Ask HN: What free-to-use software inspires you? - nvr219
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iammiles
All the free editors (e.g. VS Code, Emacs, Vim) and especially their
respective plugins. I'm always amazed at the breadth and quality among them.

~~~
reddit_clone
Emacs especially with likes of Magit, Orgmode etc.

~~~
fosco
I just started using org-mode and I wish I started years ago. Inspirational,
motivational, customizable and extremely efficient.

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truth_seeker
Libre Office - alternative to MS office

VLC - Video/Audio player, encoder, decoder etc.

Wine (on Linux) - for playing games especially

VSCode - Intelligent editor with good community support

Signal - Private messenger app

~~~
yupasama
ditto VLC!

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herogreen
TeamViewer because it is cross plateform, super simple to use and works very
well. I wish there was a good open-source competitor¹ because I feel ill at
ease giving a private company root access to my computers.

¹ it should be able to traverse NATs. I could deal with having to set up a
main server. edit: typos

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jimmies
try nomachine. coupled with wireguard for vpn to a middleman broker computer,
it works very well for me.

~~~
jfolkins
Can you explain in detail how you set this up? Thanks!

~~~
jimmies
Yep. Here: [http://www.tnhh.net/posts/wireguard-router-firewalled-
comput...](http://www.tnhh.net/posts/wireguard-router-firewalled-computer-
raspberry-pi.html)

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matthberg
Lineage OS android. It's amazingly polished for an open source, community run
system, and the breadth of devices supported is phenomenal.

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kenjikato
The software you are probably using right now to view and/or edit this post.
The web browser.

It's the most amazing piece of free software that we all use almost every day,
regardless of the platform or browser you use. Web browsers across the board
are an amazing piece of software that's been in development in one way, shape,
or form since the early '90s. Thousands of people have worked on them or
contributed code, and they provide access to the bounty of the internet for
nothing. Show me something more inspiring than that.

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weinzierl
TeX, because it's software that has been considered feature complete for
nearly 30 years and despite it's successors' additional features its original
feature set is still quite usable today.

~~~
anarazel
And by being considered feature complete and being pretty decent back then, it
has held back the entire field for a generation.

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andrei_says_
I’d like give a shout out to the multiple free (mostly open source) eco-
systems and frameworks for web development available nowadays.

The tooling is fantastic and getting better all the time.

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cgi-joe
Blender

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bernardino
TexShop:
[http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/](http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/)

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nvr219
Here are the free (as in beer, sometimes FOSS) applications that really amaze
and inspire me. In no particular order

\- pi-hole \- irssi \- plex

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kiddico
OBS is pretty amazing considering it's feature set, and adoption in the
streaming community.

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jimmies
wireguard: so good, so fast, and everything a vpn software should be

openwrt: works on many devices and so impressively stable

xbmc/kodi: although I don't use it daily, it is a complex yet very functional
piece of software

winamp: simple, easy, functional, light

go+liteide: simple, easy, no nonsense

nomachine: not open source, but good

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nextos
NixOS, XMonad, Emacs and Firefox.

Actually, that's my whole environment discounting libraries and utilities
which include Julia, Scheme and C++.

On Emacs, I adore org, magit, notmuch, eshell, calc and dired.

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mcknco
OpenBSD, of course :)

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jasonkostempski
Linux

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dlahoda
[https://github.com/WebMemex](https://github.com/WebMemex)

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xtreak29
Emacs

Redis

PostgreSQL

VLC

Perl

GNU tools like grep, xargs, find etc.

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dverma
SonarQube, SonarLint - has helped me improve as a developer a lot.

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seesawtron
youtube-dl (to download youtube content without adds painlessley)

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xstartup
qtox, arch, vscode, ufw, golang, httpie, mongoDB

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yupasama
free but powerful game engines, Unity (not truly free) and Godot (free free),
amongst others

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ccajas
Blender

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knaik94
VLC

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I_complete_me
zim, autokey, duplicati, draftsight, sublime text (ish), sketchup, vim.

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tkjef
vim, bash, puppet, chef, kitchen, terraform

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farseer
SQLite

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kornnflake
Linux

PostgreSQL

Redis

Blender

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Iceland_jack
GHC

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kang
bitcoin

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billconan
sublime text,

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stellajohn
This helps me, but free only for 30 days
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800756)

