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

[+] iammiles|8 years ago|reply

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|reply

Emacs especially with likes of Magit, Orgmode etc.

[+] truth_seeker|8 years ago|reply

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|8 years ago|reply

ditto VLC!

[+] herogreen|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] jimmies|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] matthberg|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] kenjikato|8 years ago|reply

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.

[+] weinzierl|8 years ago|reply

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|reply

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

[+] andrei_says_|8 years ago|reply

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.

[+] cgi-joe|8 years ago|reply

Blender

[+] bernardino|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] nvr219|8 years ago|reply

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

- pi-hole - irssi - plex

[+] kiddico|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] jimmies|8 years ago|reply

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

[+] nextos|8 years ago|reply

NixOS, XMonad, Emacs and Firefox.

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

38 comments