Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
I'll go with FreeCAD. I've known about it for a while and tried it about 5-10 years ago but have given it another look as I try to get back into CAD stuff and hate the restrictive licenses of commercial products. It has come a LONG way and is far more intuitive to use than it used to be.
This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
Oh wow! Every now and then I feel like I needed something like this. Thanks!
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
- Open source client and server.
- Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
- Cross-platform feature parity.
- Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
- Easy notes syncing.
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
- Ability to publish notes.
- Decent UX.
Currently im using standard note but id love to give this a try. I first heard of it from techlore
Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.
My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.
It's been a bit over a year for me, otherwise this would be the answer.
Now that most of my friends and family are using it, I'm on Briar Messaging every day. Since there are no central servers, is entirely encrypted, and runs on the Tor network, I think it is probably the most secure messaging platform out there. It also has private groups and forums but I am not yet involved in any of those outside of a couple of small ones that are just for sharing family news.
Immich as an alternative to Google Photos, it has all the main features but it's self hosted.
Is it stable yet to use it? I've seen it and it looks promising, but it's also under active development.
I've never had anything bad happen to my library, but I do back it up regularly. The only "bad" thing might be there's often breaking changes where you just need to update your docker compose yml when you pull a new immich update.
Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I've tried before has really worked for me.
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.
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.
HomeAssistant, it's such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.
It's just an amazing piece of software.
Yeah, as far as FOSS I almost actually can't live without: HomeAssistant controls my spring pump to the cistern so that the pipes don't freeze.
Pretty cool, I use it as well. Works with basically everything thanks to the big community.
I just wish it allowed for proper programming of the automations. I despise the YAML-as-code hack they are using. I get it, it's much easier to offer a GUI editor for such a format. It feels very limited and cumbersome compared to regular programming.
