Ask HN: What Open Source Code Are You Most Thankful For?

5 points by dzink ↗ HN

15 comments

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I am more thankful for Free Software (preserving user freedoms) than for Open Source Software (free labour for corporations, screw users), but when it comes to OSS I suppose I am most thankful for SBCL.
What Free Software are you most thankful for?
Emacs, which has been saving me from Vim-induced RSI since 2019.
Linux, Firefox, curl.

In Ascending order.

Rails, the whole ecosystem around it and Ruby. Webdev tooling in general.

The Linux/macos tools. Things like iterm, fzf, git.

Just scratching the surface here - I feel it’s brilliance and generosity all the way down. A lot to be grateful for.

apps/frameworks: firefox, ffmpeg, curl, virtualbox, vlc, Git

kexts: AppleALC, IntelMausi, lilu, USBInjectAll, VirtualSMC, WhateverGreen, SMCSuperIO, SMCProcessor

uBlock Origin, hands down. Non-shitty, non-corporate adblocker that both works out of the box and offers great customization options? Amazing! UBlock Origin Lite is the best Manifest V3 compatible adblocker, and it's okay (when someone's sharing their screen on Zoom and I see how many ads there are, I'm surprised), but it's not as good.

I was debating between various other things (Firefox? Linux? LibreOffice? VLC media player?) but quite frankly I'm not as thankful for any of them.

Besides for the obvious...

newsboat, shellcaster (podcast manager), yt-dlp