Asklemmy

Lemmy

Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I've tried before has really worked for me.

Mine will probably be Bottles.

The team behind that application did a fantastic job. Wine was due for something much more user friendly like this. And integration with Proton, allowing 3D acceleration is the cherry on top.

HomeAssistant, it's such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.

It's just an amazing piece of software.

Notesnook.

I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.

[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.

[1] Requirements in no particular order:

• Open source client and server.
• Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
• Cross-platform feature parity.
• Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
• Easy notes syncing.
• End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
• Ability to publish notes.
• Decent UX.

Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without

Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.

With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.

• URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
• PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.

I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.

Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:

Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)

cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)

VLC (media player that plays almost everything)

PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.

It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!

Immich as an alternative to Google Photos, it has all the main features but it's self hosted.

• Voyager --> feddit for android
• Fossify --> essential apps for android
• syncthing -- > more use cases than i thought
• paperlessngx --> finally going digital
• obtainium --> get android apps directly from their github

I am still learning and try to replace my stuff with open soure software

This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?

Beyond All Reason

This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.

• labor of love
• fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
• tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
• all shots actively rendered, leading to:
• realistic friendly fire
• even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
• redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
• meaningful terrain
• radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
• radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
• two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
• crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
• free server hosting (!)
• active servers all times of day

The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.

Fam and friends play together often.

Home Assistant. I only installed it to help me control my solar/battery but I ended up putting other things on it and fell down a rabbit hole.

I'll go with FreeCAD. I've known about it for a while and tried it about 5-10 years ago but have given it another look as I try to get back into CAD stuff and hate the restrictive licenses of commercial products. It has come a LONG way and is far more intuitive to use than it used to be.

paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.

I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.

But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust

Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.

Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.

It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.

Revanced

Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.

I've had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.

Spottube, like Spotify but without the shitty ads, play limitations and tracking.

Every. Day. In the kitchen.

My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.

Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.

I don't know if Tailscale counts because it's mostly open source (with options to run your own server), but I use it constantly to connect to Home Assistant and Jellyfin on my home server, as well as pairing it with NextDNS (pihole is possible for those that want to go that route) for ad blocking and Mullvad to use them as an exit node.

spotDL. Searches YouTube to download whole Spotify playlists, or individual songs, and includes artwork and metadata.

Linux and godot

"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:

• Kvaesitso, search focused android launcher. I used to really like nova launcher's local search and navigated my phone mostly using that. But once gensture navigation became a thing I had to stop using nova and replicate the experience in Samsung launcher with various local search apps that were lacking in comparison. Tried to go back a couple times once gestures with 3rd party launchers got better but found my old setup still too ugly and sluggish to go back to. Recently I randomly came across Kvaesitso on fdroid and it was everything I ever wanted out of a launcher.

• Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.

• Kid3, audio file tag editor. It has much better workflow/automation than mp3tag that I used in windows, and it seems if you spend some effort on it you could add more automation to make it even better.

My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.

Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.

Nuclear and RiMusic are great so i dont need spotify/YTmusic or something.

proxmox really made me enjoy selfhosting again.

Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like "Press T to open up trainer menu".

Unfortunately it's not available (natively) on Linux. I've used Lutris but I don't believe it has the same customization options. I don't think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven't tried to customize it in several years. I've gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It'sFOSS article about it here.

Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,

Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.

Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.

conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.

LiveCaptions