Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?

80 points by joshdance ↗ HN

97 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] thread
For me Handbrake is very impressive. When I was ripping DVDs frequently it worked great, and the queue feature is super.
- Visual Studio Code.

- iTerm2

Krita. It has the best brush engine by farrrrrrrrrrr. You generally have to use custom brushes though, the default ones are mediocre at best.
How would you compare it to Photoshop and what would you say to a Photoshop digital painter to get them to switch to Krita (or at least try it out for a while)?
The Good in Comparison:

It's incredibly faster.

It does a spectacular job at emulating how real painting feels.

The color picker is a lot better in Krita, in my opinion.

Krita can use (some) Photoshop brushes out of the box, just add them in.

It has an (arguably) better interface, and four color schemes out of the box.

The Bad in Comparison:

It doesn't have the non-painting effects of Photoshop, which can be a huge downside if you tend to use those on your projects.

Blender. It is probably one of the most versatile 3D suites available.
Interestingly, Blender was originally proprietary, and was open-sourced after its parent company went bankrupt, and only after money was raised from the open-source crowd (before crowdfunding was a thing).
Freenas, for sure!
Podcast Addict. I paid like $1.99 to remove the ads from it, I feel super guilty that I can't somehow give more.
Agree, this is an awesome app. You can give the dev more BTW - they have PayPal and other ways you can give them more money. Send them an email
(comment deleted)
Trello, draw.io, visual studio code.
+1 for Trello, I've been a very happy user for years now.
Thanks for mentioning draw.io. After a quick look around I can see that it will be very useful. I especially like the interface. If it wasn't for my browser interface above I would swear this is a very well made desktop app. Standard OS inputs used well are hard to beat. This really makes me think twice about using some of the fancy UI libraries out there.
gcc and llvm!
And the myriad of languages build on top of them, mainly Rust these days ;)
Linux... but I guess I'm not really surprised. Most of what's so good about it is a result of it being free.
Well obviously not free but waaay to cheap: sublime For free: visual studio code
sublime is overpriced by a factor of 2-3

especially with competition from atom + with electron improvements leading to atom not having totally garbage performance

VLC.

Pretty much my entire development stack.

The programming community in general is bloody amazing. I feel very grateful to be a part of it.

I remember downloading VLC for the first time and being overjoyed with the ease, reliability and compatibility. Nothing has changed in the years since then, something most software can't say.
And libVLC for that matter. I had to embed some media viewers in a Qt app and libVLC made it a breeze.
It was said in jest, but emacs really is amazingly good for what it costs. Even more so if I consider each of the individual contributions that I take advantage of from so many other contributors. Helm, org-mode, use-package, paredit-everywhere, ace-isearch, magit, undo-tree, ...

The list really is quite impressive. And then there are the things I don't use, but still impress the hell out of me. Skewer mode being the frontrunner there.

Then there is Firefox. Easy to complain about memory usage and whatnot, but it really is an impressive piece of engineering for what I paid for it.

Pycharm (community edition) - you gotta use it to believe it. Incredible piece of software.

Dropbox (basic) - Support across platforms with cli.

not sure if this counts, but as long as you have a .edu account, all of JetBrains stuff is technically free. i've been using all their IDEs since school, and continue to renew my licenses with my .edu email no issues.
KDE Plasma for me, it's amazing how good it is and how stable it has become. I've been using KDE for years and I've recommended it to almost anyone I could - and they always stuck with it, because it was simply too much well done. Compared to gnome 3 and other new desktop environments, KDE has always been so easy to use, predictable and customisable, a very joy to use.
I don´t want to enter the eternal debate but predictability is definitely not the greatest kde features.
Which kde distro would you recommend for stability?
I'm personally on Debian. Some times it lags behind a couple of releases but I'm happy with it as it's very stable.

Some people are extremely happy with KDE Neron though.

The core stays on the latest Ubuntu LTS but the KDE is updates real quick to the latest version.

I'm on KDE Neon. Built by KDE developers on top of Ubuntu.
Elasticsearch
Utter crap, look at their source code. Lucene, on the other hand, is really good.
OpenSCAD. It’s not feature rich but it does its thing very well with a clean user interface AND a nice language to work in.
tesseract-ocr CMU-sphinx

and such.