A bunch of people here recommended Libre office to me when I asked about free word processors and it's been serving me well since.
Another +1 for GIMP, also love Inkscape (for svg graphics) and VLC for media playback — I think those should all be available on linux/macos/windows. I also liked GNU Octave when I was doing matlab-adjacent work in undergrad.
Some of my favorite utilities are
ag
(code searching tool called the silver searcher, like awk but faster and more fully featured), andjq
for parsing/manipulating json data — both definitely available on linux and macos, probably bsd too but I haven't checked.Also loving the hell out of Nix as a package manager right now (haven't used nixos itself yet). Nixpkgs really easy to use, though writing nix configuration files has one of the steepest learning curves of any language I've ever used lol
I love how ancient GIMP's UI is. In an age of slick mobile design it takes me back to my roots.
That being said I would never recommend it to anyone because of that.
Blender! Blender! Blender! It's on windows linux and macos and it has one of my favorite guis of any program every. Also Musescore!!!!! It's a great notation app for everything, as well.
I'm unemployed and spend like 8 hours a day in Blender. I love it so much.
I generally try to use FOSS for everything; even my phone runs Linux >:)
100%! I've also tried out everything on this image, but I like postmarketOS because it has full disk encryption working
Wait I was joking. You actually have it working? On a pinephone or what?
Out of curiosity, is arch easy to setup these days? I had a friend install it on his computer quite a few years ago and he said it was a pain.
I wouldn't call it easy, but the wiki is very detailed, and every step involves something that is pretty important to understand, so you'll be a better user for having learned it.
The process is involved, but there's a few handy scripts that help you manage that. How much post-installation fixing you'll have to do depends a lot on your computer too, like if your laptop has a dedicated gpu, like mine has, you need to do a couple of steps more that are not listed on the install instructions. People here are very nice and many are running arch linux though, and they helped me once before :)
Jenkins Deluge Python Parallels VLCPlayer Jellyfin Awk GnuPG isync + mutt Streamlink is awesome for twitch Wireguard
i use arch btw just wish my printers would work
I love how gimp still has that goofy web 1.0 wavy text when you start it up
wget, haproxy, youtube-dl. Also wine and dxvk because without them I wouldn't have been able to play tons of games.
Hell yes. I use Emacs for my file manager (dired), shell (eshell), PDF viewer (pdf-tools), and for pretty much all my writing and programming. I also used qutebrowser briefly a few years ago but I switched back to Firefox + Vimium.
Jellyfin! It's a replacement for PLEX media server, and has lots of clients available for it along with an active community. Forked from Emby.