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blorgblorgblorg
@blorgblorgblorg

ive posted a lot of complaints about free software but also i routinely have a solid experience with shotcut, inkscape, gimp, ffmpeg, imagemagick, and avidemux.


sirocyl
@sirocyl

I've complained a lot about free software and open-source stuff, but like... I use it a lot, I like it a lot, I'm an advocate for the use, adoption, contribution to, creation and improvement of free software and their projects, and the things I use which are free-software, have been some of the best utilities for the things I need them for. I've put a list below the fold here.


  • GNU IMP (post-2.6, with the single-window UI) works well for doing color-restricted/rotoscoped/dithered art for Vintage Reasons, modifying photos and doing in-depth image editing, and as well, it has the Resynthesizer plugin (available separately) for content-aware erase/fill, and its various select and layer composition tools, for Good Shitposting.
  • Libresprite (A fork of Aseprite) has served me well for sprite and pixel art and animation work.
  • GrafX2 is a bit odd and frankly doesn't have the most discoverable UI, but it captures a lot of the late-80s/early-90s Amiga/DOS/ST 256-color art program fare, in a very compatible, distilled open-source program that runs anywhere SDL does.
  • FamiTracker (its currently-maintained fork, DN-FamiTracker - Windows only) is imo, one of the best music-tracker user experiences I've had. It is a 'tracker', a program for making music through a program grid, rather than a piano-roll or notation interface, and is specifically geared for making music for the NES and Famicom (including its expansion chips). It is very PC-keyboard-driven, and allows the composer to code in the music in an intuitive way that is easy for low-end computers and video game hardware to process.
    • FurnaceTracker comes a close second, and has far more chip support. It may overtake FamiTracker in the near future in terms of ease-of-use, if it hasn't already.
    • AdlibTracker2 (MS-DOS + SDL crossplatform) is a very full-featured tool for making music for the OPL2/OPL3 chips, as seen in the AdLib and Sound Blaster cards on vintage computers. It's all around a good FM synth and workstation.
    • MilkyTracker is another option, and it is more suitable for the classic S3M/XM/MOD/IT style multichannel sample synthesizer type music engines, as seen on the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS.
  • ShareX (Windows only) is the quickest, most featureful screenshot tool I've used yet. It's Windows-only, but has a lot of powerful features for selecting windows, recording windows and the desktop, and editing screenshots on the fly.
  • Audacity is the only audio editor I use. I've tried commercial shit, and the suckitude is large at the two-to-three-figure mark, and the four- and five-figure stuff is out of reach
  • revolt.chat (AGPL-3.0, web/Electron cross-platform) is amazing, honestly. they did an open-source Discord clone and host a chat service with it, and it rocks.
  • almost every emulator you use is free software.
  • I'm building a game with the DOOM engine/renderer. The Chocolate-Doom project has gone way above and beyond at modernizing the codebase, refactoring it and making it work cross-platform, yet maintaining 100% compatibility with the original.
    • FreeDoom, while kind of a "free software bootleg" of DOOM in terms of the game itself, is absolutely phenomenal to work with as a base for making your own WAD from scratch, especially if you want to make a TC with no dependency on the commercial DOOM WADs. It has a very well-thought-out build system, a git repository workflow, permissive licensing (not GNU GPL) and assets in common formats that you can easily modify with standard graphics programs - no import/export step required! The buildsystem automatically "bakes" your assets - maps, graphics, music and sounds, into the WAD (or WADs - you can build more than one game through it!) in its native formats.
  • Kodi is an amazing UX/UI and plugin system for handling and discovering media in a concise, remote-friendly way. It's developing gaming support, too, as well as handling native application launching, and has a liberal buttload of plugins to support almost any usecase you have for it.
  • VLC is a video swiss-army knife. If it won't play in anything else, it'll pop in VLC more than likely.
  • 7-zip (7-Zip File Manager, and NanaZip) is quite an extensive suite of archive, disk image and package file interpreters with a cool, minimal win32 line-based file-browser GUI. It also has some extra features which make it an invaluable piece of kit to include in a recovery/emergency toolkit, and it has a much better UX, despite its ugly UI, than most archival or disk image browsing tools.
  • The Linux kernel itself! Not many people give this its direct credit, but it has done so much in the space of hardware enablement, virtualization and systems management, cloud, containerization, and being a good common platform for many experiments and products alike.
  • Mozilla Firefox. This is a no-brainer. Despite the problems Mozilla the org has had as of late, Firefox has been a solid and stable browser with complete and un-hobbled extensions support (which uBlock Origin and other ad/malware filters need, and which Chromium has decided to effectively short-change in the name of Google's bottom line.)
  • uBlock Origin, and its set of default filter lists, have been the only performant real-time ad, tracker and nastyware filter with up-to-date definitions for Firefox, Chrome and other browsers. Unfortunately for Chrome, it fails-open when the extension is sidelined (the process is killed) by Chrome for more "important" things, like serving ads on YouTube. Never had that problem in Firefox, though. IMO, uBO is mandatory for keeping the web safe and usable, as without it, I've seen drive-by downloads, deceptive and hijack ads, pop-unders, crypto-miners and notification hijacks plunder unprotected browsers.
  • Godot Engine has picked up a lot of speed to become an all-in-one toolkit for working on video games. AAA studios have used it now, as well as published indies on consoles and major PC storefronts. It's big!
  • Meld is perhaps the best tool for finding differences in files, hands down. The UI is simple and intuitive, and goes a long way to make changes stand out.
  • Zenmap (Linux-only) is a great frontend for nmap, the port-scanning and network discovery utility.
  • ImageMagick (command-line) is a batchable, command-line image toolkit. It's what you'd use for doing automated work on an image file, on the fly, in a workflow. For the manual option, choose GNU IMP.
  • sox (command-line) is like ImageMagick, for audio. It pulls together a lot of features and utilities for converting, playing, and working with audio. While it has a lot of commands, the usual workflow for converting a file is sox [input.ext] [output.ext] - it detects what format you want to convert to, from the file extension, and is set with sane defaults you don't have to fiddle with unless you have a need to otherwise. For the manual option, choose Audacity.
  • ffmpeg (command-line) is like ImageMagick, for video, audio and their containers. Its syntax is very awkward, but 99% of the time, someone has the same task you do, and there's a command you can use on stackoverflow or a forum. For the manual option... (I seriously don't know.)
  • yt-dlp (command-line) doesn't just download Youtube videos - it picks apart a whole lot of websites and DASH/HLS type streams and media, and is adept at ripping media from almost any website. It has a million different switches, and is extremely flexible, but the important part is that it works, and yt-dlp https://[url] works 99% of the time.
  • NewPipe (Android) is a very well-put-together Youtube client for Android. There's a fork with Sponsorblock support - that's the one I recommend.
  • OsmAnd (Android) has been picking up steam. It's an OpenStreetMap viewer and navigation tool for Android that's open-source. There's a paid version, and buying it directly supports the OpenStreetMap project and enables some service features (like automatic, real-time map updates), but it is free-software regardless, and available on F-droid.
  • qbittorrent is a reliable, feature-complete torrent client, with a native look and feel, and it gets the job done.
  • Adium (macOS) is a really good Pidgin client for OS X, and has a very good native look-and-feel.
  • Cyberduck (macOS) has been my go-to for doing any remote file/folder management from a Mac.
  • 64characters' Telephone.app (macOS) is a no-frills SIP client, and has handled many a phone call for me in the past, reliably and effortlessly. It's minimal and its UI is straightforward.

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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

onlyoffice surprised me for being good, I accidentally launched a .xlsx with it instead of vscode and it just worked on The World's Most Hacked Together Workbook.

i didn't even install it, i just forgot to install kde-plasma-minimal instead of kde-plasma