There’s a lot of free software, and there’s a lot of hidden gems to be found. Share some software that you like, as long as it isn’t your own and isn’t known by many. Here’s my initial list:
hayward
Hayward is a fork of Sway that works more like wmii. It’s far from being finished, but I think it’s a great project that deserves more love than it gets. For some reason GitHub hides this project in search, and I’ve never seen it suggested to me.
gallery-dl
This is a fantastic piece of software that lets you automatically download media from sites. I’ve downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of stuff using this tool. It works on a crap-ton of sites. If you find youtube-dl doesn’t work on a site you use, or doesn’t have the tools you need to scrape a profile/board/collection, give this a shot. It automatically organises your stuff into folders so you often don’t need to configure anything. Just run gallery-dl [thing].
Himitsu
Maybe a lot of the people here know this piece of software given it’s written by Drew, but it’s a very useful piece of software. It’s a store for secrets, with integrations into other software like SSH. For me, what I find really useful about it is that I can have a prompt for sandboxed programs in Flatpak using the Himitsu SSH agent. Instead of giving it direct access, I can just have it ask for permission to use a secret. It also has a really simple protocol that I think most people could easily implement.
EtchDroid
EtchDroid is an application for Android that lets you make bootable USB sticks without root using your mobile device. This app has helped me so many times when my main system and I had no other computers laying around.
Cromite
It’s Bromite, but updated by one of the guys who used to work on it. It has a lot of fantastic features like a built-in adblocker, the ability to move the search bar to the bottom, and a lot of other stuff. It’s also Degoogled. My understanding is that Cromite doesn’t use blobs unlike other Chromium forks, which makes it a very practical but also very free browser.
acme2k
It’s acme but modernised a bit and with a customisable colourscheme. Comes with some of its own. Great if acme isn’t quite enough by default.
Seal
It’s youtube-dl, but for Android. The app is slick, and it’s super easy to use. Just share a link to the app. It lets you customise the codec and quality and stuff. It’s really great for stealing memes to post onto freer platforms.
Shadowsocks
This is a proxy designed for circumventing censorship. However, I use it to not have public Wi-Fi block sites. I’ve used public Wi-Fi where even F-Droid is blocked for being a “freeware” site. It’s easy to set up on a cheap VPS, and works well. I’ve never had it blocked. This is the same technology that OutlineVPN uses.
DivestOS
Like GrapheneOS, but have an unsupported device? Try Divest. It isn’t as polished, but it’s great as a harm-reduction strategy until you’re able to get a phone that supports Graphene well. It isn’t as hardened, but does borrow some patches from Graphene, and supports sandboxed MicroG (which is cool.)
Tubular
It’s a free software Android client for YouTube based on NewPipe, with support for SponsorBlock and Return YouTube dislikes. It’s basically a direct upgrade over NewPipe in my opinion.
Molly
Molly is a fork of the Signal client that adds some nice features. For me, the killer one is the UnifiedPush version. Instead of using Signal’s websocket for notifications (which drains battery) you can use an existing UP app like ntfy.
zutty
It’s like st meets Alacritty. A slim and simple X11 terminal emulator that has fast start-up times but with GPU acceleration. High recommend if you use X11. I used it up until I moved to Wayland, but I still miss it a lot.
shod
It’s like acme but for X11 windows. Really cool project.
