Mine is kdeconnect which does what local send does plus so much more.

• using phone to control laptop
• getting phone notifications send to your pc
• can browse phone's storage directly from pc
• find my phone function

Lemmy

Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I've tried before has really worked for me.

Zotero

If you're in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you're doing and click that link.

Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it's so much better than your standard internet citation generators.

Don't forget to share the intel with your classmates!

Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs... with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.

Jellyfin and the .arr suite.

It’s absolutely incredible and I am so greatful to anyone with the skillset and dedication to develop and maintain things like these.

Currently playing with Proxmox and HomeAssistant too.

Hat of to all of you legends involved in FOSS

HomeAssistant, it's such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.

It's just an amazing piece of software.

Notesnook.

I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.

[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.

[1] Requirements in no particular order:

• Open source client and server.
• Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
• Cross-platform feature parity.
• Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
• Easy notes syncing.
• End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
• Ability to publish notes.
• Decent UX.

Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without

Jellyfin. Use it daily. Dropping more and more atreamjnf services, it's been awesome.

Honorable mentioned to Revanced.

Mine will probably be Bottles.

The team behind that application did a fantastic job. Wine was due for something much more user friendly like this. And integration with Proton, allowing 3D acceleration is the cherry on top.

PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.

It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!

Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.

With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.

• URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
• PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.

I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.

Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:

Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)

cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)

VLC (media player that plays almost everything)

This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?

Beyond All Reason

This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.

• labor of love
• fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
• tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
• all shots actively rendered, leading to:
• realistic friendly fire
• even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
• redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
• meaningful terrain
• radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
• radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
• two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
• crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
• free server hosting (!)
• active servers all times of day

The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.

Fam and friends play together often.

Immich as an alternative to Google Photos, it has all the main features but it's self hosted.

I didn't discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn't budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

Anyway, I've gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we're sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.

• Voyager --> feddit for android
• Fossify --> essential apps for android
• syncthing -- > more use cases than i thought
• paperlessngx --> finally going digital
• obtainium --> get android apps directly from their github

I am still learning and try to replace my stuff with open soure software

Aegis as an authentication App

Aves as gallery

Proxmox bare metal hypervisor for homeserver

I've known about it for longer but just started using KDE Connect over the last year or so.

It's got some bugs, at least for me. Like sometimes my phone won't connect to my computer or like the SMS feature takes forever to load, but having something akin to Pushbullet but free from enshitification has been really great.

Not discovered last year but ffmpeg.Crazy how many tools it can replace and how many usecase it has

Syncthing

Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack

Syncthing; it's a modern miracle

I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.

But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust

Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.

Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.

It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.

Home Assistant. I only installed it to help me control my solar/battery but I ended up putting other things on it and fell down a rabbit hole.

Freetube.

Once they added quick playlist functionality earlier this year, it was over for YouTube for me.

At this point it has everything I need and could only use small QoL improvements to be absolutely perfect for me.

I don't know if Tailscale counts because it's mostly open source (with options to run your own server), but I use it constantly to connect to Home Assistant and Jellyfin on my home server, as well as pairing it with NextDNS (pihole is possible for those that want to go that route) for ad blocking and Mullvad to use them as an exit node.

Revanced

paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.

My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.

I'll go with FreeCAD. I've known about it for a while and tried it about 5-10 years ago but have given it another look as I try to get back into CAD stuff and hate the restrictive licenses of commercial products. It has come a LONG way and is far more intuitive to use than it used to be.

Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.

I've had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.

Proxmox, if that counts, life changing.

Linux and godot

DeltaChat.

It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Sends downsampled pics, videos or push-to-talk audio by default. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too, as a file.

Integrates with Jitsi Meet to connect video-calls.

It's available on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free-email-address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/ ), or use your own existing email address.

Elegant and robust.