in beer) smartphone apps I really like.
- tidy
- Librera Reader
- these pre-packaged apks for the onnx text to speech engine which uses the piper voices that can be used in conjunction with the above Librera Reader to turn any compatible text doc to an audio book.
Nice set of local AI apps
