Asklemmy

Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like "Press T to open up trainer menu".

Unfortunately it's not available (natively) on Linux. I've used Lutris but I don't believe it has the same customization options. I don't think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven't tried to customize it in several years. I've gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It'sFOSS article about it here.

Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.

My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.

My choice is screen on the CLI. It's an old one, but I just learned about it this year and it's been amazing helpful doing complex, long-running tasks via SSH.

Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.

With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.

Linux and godot

Zotero

If you're in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you're doing and click that link.

Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it's so much better than your standard internet citation generators.

Don't forget to share the intel with your classmates!

Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs... with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.

I picked up KdenLive for video editing and it's pretty freaking good imo

Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without

Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.

For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.

Timelinize... description from GitHub: Organize your photos & videos, chats & messages, location history, social media content, contacts, and more into a single cohesive timeline on your own computer where you can keep them alive forever.

There's also Delta Chat, FairEmail and DEFINITELY LOCALSEND.

conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.

Newpipe + sponsorblock

croc

I've known about it for longer but just started using KDE Connect over the last year or so.

It's got some bugs, at least for me. Like sometimes my phone won't connect to my computer or like the SMS feature takes forever to load, but having something akin to Pushbullet but free from enshitification has been really great.

Mine will probably be Bottles.

The team behind that application did a fantastic job. Wine was due for something much more user friendly like this. And integration with Proton, allowing 3D acceleration is the cherry on top.

Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:

Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)

cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)

VLC (media player that plays almost everything)

PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.

It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!

Ditto clipboard manager and altsnap with the Hot-click and fancyzone style controls

I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.

But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust

Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.

Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.

It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.

• URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
• PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.

I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.

My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.

Image Toolbox Its a photo editor with everything you need. Its really really powerful and so fleshed out. Everytime I use it, I discover something new. The only sad thing is, that I can't donate in XMR otherwise I've would of donated. If you have an android, download it and try it. It's a must have on any phone imo.

Not discovered last year but ffmpeg.Crazy how many tools it can replace and how many usecase it has