What's A Piece Of Software You Could Never Do Without?

uBlock origin
- And sponsorblock!
  
  And DeArrow!
  A must for actually knowing the content of LMG videos past the click-bait headlines/thumbnails.

Firefox. I hate how inflexible other browser are.
- Speaking of which, user scripts. So useful at un-enshittifying the web. Or just personalizing it to scratch those little design itches that annoy you.
  
  any good ones you can recommend?
- The fact, that you can install plugins on a mobile browser
  head blown gif
  
  Kiwi Browser is Android Chrome with desktop extension compatibility.
- Others browsers, plural?
  I guess Lynx exists...
- Have you tried out LibreWolf? By default its a bit hard to use since it doesnt save passwords or history or cookies or anything, but you can turn all that on. Its a fork of firefox meant to be more privacy focused. You can still use your firefox account and everything im pretty sure.
  
  Use IceRaven for Firefox with full extension compatibility.

Bitwarden. Otherwise I won’t be able to log on to any of my accounts.
- I concur. I would never go back.
- I also like Keepass

The kernel. I can take or leave most things, but I'm not going back to the days of writing directly into memory-mapped registers.
- But that's my favorite part
- Someone always beats me to the funniest response!
  
  Oh, don't worry. The guy who answered vmlinuz beat me to the joke in general :)

Android. As bad as it is, if I had to use iOS or Linux phones it would be even worse, at least with the current state of Linux phones.
But actually, maybe if Android didn't exist, the FOSS community would focus more on Linux phones and they would be an actually good option. Maybe Android shouldn't exist?
- For me it’s iOS, funnily enough. I use Windows for all of our video game machines and Linux for everything else, but I don’t use any Google products or services. After messing around on my computers all the time, I don’t want to even have to THINK about doing things to my phone to make it go. My current phone is six years old and the only reason I’m upgrading this year is to get a 120hz screen, USB-C, and for better low light pictures of cats. And a terabyte would be nice.
  
  Google is a bad company, and Apple isn't any better. Probably the best option for you would be GrapheneOS on one of the latest pixels, they have intuitive software, 120hz screens, have had USB-C for years, a good camera, lots of storage, and most importantly GrapheneOS doesn't use Google or Apple, it's FOSS.
- Maybe just a feature phone and tether it to a laptop?

- I will!! Right after I look up the key command that does that.
- Sure and place neovim there
- What if I swap it out with helix like that statue in Indiana jones

On Android, it's probably a little utility software called Quick Cursor (it's not FOSS). It's incredibly convenient being able to spawn a cursor on your phone from thin air that you can use to reach the "unreachable" portions of your screen, especially if you are holding your phone with one hand. Besides being a "phone touchpad" it has a bunch of ways of triggering actions/shortcuts, for example: volume or brightness control, launching an app (I use it for launching a floating calculator, notes...), opening notification shade, copying text (it can copy any text that is under the cursor, even if it's not selectable)...
It's not that I couldn't go without it, but it changed the way I use my phone and it would feel really weird without it. It feels like it should be a part of the OS.
- Used this for all of 10 seconds and fell in love.
- wow this will legitimately improve my life daily, thanks for sharing
- That seems like a wonderful function. Considering android support external mouse with cursors. I hope someone can make a FOSS version and put it in F-droid.
- This is a nice share. I have used Edge Gestures for years (made by the same dev who created Square Launcher, which was my daily driver coming off Windows Phone) and this is a nice augmentation to that.
  I am curious about the usefulness of the functionality behind the paywall. It looks like some of the app launching features could replace what I use edge gestures for, but without a trial to test it I can't be certain.
  If you use the pro version, can you let me know if there is a way to pick from multiple applications to launch?
  Here's an example of the application shortcuts in Edge Gestures:
  
  So, there are 2 main places for shortcuts/actions: tracker actions and edge actions.
  These are my tracker actions
  
  I set it so it activates when I tap and hold the tracker, it shows up those shortcuts. If I slide my finger towards one of the shortcuts, it activates it.
  These are my edge actions
  
  These are actions/shortcuts that you trigger by pushing the cursor to the edge of the screen.
  You can pick any app from your phone or any of the actions available in the app, there are a lot... Like system controls (volume, brightness control, media playback buttons, screen lock, screen rotation, etc.) and you can also make a shortcut for Tasker/MacroDroid/Automate action. So basically, you can make a shortcut for almost anything you can think of.
- That may be the single most intuitive, and intuitively useful, app I have used in years.
  Wow, instant default install.
- Downloaded and enjoyed. Thanks for the recommendation.
- Legend!
- You can just connect a Bluetooth mouse if you have one and a cursor will appear natively.
  
  I think you are missing the point of the app. The cursor part of it is more of a gesture, or you can think of it as a "thumb extension". The point is to help you avoid the inconvenience and save time by allowing you to reach farther parts of your screen without repositioning your hand. I called it a "phone touchpad" just because, when you activate it, a part of the screen is acting like a touchpad. You are not using it for a specific purpose of having a cursor on your phone, the cursor is basically just the tip of your "virtual extended thumb". So it's a utility/accessibility software.
  Using a physical mouse would be the opposite of what this app is trying to achieve.
- That's stupid, so good. How haven't I heard of this before?
- no F-droid?

Linux, seriously, it's in my phone, my router, my desktop, my ISP and nearly the entire infrastructure of the internet upon which I rely uses it.

Firefox, uBlock Origin, uBlacklist KDE, Dolphin, Kate, LibreOffice, CherryTree Kid3, Flacon, LosslesCut, qBittorrent, VLC Musicolet, Simplenote, F-Droid, AuroraStore
- I agree with everything and also with Musicolet, like no other mp3 player felt right until this one, it has everything I like, I listen to downloaded audio books, and can effortlessly change audio speed and pitch, sleep timers, and folder directories.
  
  I desperately want a Linux desktop version of this.

A compiler. I mean, yeah, I guess I could go back to writing asm, but I really don’t want to.
- asm? ha! back in my day we were hammering ones and zeros into clay tablets.
  
  You had clay? You lucky. We used stones and put mammoths on the wall.

Going back to a "normal" text editor after using Vim for a few years would be horrible
Life without qBittorrent would also be pretty difficult, hell no, I'm not paying for DRM content that requires proprietary software to watch
- I really like qbittorrents built in search feature.
  
  Yeah the search is pretty nice, but I prefer my selfhosted instance of bitmagnet
- After 20 years on vi/m, I recently moved to vscode with vim plugin and I have to admit.. I really like it.
  
  You sinner
  
  Check out zed or lapce. Both are open source but native editors as opposed to chromium with near first class vim support. Much faster but less stable as neither are 1.0 yet. Additionally they have great LSP features.
  That being said I just can't give up my vim and terminal workflow but I'm actively following both projects.

firefox

Python
- Python is underappreciated

vmlinuz
- The entire world would shut down if this disappeared overnight.
  
  I'd be out of a job too
  
  There's always BSD, Hurd, Darwin... or NT 🤮

Yt-dlp. It's basically the only way I download music nowadays.
- Someday, when I'm not balls-to-the-wall poor I'll actually support the artists. Until then, it's not illegal for personal use, and morally it's that or just no music.
- Speaking of, is there a known way to get around the "sign in" blocking? It's not working anymore.
  
  It's fixed in the development versions. If you installed yt-dlp using pip, update with the prerelease flag: pip install --upgrade --pre yt-dlp. If you manually installed it, run yt-dlp --update-to nightly or grab the latest dev from their nightly repo.

7zip

KeepassXC + KeepassDX
- KeepassXC + Keepass2Android with the Inputstick plugin to let me type passwords into other devices using my phone.
  
  Nice, someone else with an InputStick.

I'm bored so I'm just going to make a list:
Lightroom Classic (I've tried Darktable, just not for me. I take a lot of photos on my DSLR and I've been using Lightroom since 2015 so for me it's worth eating the awful monthly subscription that I split with someone else.)
Anki (flashcard app, very popular among med school students and folks trying to learn new languages. Open source and tons of useful decks available. I've aced plenty of exams thanks to Anki.)
Bitwarden (finally caved and got a password manager-- could not be happier)
CHIRP (the best for programming handheld, mobile and base station radios)
CrystalDiskInfo (great for checking the health of SSDs and HDDs)
DaVinci Resolve (love using this for video editing-- pirated copy was easy to find)
Deluge (great for torrenting)
foobar2000 (I love it for music)
Greenshot (useful screencapture software)
inSSIDer (great for wifi analysis)
IrfanView (very good for photo management)
MusicBrainz Picard (amaaaaaaaaazing god tier music management software to get all the correct metadata/album art)
reWASD ($7 but it's so good for no BS macro'ing of keyboard/mouse/gamepad shortcuts and profiles. I have two PCs and two mice + gamepad attached to my PC and this software is very helpful. I think the license is for life.)
WizTree (SSD/HDD visualization tool that is useful for figuring out what's taking up too much space on your drive)
- Three stages of a passwort manager
  Stage 1: I do not need a passwort manager
  Stage 2: Maybe I need a password manager
  Stage: Why didnt I setup one way earlier???
- Why pirate Resolve? The non studio version is free (but not OSS)
  
  Hardware decoding was my reason for upgrading
- Is there a particular draw for foobar2000? I remember a while back I was looking for a music player and that kept coming up, but I found it underwhelming when trying it. I've been using MusicBee for a long while now, and have found it excellent, so I don't plan on switching, just curious if there's something I'm missing.
  
  Back in the 90s, when Winamp was the only game in town, many of us got tired of messing with the interface to make it useable and efficient. Foobar pretty much was plain Jane vanilla, looked like any other window and had the basics so you could do other stuff and not fuss with the horrendous skin.
  After all, you're typically listening to it, not looking at it, which was the point for me. Winamp's tiny buttons and such drove me mad.
  
  Just familiarity for me.

Leisure Suit Larry

git, vim/nvim

Notepad++
- I thought so too, yet here I am on arch linux now.
  I guess I could run it under wine or something if I really needed it.
  
  I feel like the text editors we get by default do all the things I ever wanted notepad++ for anyway.
  
  There is notepadqq, if I remember correctly.

Obsidian.
Since the Internet in general is getting harder to find genuine information, it is becoming increasingly important to save anything important to you. One day it could just disappear without warning. Obsidian can be used for an offline knowledge base. Design it however you like. I do recommend NOT watching YouTube Obsidian “gurus”, their system works for them not you.
- What's the premise?
  
  Personally for me, it allows me to dump stuff out of my noggin good or bad. That way I can stop thinking about it and move on. A form of self reflection. I have a bad habit to hold onto thoughts and go down a rabbit hole with them in an unhealthy fashion. Basically journaling but I can store things I have learned long term.
  The beauty of it is Obsidian (or really any other writing app) allows you to develop a system of writing for you. I’m not the typical writer but Obsidian allows me to write without worrying about the organization so much.
- Yep, today I'd say obsidian and syncthing, they're the bread and butter of my life right now. Although it feels sad and weird to see the small app I discovered 2 years ago starting to enter the «selling template» and «enhance your experience» that notion also took a few years ago «althought it's a completly different company culture»
- I do recommend NOT watching YouTube Obsidian “gurus”, their system works for them not you.
  One of these is actually what got me started with it. I do not rigidly adhere to their system but it was a nice starting point I have since adapted to my own style. If I had gone into it blind I would have made a lot less progress because I'm kind of dumb when I have nothing to go off.

qBitorrent, undoubtably
- 100% agreed

Vi/Vim - had it on every computer I've owned or used since about 1991.
- Vi for me too. Mostly because I'm trapped and cannot exit it.
  
  Just head down to the basement, find the circuit breakers for your building and flip them all to off for 10 seconds. That usually gets you out of Vi.

On Windows: EarTrumpet
Being able to quickly change audio outputs is awesome, I am always bouncing between headset and speakers. Also the pop up volume mixer is better than the built in one. Been using ET for years and years, can pry it from my cold dead hands.
- What does it do that the standard windows soundmixer doesn't do? You can change inputs in 2 clicks or ctrl+windows×v
  
  Ctrl+Win+V doesn't do anything for me. The best part about Eartrumpet for me is that you can manage all audio outputs on your system individually. Since I use a virtual mixer, this makes it easy to adjust everything without being to open the mixer, as well as making sure each program is outputting audio to the right place.
- +1 for EarTrumpet
  It's probably the most useful program I have on my Win10 machine.
- I programmed my headset macro keys to do this with nircmd.
- Having a bind that just instantly toggles between speakers/headphones is one of the major reasons I'm now stuck with Linux whether I like it or not
  Was one of the big things that got me hooked in general because audio config is such a pain on windows

Termux on Android.
I've got some videos on my phone I might want to watch on random computers, so I serve them up with NGINX. I've got wget-created mirrors of some old websites on my phone, so I serve them up with NGINX. Other files I may want to move out from my phone to untrusted computers on the network can too be served up simply by NGINX.
I've got the full Wikipedia zim file from Kiwix on my Micro SD card, so I run kiwix-serve (behind NGINX).
I've got all the music on my phone, naturally the phone is then running my Navidrome server (behind NGINX).
Of course, I may want to manage this from a computer, so it's running SSH server.
My phone is always connected to VPN and uses NextDNS, naturally I may want to use this with other computers, but I can't install software to computers I don't own (I mean, I can, but ... it would be disliked), naturally it is then running Tiniproxy HTTP proxy server.
Some desktop GUI apps can be useful on a phone too. noaa-apt, Kid3, Audacity, desktop Firefox, Handbrake because I am too dumb for ffmpeg, so I run XFCE DE on it. Naturally, I can access it from a computer (I know) too, after all it's accessed via a VNC server.
Am I stupid enough to expose something using HTTP protocol running on my phone to the internet? Of course I am! I can use cloudflared.
Do I want to encrypt a file? I can use GPG.
Do I want to create a compressed archive? I've got TAr and GZip.
Do I want to browse Gopher? I've got Lynx.
SSH or telnet somewhere? The clients are there.
- Christ on a bike, this comment reads like I'm having a stroke
  
  Do I want to download a car? I have PoterZebie on LilypaD for 3gb and a portable SD kaZoo
- Why on earth do you run this all on your phone as opposed to on a home server?
  
  Because... I can.
  And it's portable.
- I code nearly exclusively over termux+ssh.
  
  You ssh into your phone? Or you use Termux on your phone to ssh into another machine?
- Thanks for giving me many hours of something to do
- nginx
  why not just python -m http.server 1234 ?
  
  I feel like NGINX is simplest to configure. And it's in the repos already, so I don't see the advantage here.
  Easy to do redirects, directory listings, serving a static website, setting mime types of specific files, basic user authentication, using HTTPS, using it as reverse proxy, limiting request types, limiting bandwidth, and making the directory listings far nicer with fancyindex module. That's all I need and it's pretty simple to do with NGINX. I don't know what the Python HTTP server does, nor how to use.

LiGNUx, VLC, Firefox w/Ublock, KDE Connect, Dolphin, Kate, KDE. Vim, i3wm, Keepasses, yt-dlp, deluge, freecad, librecad, slic3r/cura. Some of these are clearly redundant or overlap. My use cases vary
Non-foss: Steam library.
I wouldn't spend so much time on the PC if I had to pay a premium for every little thing much like I've experienced with my arts-related hobbies.

Probably an OS
- Bah, real power users only need a magnet and a pin.
  
  Oh look at you with your fancy magnet!

bash

Windows: PowerToys. First thing I get approval to install on a work machine. PowerToys Run (Launchy on roids) saves me from the built in Windows search, a quick calculator, etc. PowerRename gets used more frequently than I care to admit. Video Conference mute is a second nature key combination. Can't remember the name of the window manager module but it is a key part of my workflow.
Android: As I've mentioned in a reply, Edge Gestures has been on my phone for years (first installed on a Pixel 3). Having 10+ apps accessible (especially 2FA, password vault, home assistant) from any screen, plus gestures for quick controls (flashlight, brightness slider) is incredibly handy. And unlike the notification shade, the edges of the phone can actually be reached with your thumb.
Linux: Docker. It's been an instrumental part of building out my home server which allowed me to kill my Microsoft 365 & Google One subscriptions. For me it has been the gateway drug in to learning more and more about self hosting - to Proxmox, LXCs & VMs, pihole and unbound, etc.

Joplin App

Obsidian

My first instinct was to say GIMP or Firefox, but I could still use Krita or Chromium in those cases.
I'd say Anki then. I don't know of any other FOSS flashcard app this good, and I have so much saved on it that losing it would be devastating.
- How does one use flashcards?

libreoffice, particularly calc. I keep all my finances and planning in spreadsheets I migrated from excel years ago.

Emacs, of course!!!
I can not imagine trying to get stuff done without it.
It makes organizing, programming, writing, just everything so much easier.

Python, Jupyter, Freetube
- We used Jupyter Notebook in school, we'd have assignments where each again was broken out by block and then we'd have to solve it. I don't see much of a use outside of an education setting
  What is your use from it?
  
  Jupyter is great for data analysis.
  
  I'm a data scientist, so I use it daily for machine learning tasks. Value imputation, model training, ad hoc analytics, and s lot more
  
  The jupyter console is just a better version of the interactive shell. Great for just trying out some lines of code.
  I also use notebooks at work to try out some APIs, to skip the tedium of the initial setup or some other routines.

KDE. My brain is hard-wired for Windows, so KDE is intuitive and just gets out of the way.

I think vim (and other text editors with vim bindings). I've gotten so accustomed to the vim way of doing things that I can't go back

Newpipe

Joplin because I struggled for years with a consistent way to keep and refer to notes that I could find easily at a moment's notice and access from any device, anywhere.
(Please don't tell me about how you use a text editor and markdown in your home directory Like GH* INTENDED because I tried that FOR A DECADE and it didn't work for me. I'm old and cranky. Get off my lawn! :)

Firefox, emacs, restic backup, bitwarden, linux/bsd

NAND gate
- What's that?
  
  It's just a joke. NAND isn't a software, it's a bit operation (Not And) so 1001 NAND 1010 = 0111
  It's technically a "piece" of a software and is necessary for any addition and more.

KDE. Been using it since v3, tried various other systems like Gnome, Enlightenment, XFCE etc. and I've always been coming back to it. KDE just feels very intuitive and easy to use.

I've gotten very used to this little free app called Audio Switcher that makes it way easier to switch back and forth between speakers and my headphones.
- This is going to be very handy, thanks for the rec

At this point Everything Search is goated.
- For any Linux users, ANGRYsearch and Fsearch are pretty good alternatives to Everything, fd is great for the command line
- Everything+Freecommander makes Windows so much more tolerable.

Shove-it, an ancient Windows utility by Phord Software that shoves any half-offscreen windows back onto the monitor so that you can get to all the gadgets. Phenomenally useful. First thing I install on any new build.
- Sounds like you need to try a tiling window manager. I find floating windows annoying as fuck, and they make you like super slow and unproductive by allowing windows to overlap or go off the screen. A tiler solves all of these problems, there are many fantastic options on GlazeWM, komorebi, FancyWM or the built-in tiling functionality of Seelen-UI on Windows.

Browser, I guess? Without one you'd be back to early 1990s home computing.

Irfanview. Quick easy very low fuss image viewer / low level editor
Advanced renamer.

Web browser
- Which one do you use?
  
  Firefox

My first thought is that my work requires office365 mail and my discovery that davmail exists has been a godsend. I'm not going to install outlook on my linux pc, so being able to check those emails using any client (claws in my case) is a massive convenience upgrade from relying on firefox to login.

Git

OpenSSH
- Or OpenBSD in general. I've used it on my desktop for about 25 years.

Twenty, even fifteen years ago I would've said Windows Notepad / vim. Now I rarely use basic text editors.
I don't think there's any technology that can never be superseded.

On my laptop/desktop, for now I'd say Strawberry Music Player because I like playing/listening to the audio files I've stored locally on them.
For my phone, it's currently Auxio for the same reason.
These are subject to change if I find something better.