Free and Open Source Software

This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

Photography and Image manipulation

• Darktable → RAW photo processing
• GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
• Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it's good)
• Inkscape → Vector Graphics
• Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI's Shap-E)

3D modeling and Printing

• Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
• Meshroom → Photogrammetry
• PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

Video editing and Processing

• Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
• FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
• Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

Misc

• Calibre → E-book management
• Serge → Self hosted Local LLM's made a bit easier to deal with
• Firefox → Web browser

FOSS I'm excited for

• DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
• CoDi → "Composable Diffusion" Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
• Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF's for 3D models (don't know if it will be FOSS but I'm hopeful)

Kdenlive works, and is the best foss video editor imo, but I still haven't found anything as good as DaVinci Resolve (sadly not foss). DaVinci doesn't support common video codecs on Linux though (so you gotta get used to ffmpeg), and for basic video editing Kdenlive works fine, but for making cinematic things like short films or whatever there's sadly nothing nicer than DaVinci. I'd like to be proven wrong though.

One of my favorite is fsearch, basically a one-to-one copy of Everything that is written in GTK

Notepad->kate

I recommend https://alternativeto.net/ since you just type in the software name and it will show alternatives rated by popularity. You can filter by many things including "open source".

I've replaced Windows totally with NixOS(Using the ZFS filesystem as well so I can take /home snapshots and backup easier!). Been a long time Linux user, starting with OpenSuSE.

Anyways, when I did use Windows, my most often used software was LibreOffice for school, VLC for movies, QBittorrent for, well, torrenting, Thunderbird for email and Firefox for browsing(With lots of extensions). I also used Emacs a lot, and still do, here and there.

Overall, I don't really need to use much proprietary software, except for games, of course.

I use Claws Mail for my mail stuff. It works really well with my self-hosted email server and I really like the UI and such. On Windows I used to use the mail client that was pre-installed.

For text editing I've switched to vim and emacs (doom). I usually use vim for quick little edits to things that aren't worth opening up emacs and finding it in there and I use emacs for anything that'll take some time. On Windows I used VS Code.

For a web browser I use Firefox, hardened with arkenfox/userjs. Never had any problems with it and have been using it since before switching to Linux.

I think Microsoft tried creating something like it on Windows, so I guess it can technically count as a replacement; KDE Connect