My List of Awesome Free Software
Table of Contents
Intro
Finding genuinely good software and applications is becoming a real challenge. Everything is so ad-driven these days that if your application doesn't have its own advertisement campaigns, the average person will never hear about it. As the dedicated tech guy in my circle of friends, I often get asked where the actually good apps are.
Inspired by the "awesome" lists on GitHub, I decided to make a list for everyone. Many of these might be well-known to people that browse a lot of tech or open source communities, but hopefully you might find something new here. Without further delay, here's some really cool apps I use regularly in my daily life!
LocalSend
LocalSend is an open-source program for sharing files to nearby devices over WiFi. It's incredibly simple and straightforward, and it "just works". I use it often to share images from my phone to my laptop, and share files from my laptop back to my phone.
There are a couple of apps that do the same thing and even official solutions such as Quick Share on Android, but I found that there isn't a single one that's as easy to use and reliable as Localsend.
Send
On the topic of sending stuff, there's also Send, which unfortunately failed the hardest task of programming (naming your software).
Send is based off the now discontinued Mozilla Send, a tool used to create secure temporary download links of files you want to share. Drop in a file and you'll be able to create a download link that lasts up to 3 days - or until X people download it. After that, poof, the file disappears from the server!
Send is mostly advertised for its security and encryption, but it's generally a great tool for quickly sharing files without having to create an account or use bloated services. I often use this to share files around with friends.
Feedbro
Feedbro is a fantastic RSS reader as a browser extension. If you don't know what that is (which wouldn't surprise me), it's basically a way to follow websites such as blogs and news sites and collect them all in one place. You can even read them without opening the site itself!
The reason I like Feedbro especially is that it doesn't require any signups or additional downloads. Everything being in the browser makes sense, since you can just click on the extension to quickly see a list of what's new, or open your feed page (as seen in the screenshot) for a pretty interface to read your feed. To subscribe to things, you can simply open the extension at any page and have it look for an RSS/Atom feed and automatically subscribe to it without having to fiddle with links.
It feels like RSS is making a comeback these days. 5-10 years ago, it was mostly a cool thing that most people wouldn't find that practical. Why follow RSS feeds of websites rather than just following them on Twitter? As social media became very toxic and driven by spam, more and more people are trying to avoid it but still want to stay connected (such as yours truly). RSS readers remain a fantastic way to do just that.
If you've never used an RSS reader, you would be surprised by just how many websites allow subscribing to their feed. Youtube channels, Subreddits, Lemmy communities, every news website under the sun, etc. All it takes is a click and you'll follow all your favorite websites in one place. Give it a try.
Joplin
Hey, it's what I'm using now to write this! Joplin is an open-source program for taking notes. It supports all the features you'd expect, including tags, multiple notebooks, and ways to sync your notes and back them up. It's also a great tool for making to-do lists and edit Markdown in general.
I previously used LogSeq, which is another great open-source note taker that's closer to Obsidian (which yet another note taker. Jeez.)
The point is, I made the switch to Joplin because I found LogSeq to be too cumbersome after a few months of using it. It has a ton of features I'm sure some people will love, but it all got in the way of me just taking notes. Moving to Joplin felt like a breath of fresh air, like moving from a complex database to notepad.exe. I would recommend it instead unless you have an advanced use case.
Audiomass
Audiomass is a simple web-based audio editor. It looks nice, it runs well, and it's fantastic for quick edits like removing silence, splitting up audio, applying a filter, and exporting it in either mp3 or wav. As a game dev that deals with a lot of sound effects but never wants to learn a "real" audio editing program, Audiomass is an invaluable tool because of how simple and intuitive it is.
I also want to mention Audacity and a fan-made web version of it, Wavacity. They're good for more complex audio work, but I find them more cumbersome and complicated to use compared to Audiomass.
🛈 Quick Note Audiomass uses shift as its key for shortcuts, so undo for example will be shift+z rather than ctrl+z
Photopea
Photopea is a free photoshop clone in your browser. Not much to say about it other than: It's photoshop, and it's pretty good! While it might not be a replacement for professional image editors and photographers, it's surprisingly feature-rich and has almost everything you might need from that other popular photo editor. It's also probably the best image editor you can use on Linux. Sorry GIMP fans, but it's true.
The only downside to Photopea is that it gets quite laggy on high resolution images (4K and up). Hopefully that might get fixed when WebGPU becomes a standard, as the creator said they'll look into that once WGPU becomes supported across major browsers.
Excalidraw
Excalidraw is an open-source whiteboard for the browser. It's fairly simple, but I love it because it has a nice design and doesn't require you to login. You can collaborate with friends, easily create flowcharts by writing text, and even browse for templates and drawings in the library tab. It's all great for visually explaining things and getting your thoughts in order.
CalcES (Android, iOS)
A couple of years ago, it seemed to be a universal truth that every calculator app had to suck hard compared to physical ones. Hundreds of scientific calculator apps lacked features and were too clunky to use, official apps like the Android calculator were far too simple, and the Windows calculator is flaming hot garbage.
Enter: CalcES, a calculator which started out as a shameless Casio fx-991 clone (and still is to some extent). Still, it's grown to become a genuinely great calculator with graphing, built-in formulas, the ability to solve for variables, and a looot of settings and quality-of-life features. QoL features like allowing you to choose the decimal precision, instantly showing the answer as you're typing, allowing you to choose which scientific notation used as default, which thousand/thousandth separators to use, etc...
CalcES was a game changer for me when I was still in college, because it meant I no longer had to carry around a physical calculator for studying - which is fantastic, because I keep misplacing it everywhere.
There's also a web version for desktop use, but... It's a bit weird. It doesn't do calculations locally, but rather sends your equation to their server and then recieves the answer back. Looking at the network console, it doesn't seem malicious. It just sends a JSON of the equation and recieves another JSON with the answer. It seems that they couldn't make it work on the web for some odd reason, so they just made a wrapper that does everything on the server instead. The result ends up being way slower and noticeably delayed compared to the Android app. Weird!
If you don't want to bother with that and still need a web calculator, I'd recommend Desmos Scientific Calculator instead. It's not as powerful but it gets the job done.
Chris Titus WinUtil (Windows Only)
WinUtil is a must-have app if you're using Windows regardless of who you are. It's a powerful application that allows you to customize Windows and rip out the parts of it that suck. That said, it's also a powerful tool so make sure you use the standard or minimal preset if you don't know what you're doing. For advanced users, I would recommend toggling the option to create a system backup before you start firing away.
WinUtil does a lot of things, but I mainly use it to:
- Disable Microsoft telemetry and privacy-invading services
- Disable search trying to trick you into opening Bing when it can't find results
- Uninstall Edge and OneDrive
- Disable AI features like Copilot and Recall
🛈 Quick Note Microsoft loves to reinstall stuff after a Windows update, so you may want to run WinUtil again after each update.
Microsoft Powertoys (Windows only)
On the topic of Windows, I consider Powertoys also a must-have on the OS. It's an application Microsoft developed themselves that adds a slew of features for power users, and it's thankfully open source. It includes things such as an improved search, the ability to keep windows always on top, a great color-picker, an easier way to control environment variables, among other things.
The great thing about Powertoys is that you can individually choose which features you'd like to enable, ensuring it doesn't dump useless features on you like Microsoft is known for. Maybe one day they can take the hint that regular users, too, should be able to disable things on Windows.
ShareX (Windows only)
Hands down the best screenshotting tool for Windows. It's lightweight and offers a slew of options, including automatically uploading images to dozens of domains and automatically compressing images that are too big. You can also draw and edit the screenshot as you're taking it, making it very useful to instantly highlight and screenshot something and quickly pasting it online.
NewPipe (Android only)
NewPipe is a lightweight Android app for watching YouTube. It's exactly what it looks like: A simplified, distraction-free version of YouTube that also has neat features like downloading videos and allowing Picture-in-Picture while skipping ads.
That said, I want to be clear this won't replace the official app for most people. There's no way to log in and it's fairly barebones in terms of following channels and organizing your feed (hence the "lightweight" part). This is a deal breaker for tons of people, but I enjoy Newpipe's simplicity and always prefer it when someone sends me a link.
Fossify Apps (Android only)
Fossify apps are a group of open-source applications for Android that aim to be clean, easy to use alternatives to built-in applications like your gallery or file manager. They offer a better experience than the often slow and overcomplicated ones that come with your phone.
Currently there's a calendar app, a contacts app, a file manager, a gallery, and a messages app. I'm personally a really big fan of the file manager and gallery, but the rest is great as well.
NuShell
These last two are for programmers and tech folk. Nushell is a terminal shell (and scripting language) that aims to change how people interact with the terminal. It's very modern and feature-packed, but will take some getting used to as it's wildly different from other shells.
Most things can be represented as tables, and you can grab each column or row to apply filters on them. In the image example, I can ls but apply a filter to only show files greater than 80 megabytes. It's very neat.
Complex features aside, NuShell just feels better to use. It has great autocomplete, useful error messages, it uses pretty colors out of the box to separate important things, and it's overall very nice to use.
The great thing about NuShell is also the fact that it works great on any platform. As someone that bounces between Windows and Linux, it's super convenient to have the terminal act the same across both operating systems, rather than having to use Powershell here and Bash there.
RClone
RClone is a command-line tool that makes it INCREDIBLY easy to sync files between your computer and basically every service online, such as Google Drive, Proton Drive, server providers like DigitalOcean, etc.
The initial setup is a pain in the ass, but once you get over the hurdle of connecting to a service in a very specific way, it just works incredibly well. I use this to backup my Joplin notes online, as well as sync things between my Windows and Linux computers.
Other Recommendations
These are either too popular, too niche, or I'm just too lazy to talk more about them.
- ImageGlass - A great and simple image viewer for Windows
- WizTree - A Windows program to quickly see what's taking up all your disk space
- Everything - A Windows program that allows you to instantly search your entire file system. Instant, literally. Search results are so fast you'll see them as you're typing.
- Krita - A fantastic open-source drawing app
- Inkscape - A fantastic open-source vector drawing tool
- OBS Studio - The de-facto program for screen recording and streaming
- ScreenToGif - A powerful GIF editor and recorder that can also export to other file types
- Firefox with Ublock Origin - The only way to browse the internet without going insane
- DeArrow - A browser extension that aims to remove clickbait in YouTube titles and thumbnails
- Typst - Open source LaTeX alternative that's 100x more user friendly. If you don't know what LaTeX is, you probably don't need this
- Squoosh, Handbrake, and 7-Zip for compressing files. Check out my other blog post about them!
Outro
And that's that. There are definitely more things I can put on the list but they'd steer too much into being very obvious or things I rarely use at all, the list is intended to be more about things I genuinely recommend rather than things I use sometimes. If I missed something really good, maybe shoot me an email. Thanks for reading!