blender’s beginner friendly enough for me to universally recommend it at this point - you might bounce off, or you might, like me, be a half-decent visual artist 3 years later!
I was a big fan of blender, but the support for rendering on AMD GPUs is completely abismal. Nowadays you have to get an expensive Nvidia card to get good results.
aw, thought they’d finally sorted that recently - did get an Nvidia one for that reason a while back, which has been slightly annoying now I’ve finally switched to linux
it’s ridiculous how easy it is to use now once you get the basics down. im a bad artist in general, so i mostly use it for editing existing models, but i can also whip up a simple prototyping model pretty quick too. awesome stuff
Libreoffice – the best, most customisable and powerful office software available
Onlyoffice – alternative for less-advanced users who are used to the UI of contemporary MSO
Zotero – great bibliography manager useful when writing scientific papers: lets you collect books, journal articles and all other types of sources, automatically finds full text PDFs online, fills in metadata and then inserts dynamic citations in thousands of different, customisable styles. Also generates bibliographies. Works with LO, MSO and GDocs
TeXStudio – my L^A^TeX editor of choice; integral (ha!) when formatting maths-heavy documents
Android:
Cloudstream — free streaming app, works with SFlix, Sodastream, PH and other legally dubious streaming providers. Takes some trickery to set up though.
Osmand — OpenStreetMap client with offline (optional online) navigation and plenty of plugins; loads of customisation
Material Files — nicest file manager, especially for rooted devices
Showly — freemium open-source TV and film tracker. Syncs with Trakt.tv
Simple Gallery — out of all Simple Apps by this developer, this is the only one which is in fact superior to its alternatives. Highly customisable, powerful, lightweight gallery app
Good list I make use of a lot of these too. Keep both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice around depending on how I feel that day but been leaning towards LO quite a bit recently.
I will say I had Caprine for a while but my god it uses so much memory, it has an absolutely massive footprint on my laptop. I find a nice compromise is using messenger.com as that way I can still send and read messages without delving into the horrors of FB, plus can keep it in a container.
Question about zotero, I just started using it and I can’t seem to find a way to direct it to PDFs I have already downloaded? Is there a way to do that or does it only have the PDF finding feature? The citation thing is pretty cool though, it’s gonna make my writing class easier and I won’t have to use mybib anymore. Also, is there a way to make it always use the classic interface when adding a citation? I keep having to click “show classic interface” or whatever the button is, and it’s a tad annoying.
Question about zotero, I just started using it and I can’t seem to find a way to direct it to PDFs I have already downloaded? Is there a way to do that or does it only have the PDF finding feature?
You can just drag and drop PDFs. Either to the list to create a new item or to an existing item if you already have it there.
Also, is there a way to make it always use the classic interface when adding a citation? I keep having to click “show classic interface” or whatever the button is, and it’s a tad annoying.
Zotero: Edit: Preferences: Cite: Word processors: Use classic Add Citation dialog [X]
BTW, why use classic dialog? The quick one is great, when you learn to use it: it allows you to easily find a bibliography item by any keyword or tag; lists previously cited items on top; can automatically add locator (page number) and also lets you modify the citation appearance by double-clicking the cited item. I can’t imagine how the classic interface could be more usable in any application
I guess I just didn’t like having to type and find what I wanted to cite when I knew I wanted to cite the first or second article in my paper. But I guess that could become a problem once I have more citations, so I’ll definitely try to get used to the other way too.
Thanks for spreading the good word on OpenData mapping solutions! In case you find Osmand’s interface confusing, check out Organic Maps as well. FOSS and offline features are naturally part of the offering.
I know it might not be in the spirit of the thread because it’s not something you download and use as it’s own thing but it has allowed me to exclusively run Linux on my gaming PC. I think more folks should try it to slowly tip the scales more on Linux.
Using it with steam or without. I personally use it with steam as well, it’s amazing. Hopefully we reach a point where publishers are incentivised to make sure their games run smoothly on Linux at launch through proton.
Yeah seconded that it’s not FOSS but still a great app. Logseq is a good FOSS alternative for a knowledge base, and I really like Zettlr for long form md writing and note taking too.
Firefox+uBlock (web browser)
MEncoder (video encoder)
OBS (screen recording and streaming software)
Inkscape (vector illustration software)
Mumble (VoIP chat room server/client/protocol)
Julia (programming language great for scripting and mathematics)
For Unix systems:
Wezterm (terminal multiplexor)
i3 (window manager)
Over a decade ago when I was big into gaming it was the best option over competition like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. Still have a server to this day even though many gamers seem to have moved onto talking over Discord voice calls or channels.
Equalizer APO + Peace equalizer (as the interface) + AutoEq (for the automatic equalization).
It allows to change do advanced and automatic equalization on audio devices, being audio outputs or inputs as mics.
AutoEq is the automatic part. It is more focused on Headphones/earbuds/iems presets. It’s an automatic tool trying to equalize measured (by a compatible reviewer source, which is already in the database) headset to match the target the user wants, Then export a file for the software someone uses (peace for example).
As a common preset, the harman over-ear 2018/in-ear (depending on the device) is pretty good, but other presets are available too.
ssh plus sshd is available already or can easily be installed on any Linux system. It can do many things: Remote terminal sessions and remote login (for admin for example), file transfer, directories can be mounted as shares too over ssh, remote execution, you can also even do tunneling, graphical application UI forwarding, and even implement VPNs via ssh. Every Linux admin knows about and uses ssh all the time.
It is interesting a lot of people forget you can use any Linux box as a file server via SSH, in addition do a lot of other things. I also have an ssh app on my cell phone, and can just mount the file system their on Linux too. There are clients for SSH for Windows also.
Any cloud server, any linux server on your network, any virtual machine… is a network hard drive. No need to mess around with shares, permissions or server side settings (caveat: Your ssh user on the remote server DOES need to have the access you want to the files you want… but also duh). Want to edit config files on a remote server in your local text editor? You can. Want to mount your media server in your home directory on your Ubuntu laptop and watch your videos in VLC? You can. Want to just open Finder windows where one is your working directory on a cloud server and one is your home directory on your local machine and just drag files between them? You can. Want to share a hard drive between your Mac, your Windows machine and your Linux Mint laptop and just open the network share with one simple line in the terminal? You can.
The remote server just needs to be running SSH (that’s it! You don’t need ANY OTHER SERVER SIDE code) and you can mount ANY PART OF IT’S FILE SYSTEM like a network drive. It’s file system agnostic on the server side as well. Implementations for Mac and Windows in addition to Linux. Although, admittedly, the non-Linux implementations are a bit janky… but I’m almost a pure Linux user, so that doesn’t affect me… I DO have it running on my MacBook and my Mac Mini, but I barely use those.
Over the years I got bored of repirating photoshop and now I just use GIMP.
I’m not exactly a graphic designer by any means but there’s very little I can’t do with GIMP. Seems to just run better and more intuitive than photoshop for me too.
It is a markdown editor and has a lot of features i didn’t know I wanted. Like you can mark in PDFs and those marks will be made into notes with shortcuts to that place right into your other notes.
Gonna try out a few of these, but I have to admit I prefer the rich-text and database options that Notion provides. That said, the whole privacy thing they do and was mentioned in the start of the video concerns me. Time to do some testing! Thanks for the link!
I use a lot of note apps partially for school partially for fun but man Logseq PDF annotation is incredible. That plus native Zotero integration is a game changer for anything academic.
Ardour. Great digital audio workstation. It’s on par with the proprietary options, would choose it any day over Cubase or Reaper. Listen to some music I made in it!
Bitwarden is very good. And it is not getting hacked every year as Lastpass… (another free password manager).
I also saw that proton has launched proton pass as a password manager. Seems to also be free, but only the app, I think is open source, and not the server. It also works less well than bitwarden, being new it can be expected.
I was a Bitwarden user for 2yrs and recently moved away to ProtonPass. Primary reason for me was native mobile apps and email alias feature. Although it doesn’t have a web version yet (which is planned and would be coming in future), browser add-ons and native apps cover what I need and migration was mostly seamless as well
Blender is my favorite open source tool I wish I knew how to use :)
I’d love to use it for creating my own designs and took several attempts at learning it. But I always end up giving up on it due to lack of time and energy.
Blender has one of the hardest learning curves I have experienced so far. It simply does so much and there is so much to remember. It’s worth it, but man, it’s intense.
Did you use the youtube tutorials from the doughnut guy?
I tried to learn blender by just using it and googling the issues but gave up several times. Then I bit the bullet and went trough a proper video tutorial. Most of them run at increments of 10-20 minutes and each one reaches enough to be useful on its own.
Another tip is to do lots of tiny things you can reasonably make in a weekend before doing big things.
I prefer to use tutorials I can read and reference. But I’m willing to give videos a try if you say it’s a good one for a total beginner.
Could you give me a link?
Yeah, Absolutely. youtu.be/nIoXOplUvAw?si=NsMPxjkNfcCfuf6IThis guy. I haven’t done the most recent tutorial he has made because he actually goes back and redoes the beginners tutorial to keep up with the most recent version but the earlier versions of this was great for me.
Thanks! Someone else already posted the link but I really appreciate you still following up on this. I can see now why you call him the doughnut guy :)
I’m absolute with you on prefering written tutorials and documentation, however when it comes to beginner tutorials for Blender, there’s simply nothing better than the doughnut tutorial from Blenderguru. It’s not a “do this then do this” video - he’s actually explaining what he does and why, so when you’re finished, you actually have ideas of what to do with your own projects.
3D art is a complex thing - but you can actually get a long way following the doughnut tutorial, and after that, you may be open to try other video tutorials or have a look at other channels.
Take it a little at a time. The blenderguru videos are short and arr perfect for doing 30 mins today, 30 mins the next day - you don’t need to do it all in one sitting.
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