VLC! No ads ever, that’s insane!
But does it whip the llama’s ass?
I think not.
- this is a really old Winamp reference for you younger folks.
VLC isn’t a WinAmp replacement? Though.
Foobar2000 is!
Foobar themes and customisation was and still is absolutely amazing.
I love my minimalist black version, but now I’m curious! Do you have any examples of cool themes/customizations?
To piggyback off of this, consider donating to VLC.
Donated!
Firefox. I couldn’t imagine using the internet without it.
I’ve never thought about it, how do they make money? I’ve never seen an ad or sent them money.
They make a large amount from Google paying them to be the default search engine. Also they have been making additional projects that can be subscribed to as add-ons for Firefox (like a VPN and an email forwarding service that allows you to make fake email addresses or phone numbers to use on sites that will forward the messages to your real inbox/phone). You can use a limited version of the email thing without paying though so it is easy to try out. And they are always ready to take donations of any size and can be reoccurring. I personally pay .99/month for the email service even though I don’t use it often. As it is nice to have if I need it, and it is basically a donation at that point. lol.
Here are links to those products if you care to read more about them or at least see pricing.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/But even just making a point to donate some one-offs here and there does help in small ways to keep a real option in browsers that isn’t just another Chromium-based project.
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/Everyone hated when IE was the only browser that sites were coded for, and we are seeing more and more Chromium only sites. Which means a bad vulnerability in Chromium will impact all the browsers based on it. Also privacy add-ons for Firefox tend to work better and block ads well.
Mozilla seems to be pretty transparent. You can see their financial statement at State of Mozilla.
I donate every. single. month.
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Donations
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Getting payed by google to make it their default search engine.
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They get paid by Google to feature their search engine as the default primary search engine. In Fennec, the non-google-play version of mobile browser Firefox, Duckduckgo is set as default, even though both versions are maintained by Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind Firefox.
This but in the Fennec flavor
Fennec is only for Android, because the desktop Firefox doesn’t have have weird app-store shennanigans to begin with, so there’s no point of maintaining Fennec for desktop.
And I do use Fennec for Android, just to keep the Google-Play shennanigans out of my browser.
I’m on Fennec on Android and LibreWolf on desktop.
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It seems evident that the effort put into a comment would mirror one’s investment in the topic. With these bare minimum answers I always assume the quality of the recommendation matches.
With a catch: If it’s something absurdly popular, then no. Something like Google Maps, you really don’t have to say why it’s both surprising and unsurprising that it manages to be ad free. The whole conversation is self-evident and no more words are needed.
Have you considered asking the question yourself and explaining in your post that you are seeking for actual recommendations instead of expecting them in a post with a one-line random question like this one? Maybe?
Most “ITT people” love to help with “ITT” matters, but also enjoy throwing quick answers in posts like this. Just a heads-up.
I mean, when asked for something like this and the quick answer was Everything, you’d wonder if the OP meant the voidtools’ file search software ‘Everything’ or just… everything. At least provide a quick explanation of the usage, 1 sentence is usually enough.
Although I agree with your point, all I see is a will to complain in this thread. And for free. The popular thing to do, I guess.
Linux.
The world would be a very different place if linux didn’t exist.
No Android phones, insanely outdated internet, software development confined to what corporations allowed… Yea things could have been a lot worse
Insofar as BSD is very different. Linux emerged while BSD’s legal status was in serious doubt, and had already gathered considerable inertia by the time the court case ended, but the court case ended favorably for the BSD community, so we’d have ended up on that if not for Linux.
/thread
This is it.
Bitwarden is one I use several times a day. They do have a support plan for like $10 a year that gives a couple extra features like TOTP support, but the base level is incredibly robust. It’s open source, too. I know a lot of folks also host their own servers with Vaultwarden, but that’s a little beyond my skill level.
I just recently started using their totp function and I can’t believe I didn’t switch sooner. Just the fact alone that it automatically copies the code to your clipboard is such a Time saver not having to open up a separate app.
It’s a wild time saver. I can’t believe other folks go to a whole separate app for their codes! Hitting Ctrl+L to autofill passwords and user names then Ctrl+V for TOTP feels like a hack when I watch other people struggle with their other solutions.
I use a separate app for my codes, if someone somehow gains access to my Bitwarden if they have TOTP as wellcthrn they have all my accounts. With my TOTP in another app they still can’t access them.
What do you use?
I use keepassxc which autofills. Then 2fsa has an addon that auto adds the code. I’m in in under 10 seconds. I dread the idea of keeping my passwords and TOTP in the same vault.
Right! I was using Authy so I didn’t have to grab my phone every time, but even that was still having to open the Authy app and wait for it to load, copy+paste. But using the keyboard shortcuts for Bitwarden is just so fast. Like you said, feels like a hack. It even auto copies on Android and with the autofill, makes it so easy.
I pay for it just because it’s cheap and to support them
Same, the free tier is so good that I’m paying to make sure it stays free.
I pay for it just because it’s cheap and to support them
I did this too when it first came out, and then the product became robust enough that I recommended we implement it at work because secrets management was non-existent. We have a bunch of licenses on the Enterprise plan now and it just keeps getting better each update.
My only complaint is that migrating the data to a new server is a pain in the ass and never works correctly, even when following the migration instructions to the letter. Always have to open a ticket with them for that. Not enough of a pain to move to another product, though.
I also still pay for my personal plan. It really is a fantastic product.
Why not just let them host it?
Because we have some contracts that stipulate any data related to the project, including secrets/credentials, must remain on-site, and in some cases, on an air-gapped network. Doesn’t make sense to spin up something else to manage those secrets when Bitwarden can do it all and satisfy the requirements of those contracts.
Ahh figured it’d be something like that.
Pretty uncommon to host company credentials via 3rd party as policy. It wouldn’t even be legal under national law for my field of work for example.
Obviously situations are different but the majority of standard businesses will let bitwarden host. In fact, I’d put more trust in bitwarden than than most self hosting teams.
Oh wow, is it really cheap?! Good much money can I invest right away?!? 11?!1111!
FYI, This product is 100% marketed on Lemmy for a profit. I’ve seen astroturfed threads multiple times now.
Free app marketed for profit… There might be something wrong with you
It kinda does feel like it’s being promoted here, which seems unnecessary for a free, open-source program hahaha
Might just be because people really like it and want to share.
I don’t doubt that! I’ve just seen it mentioned a LOT, much more than any other sites I’ve visited.
I’m not suspicious about it anymore, though—if it wasn’t a free open-source program, that would be a different story! Spotting obvious ads disguised as comments everywhere on Reddit was always fun.
Same, the last few posts about a password manager was heavily voted for bitwarden and keypass. It is suspicious, but at the same time Lemmy is primarily filled with techy programmers that are more in tune with tech than most people and lean toward open source and pirating.
I kinda thought that too, but it’s free and open-source… so that would be weird.
Looking into password managers, though, it does really seem like the best choice. Lastpass had breach lately, KeePass requires self-hosting, and other offerings cost more (and aren’t open-source.)
7-zip
Microsoft is adding extensive archive format support (using libarchive) to Windows 11. I’d like to thank 7-zip for its service over the decades, though.
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The way Msoft are going with right click options I’m doubtful it’ll complete.
If you’re talking about the more limited set of options you get when you right click a file in Windows 11, just hold shift while right clicking to get the original options. You’ve actually been able to hold shift to get additional options going way back, I think to windows XP.
There’s a lot of extra useful options in there too like opening command prompts to the current folder and copying file paths to the clipboard.
Yes, I totally paid for WinRar.
It’s said that when Jesus comes back, you get to go to heaven if you paid for it.
The three people who did are going to be pretty lonely.
Weawow is a completly (also ad-)free weather forecast app run basically solo by a Japanese guy. I was surprised when I found this app that it was so good in every aspect that I had to donate the guy. It has has more than half a Mio. reviews on google play with an average of 4.9 . Idk of any free app with that many reviews having this kind of rating, well deserved.
Further honorable mentions:
- Vivaldi browser
- Joplin notes app
- nextcloud
- wikipedia (obviously)
- Öffi
- Signal
- keepass
- rif for reddit (R.I.P)
Nice find, I just downloaded it and it looks amazing, thank you!
I love weawow! Agreed about making a regular donation to the Weawow dev… or it’ll face the curse of other top, rated free apps - the developer has tons of users, dealing with all their support requests, and can’t make a living from it, then rightly sells up to some sh!tty company who then turns the app to shite. Yes, that’s the story of the legendary Quickpic app.
yeah you can see all donation transparently on the donations section (unless u opted for anonymous) and fortunately it’s looking like it’s going quite well. I assume the creator actually has some more employees now or at least professional help for all the translations of the app as it seems to be available in a lot of languages.
Blender. The leap from 2.79 to 2.8 and beyond was astonishing
Can’t agree more. Blender is very solid 3D editor software with a lot of features for creating 3D models and scenes, whereas other software of such level of functionality is very expensive. I’m no way a professional 3D modeller, but I am very grateful for enthusiasts behind Blender to make it possible for random people to even touch the world of 3D modelling, not even speaking about to create quality assets for their pet projects.
GNU!
Just had to give a shout out to Stallman & GNU. I’ve seen a lot of mentions of thanks to Linux on here, but Richard will never let us forget that Linux ain’t shit w/o GNU software to interact with it.
Just think of the number of GNU programs you’ve used, just in a typical day on the terminal.
My hat is off to you, Richard.
Very yes. But GPL license, while inteded to make IT world better, still makes life harder for common developers.
how
Not everyone writes open source. Let’s put the reasons aside, but GPL stuff is unusable outside of open source. MIT and Apache are the licenses that make code really free.
I have to add that GPL licenses would hardly change the intention of creators of software not to publish their source code, instead limiting what libraries they can use and open possibility to sue for a fragments of code that could originate from GPL licensed repositories.
how so?
Ffmpeg, VLC
OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by millions of volunteers. It includes data about roads, buildings, shops, points of interest, and more.
Many of the benefits of Google Maps without all its spying and advertising.
Bonus in line with this: OsmAnd.
Others have mentioned most of my favorite tools. One thing I’d like to add is SageMath. It’s a mathematical software that’s comparable/better than commercial offerings like Mathematica and MatLab. I’ve rarely seen anyone in the academia using anything else these days. If someone does use something else, it’s just because they’re more used to it. SageMath is by far the best tool for most things math.
Also, while typing about Sage, I was reminded of how great of a tool LaTeX is. If you want to write anything that’ll be more than a single page, LaTeX is probably the best way to do it.
Home Assistant. It is an incredibly powerful smart home solution that is far more capable than any other solution one needs to pay for.
Linux
Not an “app” but close enough :) I agree anyway
On this note it’s crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.
I can get if you’re using some adobe products, or some game that hasn’t been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.
Bitwarden and firefox
I don’t use it but blender is another one
What is blender for? I would Google it but I imagine it would mainly be kitchen accessories
Blender is an open source 3D art/graphics program, on-par with what companies charge hundreds of dollars per month for. Unlike some things where people say “Use GIMP instead of Photoshop!”, Blender is actually industry standard everywhere I’ve worked
For the self-hosters out there, there’s VaultWarden, which works seamlessly with all Bitwarden plugins and apps.
It’s very lightweight and easy to setup and run. It has support for multiple accounts, so you can use it for your family, or business, or whatever!
