Ask HN: What free-to-use software inspires you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794244

by nvr219 • 8 years ago

42 38 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

nvr219• 8 years ago

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

- pi-hole - irssi - plex

xstartup• 8 years ago

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

iammiles• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

Emacs especially with likes of Magit, Orgmode etc.

fosco• 8 years ago

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

I_complete_me• 8 years ago

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

knaik94• 8 years ago

VLC

dlahoda• 8 years ago

https://github.com/WebMemex

matthberg• 8 years ago

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

cgi-joe• 8 years ago

Blender

kiddico• 8 years ago

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

herogreen• 8 years ago

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

jimmies3• 8 years ago

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

jfolkins• 8 years ago

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

truth_seeker• 8 years ago

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

yupasama2• 8 years ago

ditto VLC!

yupasama2• 8 years ago

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

bernardino• 8 years ago

TexShop: http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/

kang• 8 years ago

bitcoin

jimmies3• 8 years ago

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

dverma• 8 years ago

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

billconan• 8 years ago

sublime text,

xtreak29• 8 years ago

Emacs

Redis

PostgreSQL

VLC

Perl

GNU tools like grep, xargs, find etc.

Iceland_jack• 8 years ago

GHC

jasonkostempski• 8 years ago

Linux

kornnflake• 8 years ago

Linux

PostgreSQL

Redis

Blender

seesawtron• 8 years ago

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

weinzierl• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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

tkjef• 8 years ago

vim, bash, puppet, chef, kitchen, terraform

andrei_says_• 8 years ago

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.

mcknco• 8 years ago

OpenBSD, of course :)

ccajas• 8 years ago

Blender

nextos• 8 years ago

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.

stellajohn• 8 years ago

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

kenjikato• 8 years ago

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.

farseer• 8 years ago

SQLite

Ask HN: What free-to-use software inspires you?

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