EuphoricPenguin

Adam Ragusea did a pretty decent video on the topic a while ago.

Krista is a good program if you’re doing a lot of digital painting, which I am not. OpenTTD is probably a fine game, but I’ve never played it much. This is my list, after all.

Additive Manufacturing

FreeCAD Linkstage - RealThunder’s fork of the FOSS CAD package is less buggy, has improved rendering, and is much easier to use.

PrusaSlicer - A snappy alternative to Cura for slicing 3D models for printing. A lot of awesome features and it’s constantly under development.

Blender - I’ve done a little here and there with Blender, but Cycles works great for product renders. It’s such a vast and amazing program that can accommodate so many different use-cases.

Music Production

LMMS - An FL Studio-like DAW with a simplified workflow and robust features. Lackluster plug-in support out of the box, but the addition of a VST host and waveform editor make it a fully-featured way to make music.

Element - Fully open-source VST host with support for VST3. Also works as a standalone application, which means you can create plug-in chains without touching your DAW. You can also save presets of those chains, and do crazy signal routing with the two-dimensional geometry nodes-esque UI.

Vital/Vitalium - It’s literally FOSS Serum. You can follow Serum tutorials, and have them turn out. A wavetable synth that’s so darn easy to use, you’ll never want to use anything else. This is the quintessential FOSS future bass producer’s synth.

Dexed - DX7 cartridge manager and emulator. It sounds like an awesome 80s FM synth; what can I say? Must-have for synthwave and noodling around with new sounds.

Audacity- The only FOSS waveform editor worth using. It’s extremely flexible, has a ton of useful built-in effects, and makes for a great companion to LMMS when you need to make more in-depth edits to samples.

Cardinal - FOSS fork of VCV as a VST, which enables you to create crazy virtual eurorack creations and play them with MIDI. You can also use it standalone, and the sheer number of built-in plug-ins basically guarantees your dream of automatic music generating machines are only a few clicks away.

MusicGen - A recent ML tool by Facebook that can be run locally; essentially SOTA on few-shot text-to-waveform music generation. If you have a somewhat-high-end GPU, it will probably work for you. A great tool for sampling into weird ambient tracks.

RVC - A recent tool that is fast to train and provides extremely realistic voice-to-voice conversion, especially for vocals. Ever see those AI SpongeBob singing memes? This is probably how they did it.

Photo Editing/Design

PhotoGIMP - While I’m still using Photoshop, PhotoGIMP is an add-on for GIMP that attempts to port the Photoshop UI to… GIMP. It’s mildly successful, and potentially can ease the pains of transitioning to a new program. I’m honestly too lazy to switch at this point, but it looked promising when I peeked the last time.

Inkscape - I suck at vector anything, but this program proved to be useful on occasion. I believe it’s a serious competitor to Illustrator if you bother to learn how to use it properly.

A1111’s Web UI - Now totally FOSS, this absolutely insane piece of software integrates with so many different useful plug-ins to accomplish basically any conceivable image generation or AI-with-images task imaginable. You can literally do anything from normal text-to-image generation to upscaling or colorizing, and even img2img; it’s multi-modal to no end.

EDA/PCB Design

KiCAD - Hands down the best EDA package I’ve used. Granted, it’s the only one I’ve used. Still, this is how FOSS software for engineering purposes should be designed. I wish they would send their UX people over to help FreeCAD out. If you need to design a PCB for anything at all, use KiCAD, period.

Programming

NodeJS - The sole reason JavaScript is worth learning for more general computing tasks; with the sheer variety of packages on NPM, it feels like you can do anything.

VSCodium - All of what makes VSCode worth using, and none of the creepy MS telemetry.

General Computing

7zip - The one program to conquer all archive formats. It works, and it’s absolutely tiny. I’ve even installed this on Windows 2000, and of course it worked fine.

LibreOffice - Occasionally buggy, but certainly the best FOSS office package currently available. LibreOffice Writer and Calc are especially usable and work great.

VLC - Is there anything this traffic cone can’t play? Superb video and audio codec compatibility, although it won’t play a MIDI unless you feed FluidSynth a soundfont to atone for your sins.

Strawberry - For when you want to listen to tons of music, but you hate the clunky nature of other audio managers. Strawberry basically doesn’t use a DB, and instead edits metadata directly. It will also instantly update when you add new songs or change metadata, so you rarely have to restart it. It’s the fastest way to manage tons of music I’ve found.

PCPartPicker - A website, but still worth mentioning. This is basically the only tolerable way to part out a PC, and it makes sharing specs of your recent projects trivial.

Rufus - Someone else mentioned this one, but it’s basically the only tolerable way to create bootable installation media. Works well, and it’s FOSS.

Operating Systems

Manjaro KDE - The closest you can get to SteamOS’s desktop mode. Based on Arch, like SteamOS, and the same DE as SteamOS.

ZorinOS - Tolerable derivative of Ubuntu LTS, especially for Windows natives.

Games/Emulators

Quadrapassel - Best Linux Tetris clone ever conceived. It’s in my Steam Deck library, for Pete’s sake.

Yuzu - Pairs well with a PC handheld and a “screw Nintendo” attitude. The Switch emulator that is often marginally faster (and often slightly less accurate than) Ryujinx.

OpenRCT2 - RCT, especially the first two games by Chris Sawyer, are some of the best tycoon games ever created. OpenRCT2 is a faithful reimplantation that is going places.

Gentoo with a custom tiling window manager written in x86 assembly in my free time.

Just kidding, I use Windows.

For most people, probably not much. I’m a moderator of a few smaller subreddits, and I’m trying to build something bigger than just me. Hosting my own instance gives me more control, which means I can set rules that I feel are both fair and effective, and it gives me a chance to take responsibility for both social and technical aspects of the instance. My ultimate goal is to have the instance pay for itself through donations, which is why I’m also trying to differentiate my instance from others. I’m still paying a fair bit out-of-pocket as things stand, but I’ve already received donations from a few gracious people. So, that’s it really: the total package of what I think a Lemmy instance should be. If people like what I’m doing, I welcome them to join.

I like it enough to host an instance. It’s pretty legit, to be honest. If I can find and join more of the same types of communities I was a part of on Reddit, I can easily see myself spending more time here. Even now, I feel like my time on my phone is an even split between Lemmy and Reddit.

You just have to start communities for things you’re interested in, and post the kinds of content that you want to see. People from the frontpage will upvote it if it’s generally interesting enough (people actually see stuff here), and eventually subscribers will start to submit their own content to sustain the community. Once you get things moving, communities will tend to grow on their own. To be honest, I’m quickly finding out that trying to get people interested in a community from inside of Lemmy leads to quicker growth than trying to get people to switch from an existing platform (like Reddit). I know people are sometimes put off by the idea of deliberate growth, but it’s a force of good here on Lemmy. We have to self-organize ourselves before we lose people’s interest.

If more people create niche communities and make an attempt to grow them, I think we’ll more quickly replace a lot of what we had on Reddit. I mean, what I described above is basically the same growth formula I’ve used to modest success on Reddit. Heck, even Reddit’s own support articles say the same things: create the content you want to see, crosspost said content to other communities, and so on.

Does RSF Richard Burns Rally count? An amazing simulation with extremely accurate physics and a massive assortment of stages and cars, but it’s also absolutely brutal and unforgiving. I suppose it’s fairly realistic as a result, but it’s more sim than game at that point. It’s a ton of fun to improve at, but the chances of cracking any of the online leaderboards is fairly slim (unless you spend an absurd amount of time training).

It’s cheap enough that I can pay for it, and I feel like it’s a valuable service to provide.