Ask HN: What free-to-use software inspires you?

Here are the free (as in beer, sometimes FOSS) applications that really amaze and inspire me. In no particular order

- pi-hole - irssi - plex

qtox, arch, vscode, ufw, golang, httpie, mongoDB

All the free editors (e.g. VS Code, Emacs, Vim) and especially their respective plugins. I'm always amazed at the breadth and quality among them.

zim, autokey, duplicati, draftsight, sublime text (ish), sketchup, vim.

VLC

Lineage OS android. It's amazingly polished for an open source, community run system, and the breadth of devices supported is phenomenal.

Blender

OBS is pretty amazing considering it's feature set, and adoption in the streaming community.

TeamViewer because it is cross plateform, super simple to use and works very well. I wish there was a good open-source competitor¹ because I feel ill at ease giving a private company root access to my computers.

¹ it should be able to traverse NATs. I could deal with having to set up a main server. edit: typos

Libre Office - alternative to MS office

VLC - Video/Audio player, encoder, decoder etc.

Wine (on Linux) - for playing games especially

VSCode - Intelligent editor with good community support

Signal - Private messenger app

free but powerful game engines, Unity (not truly free) and Godot (free free), amongst others

TexShop: http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/

bitcoin

wireguard: so good, so fast, and everything a vpn software should be

openwrt: works on many devices and so impressively stable

xbmc/kodi: although I don't use it daily, it is a complex yet very functional piece of software

winamp: simple, easy, functional, light

go+liteide: simple, easy, no nonsense

nomachine: not open source, but good

SonarQube, SonarLint - has helped me improve as a developer a lot.

sublime text,

Emacs

Redis

PostgreSQL

VLC

Perl

GNU tools like grep, xargs, find etc.

GHC

Linux

Linux

PostgreSQL

Redis

Blender

youtube-dl (to download youtube content without adds painlessley)

TeX, because it's software that has been considered feature complete for nearly 30 years and despite it's successors' additional features its original feature set is still quite usable today.

vim, bash, puppet, chef, kitchen, terraform

I’d like give a shout out to the multiple free (mostly open source) eco-systems and frameworks for web development available nowadays.

The tooling is fantastic and getting better all the time.