Typst: A modern typesetting system designed for easy document creation with markup inspired by Markdown but more powerful and programmable.

rnote Rnote is an open-source vector-based drawing app for sketching, handwritten notes and to annotate documents and pictures. It is targeted at students, teachers and those who own a drawing tablet and provides features like Pdf and picture import and export, an infinite canvas and an adaptive UI for big and small screens.

FairEmail, email app for Android that has every feature I can imagine. Available on FDroid

LibreOffice - simply the best office suite there is (IMHO). I was a MS-office user for years, but since I switched, I haven't looked back...

qBittorrent: only for your legal torrenting needs from e.g. archive.org :>

Lemmy ^[1]^

PieFed: a link aggregator and forum platform built for the Fediverse, focusing on individual control, safety, decentralized power, and healthy community interactions, with features like reputation indicators and keyword filters to enhance user experience.

This post is a gold mine!

screen

a gnu until that let's you run a persistent session, even if you log off. log back in and reattach your screen and whatever you were doing is still running.

librewolf a privacy-focused fork of the latest stable firefox (win,linux,mac)

Copyparty turns almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser

Czkawka: A free, fast, and open-source tool for finding and removing duplicate files, cleaning empty folders, and optimizing storage by content-based file comparison across multiple platforms.

Inkscape - the best vector graphics program out there. So easy to use, and so powerful.

Calibre: great e-book manager

VLC (VideoLAN media player): play media files, DVDs, network streams and more. Just works,

Tenacity - a pre-enshitification fork of Audacity. An audio recorder and editor that does multi-track recording, effects and much more in a really simple UI.

GIMP - unlike Krita - which is made for drawing - this is made for photo-editing. It's like Photoshop. The learning curve is a bit steep, but it is really powerful.

Xournal++: A C++ handwriting note-taking software with PDF annotation support.

Firefox - the original private webbrowser. Even though some people don't like the options in it (like those that let you stream Netflix and other DRM content). If people care about privacy, they use this browser, or one that is made from it...

Krita is a fantastic program for drawing. It's made for making beautiful paintings and animations.

Nicotine+: A lightweight, free, and open-source graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

Flameshot: screenshotting tool with everything you would ever need for screenshots

Helix Editor: A fast, post-modern text editor that combines modal editing and syntax awareness built in Rust for programmers.

Mullvad vpn, probably the best vpn imo

Nuclear: A free, open-source music player that streams content from multiple free sources like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp without ads or subscriptions.

emacs, the text editor. it's so powerful and customizable that I feel listing any feature would do so many others a disservice

Thunderbird - a brilliant e-mail program, which also handles contacts, newsfeeds, calender and more. It's available for multiple platforms, like Android, Windows, Linux and so forth...

strudel. From the website:

With Strudel, you can expressively write dynamic music pieces.

The best place to actually make music with Strudel is the Strudel REPL

It's really fun to make music in it, I recommend trying it out!

link to repo (codeberg)

Comaps, navigation from openstreetmap

Audiobookshelf. Not exactly a "hidden" gem at this point, but I'm putting it here for today's lucky 10,000. Simply the best way to store and stream audiobooks. Does podcasts too, and ebooks, although there are better tools for those.

Zathura: A highly customizable, minimalist, and keyboard-driven document viewer supporting PDF, PostScript, and DjVu via plugins.

Pass: a terminal based standard unix password manager.

Bookwyrm, a book tracker and review sharing plateform that is part of the fediverse allowing you to share your notes and review about books in the threadiverse as well as the twittoverse.

binary eye, OR code and barcode scanner with no ads

Portmaster, nowadays mandatory, monitor the traffic of all installed apps and even from the OS itself, blocking with a simple click all unwanted traffic, Inbuild DNS crypt with dynamic filterlists (customizable) blocking ads, trackers and unwanted crap from big companies. Optional SPN service (paid). Windows and Linux.

https://safing.io/

https://github.com/safing/portmaster

Breakout71

I could not believe I didn't find this fun free gem sooner. I'll let the description from F-Droid explain the details:

This is a roguelike twist on the original Breakout formula: The goal is to catch as many coins as possible during 7 levels. Coins appear when you break bricks. They fly around, bounce and roll, and you need to catch them with your paddle. At the end of the level, you get to pick upgrades. There are 50+ different upgrades that impact the gameplay in various ways. Many upgrades will impact your combo, that's the number of coins spawned for each brick broken. Your "combo" is displayed on your paddle. Your score is displayed in the top right corner of the screen. Oh, and don't miss the ball, you don't have extra lives.

MusicBrainz Picard: superb mp3 tagger with online metadata lookup feature and audio track fingerprinting

FindMyDevice, a find my server with channels through sms, a self hostable server, notifications. This is one of my favorite android utilities.

Subsurface

I recently found out after creating Linux, Linus Torvalds wanted to make a good open source scuba dive log software. Today, it's probably one of the best, if not the best dive log programs out there and I recently used this myself on a recent dive and it's great.

agate and amfora, a server and client for the text-based "small web" protocol called Gemini. Allows to publish and read text, images and media in a really simple and accessible way.

(Works also great in a local file network to distribute media and docs).

zoxide: A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells.

This is such a handy tool, and the database can be queried for other tools too. Like project switchers or fzf for example.

I think android HealthConnect doesn't get enough notice as it is a kind of silent background service.

It is local, opt-in, and privacy respecting connection API for sharing data between fitness apps with fine control over what gets shared where. You can have the shittiest privacy-violating fitness app and it can't just steal all of the data from your smartwatch or whatever because you connect the two apps via a stupid cloud integration.