“What Free Software Is So Good You Can’t Believe It’s Actually Available For Free” (34 Responses)

Yeah, Audacity is awesome.

Love audacity! It's great for cutting audio together right to the millisecond.

Absolutely the #1 answer.

+1 for Logic, soz

I'm a pro voice artist. I use Audacity daily.

YES. Have been using for about three years now. I almost never see an ad. It's free but I'd encourage sending the author a donation. And for Facebook - FBPurity. (Fluff Buster Purity - used to be called Facebook Purity). Have it on my PC. Don't see ads. Recently traveled with a tablet that didn't have it - was shocked at how many ads are in my FB feed these days.

I just view BP through the Brave browser. It's really nice 😊

Use DuckDuckGo browser. It opens most Youtube videos in its own player and there are no ads. They also block trackers.

I used ublock origin for years, but it just stopped working, I switched to adblock plus....much better

VLC is absolutely wonderful.

I wish they would tell us what each of these apps do!

Yes to all.

PSA folks, if you're still on Chrome, switch to FF. Chrome's privacy/security is atrocious and they're also planning to launch a new version that will render ad-blockers unusable. Firefox is an exact opposite. And it has to be Firefox, NOT Brave or something, since all except FF are based on Chromium.

Or go DuckDuckGo for total privacy

Firefox has always been on top.

DuckDuckGo!

I like to try every new browser that comes down the pike, but always go back to Firefox.

Very useful for quick light weight editing of technical files and editing raw data on files

For some reason I've always preferred UltraEdit.

I'm too old to go hunting the marbles I lost getting too old.... I know this is simple, and have tried to learn it all, ugh, no. I just write silly poems and mindless political rants. Most of the cool stuff is either over my head, or I've forgotten what it's for. But it gets a lot of stars!

Try Metapad instead. I love "transparent mode", which allows you to see through Metapad. You can see what's in another full screen app while Metapad is full screen if you're typing it in from an image. [ https://liquidninja.com/metapad/ ]

Use it every day.

For my money this should be number one, or very close. Consider that it's not only a highly complex piece of software, incredibly versatile, but also basically industry standard. That meets the post title better than any in this list.

Wish I was smart enough to understand all of this! I sure could use it! When I was young, I may have had enough brain cells to work with it. Everyone has good things to say about it!

What is it for?

I'm intrigued but are there advantages over simply emailing a pdf to my kindle?

Calibre is good, for sure, lots of bells and extra whistles! For reading online, I do wish it was easier. Some texts are only readable this way, so I use it, but I would rather read a PDF version. Tried it this morning and the text was a few pages from my health insurance. It opened in a window with no scroll bars or any options, settings, buttons. Move the cursor, and it all slides a bunch of pages away. Not easy to read! That isn't how it normally works!

Yes. An excellent bit of software. Makes so many e-books so much more accessible.

I love it too. And if you have problems, they respond (I can't remember how I do that, though).

I know it exists, never tried it. Always considered GIMP to be the closest free alternative to Photoshop.

If say Photopea instead. Also quite compatible with PSD files and because it runs locally via your browser, fonts are not an issue.

I did not even know this one. I use GIMP

Not quite. But it is good.

I used to love open office, which I'm assuming is probably similar. But it has major spell check issues. I literally have to take everything I write and put it in a basic gmail email so I'll get a better spell check. But it's free what can I say.

I use this - it's solid.

The spellcheck libraries can be tedious but overall this is solid.

Yeah it's solid, but not "unbelievable". It's somewhat worse than office for a few things (like drawing), and Office is NOT THAT GREAT. And 99% of users use less than 1% of the features anyway!!

Been using it for years. It's simple, effective, and free!

For those who wants classic MS Paint back: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/18rex4a/how_can_you_bring_back_microsoft_paint_once/

For me this is the closest to how old Paintshop used to work, I can’t get the hang of Gimp.