Asklemmy

KiCad - electrical engieneering

FreeCAD - mechanical engieneering

Blender - 3d modeling, rendering, animation

Krita - raster painting

Kdenlive - video editing

LMMS - music creation

Ardour - sound processing

Nheko - Matrix client

Xonotic - FPS game

KDE - K Desktop Enviroment

Hotspot - GUI for perf sampling profiler

KCachegrind - GUI for valgrind cache simulator

QT Creator - C(++)/QML(and prob JS) IDE

Graphvis - graph visualizer

LocalSend - like AirDrop, but cross platform

EMACS:- No I'm not kidding, Yes it has a learning curve but the real fun is AFTER you figure it out & find out that it can do more than just edit texts

• You can play music
• You can turn it into an Email client
• Browse the internet
• A fully-fledged IDE
• There's Tetris in it
• A File-Manager
• Even a Chat Client
• Remote-Server interaction
• Even have it function like Obsidian
• Have Vim-keybindings (For VIM-users)
• A Git interface
• Even use it as a Linux Distro

Obsidian and VLC.

No one mentioned SolveSpace, so... SolveSpace. Solvespace is a fully functional 3D parametric CAD solver in a free, cross-platform, open-source, portable, single self-contained executable 10 MB file.

I do a fair amount of hobby 3d printing and SolveSpace makes design and CAD stupid easy. The interface is perfectly laid out, the hotkeys are intuitive, and the capabilities make small-scale projects a breeze.

Now, the program has its limitations, but if I just want something quick and simple, there is nothing better.

Wireguard, I find it both simpler and easier to use than OpenVPN.

dd. No other iso writing utility has worked as consistently, even if my usb devices would gain weird glitches after using it.

Believe it or not I am a person who goes out of their way to avoid using the terminal, so this is very much vouching for the software itself rather than the ux it's based on.

I logged in just to answer this:

Stellarium

When it comes to stargazing and learning more about the night sky, there is hands-down no better program. It's available on PC (windows/Mac/Linux) as well as mobile platforms. I used it for months for free before I paid for the premium sub, and the premium sub actually feels additive rather than just gatekeeping essential features. Plus, it's pretty cheap and you can choose to just buy a lifetime pass for $20 and skip the sub. It's the only app I've ever been happy to subscribe to.

FLOSS games that are solid:

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Luanti (aka Minetest)

sgt-puzzles

Bitwarden

It's a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.

Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I've been using it for years and I love it, it's the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.

Bitwarden, Kdenlive, Firefox, OBS, Steam.

Micro or NeoVim if you're a minimalist. Emacs or VS Code otherwise (a little bit of BS maybe). And Windows terminal plus WSL if you're on Windows.

Interesting that people still use Notepad++. Haven't touched it in 15+ years.

And Python of course.

qBittorrent

Well [email protected] and [email protected] for more, but off the top of my head:

Linux, VLC, FFMPEG, HandBrake, KDE (everything KDE), qBittorrent, Momentum (Flipper0 firmware), CHIRP, Vim, and more!

TestDisk and PhotoRec. TestDisk can recover broken drive partitions, PhotoRec can recover deleted files even if the partition table is borked.

Np ++ is the GOAT. Stupidly fast to open, always restores everything you've ever typed no matter what, and the only program I've ever seen that actually lets you rename tabs where you haven't saved the file first.

Greenshot

Irfanview

Audacity

OBS

Lab Chirp: simple but powerful sound effects generator

Stickies (zhorn software): Networkable sticky notes

Agent Ransack: File content search

Notepad++ is also great for searching text strings in many documents and collating the results in a single window.

Actual - Accounting/budgeting/etc

Wrote up a python script or three to handle parsing my bank CSV export files into an actually usable form, with automatic categorization, and so now I just do a periodic export and sync, and have all my financial records all in one place with some nice visualization, categorization, and budgeting features from Actual. It saves everything to a local sqlite db, so I can always jump ship to a different system if needed, and also itself provides a CSV export option.

10/10 software, would recommend

kate is similar to npp.

Just found qalculate and it's amazing

Since you're saying "pieces of software" and not specifically apps I will mention Node.js, the programming framework for javascript apps that run outside of a browser. You can develop websites and services or standalone apps that just run locally. There's a whole universe of free packages people have created for it.

It's a niche thing, but if you play electric guitar and need a virtual amplifier and effects, you'll like Guitarix very much. Just thinking that is a community project blows me away every time

I've recently discovered and made heavy use of xournal++; for stylus-based note taking.

VeraCrypt -- creating encrypted partitions/disks with easy manager. I am surprised I did not see anybody to mention it.