Gonna go with Firefox as both my most-used piece of open-source software, and the software I see as most important to its ecosystem. If Firefox fails then we’ve just got Chromium-based browsers and, I guess, Safari.
GNU+Linux
Blender by a huge mile. Yes, there’s tons of other software like Linux, of course, but Blender is such a powerful, well managed, economically viable and healthy (community) project that it should be shown as an example of how Open Source should be.
My biggest hurdle with other projects is the fanboys, because many times they’re quite toxic, insulting everybody who doesn’t adore the project and don’t accept constructive criticism.
uBlock Origin, it’s not even close!
LibreOffice is equal to any office software out there, and has been much more stable than OpenOffice, and works without an internet connection unlike Google Docs.
Everyone should use LibreOffice … unless you work in a very specific office or school environment that specifically requires it, go install Microsoft Office, and even then, get your school or business to pay for it
Otherwise, for day to day document writing, letter writing or anything you have to do for yourself at home … LibreOffice is more than enough.
About five or six years ago, I was buying a new laptop at Bestbuy and I found myself a great deal and specifically asked for a system that didn’t have an OS with it or any software … they got an old returned unit, wiped the drive and sold it to me for about $200 at the time. While I waited, I listened as a salesman sold a new laptop to a clueless mother buying a unit for her son in high school … they got her to buy a $600 laptop, all sots of extras and MS Office and topped her off at about $1000 for a shitty laptop that was no more powerful than what I was getting
I’d go with either Firefox or Thunderbird. Both are immensely useful pieces of software that I use on a daily basis, and have evolved (mostly) nicely over time.
Not to give Mozilla too much credit, Nextcloud is also pretty slick!
Firefox. It is the only thing keeping Google from total internet domination
Librewolf, Wine/Proton, Linux, Zsh, VLC, GIMP, Kdenlive, Bitwarden.
No love for VLC player?!?
I always read there are better alternatives to VLC that give better playback features or a higher quality picture. I try them but always come back to it as there are always problems.
Potplayer, Mplayer, MPV.
Whether it’s stupidly high CPU usage on some files, settings you need to manage through a config file, or unintuitive keyboard shortcuts. I forgo those features for the simplicity and easy configuration of VLC
Linux.
Not by importance. Obviously that would be the Linux kernel, GCC and GNU coreutils, and the Firefox web browser, among some other foundational things (code to run my desktop GUI, for example).
So, I’ll say my favorite is PCSX2. Ever since they got rid of the ancient plugin architecture this emulator has been getting sooooooo much better, and it was already great! I would add other top tier emulators like Dolphin, DuckStation, SNES9X, SameBoy, and so on. I just love emulators :)
Proxmox, opnsense, fdroid, and many more on r/selfhosted (now on lemmy also) .
sunshine, moonlight ( play my games anywhere in the world, games run on my pc at home)
Firefox (the best browser against google monopoly), thunderbird (best mail client)
LineageOS, microG, Mozilla Location services, Magisk, aurora store (let me use Android without any of google tracking)
Bitwarden, Proton mail/vpn, Nextcloud (finally no gmail tracking)
Jellyfin, kodi (lets me create my own Netflix)
GNU/Linux, GNOME, KDE and host of other Linux projects. No more windows tracking. Also if you want to really know how the OS works, you should start tinkering with Linux. I expanded my knowledge base by just using Linux as daily driver.
The list just goes on and on. I am so grateful for all the open source devs that put their time in developing these tools.
For those wanting to go further, checkout https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
uBlock Origin - the chaddest AdBlock of them all!
Firefox and its derivatives. They’re the last free bastion preventing a Chromium monopoly on the browser market, which is hugely important - especially these days with Google’s push for Mv3.
Shout-out to Vivaldi for forking before mv3 happens. It is chromium based but they are very openly anti-google. It’s the OG Chrome devs as far as I understand.
I love and use Bitwarden daily.
There something I don’t understand. How does one use Bitwarden daily? It generates, remembers and autofill passwords, right? I rarely enter a password anywhere. What am I missing? Please educate me.
There are certain sites which terminate your sessions after a while. For example, banking sites or most government portals. In such situations, the auto fill function is very handy.
