Ask Lemmy

In the world of music production Reaper is an insanely good deal with a fantastically refreshing licensing system.

Bitwarden. It's free and open source, but you can pay for a subscription ~~if you don't want to self host for synchronisation between devices. It's very cheap and no doubt worth it.~~

Also Aseprite, for pixel art and custom format exports.

Edit: looks like both these programs are just straight up fully featured and freely available now.

Kagi. Search that actually works, with no ads. Worth every penny.

TeraCopy if you move lots of data around.

However, even with a pro license, I still got an ad notification in my task area recently pushing their other software. Fucking hate advertisements that go out of their way to interrupt you.

Immich https://immich.app/

Absolutely amazing and it's technically free, but please donate if you can, they fucking deserve it.

Being able to host your own photos and have ai to help identify faces WITHOUT internet or giving your private photos to the tech giants is worth every penny.

mullvad vpn

Jetbrains Intellij IDEA Ultimate. 100% worth the price.

I paid for a copy of the Torque app on android. It lets you use bluetooth OBD2 adapters to connect to your car's ECU for reading live engine data and trouble codes. The pro paid version unlocks a lot more customization for data logging screens, allows you to save live data logs to your phone, and enables a wider range of readable codes... Makes a huge difference diagnosing weird engine issues in cars 1996 and newer.

DaVinci Resolve.

The software is free but not FOSS and on Linux paying for the h.264 support is nice.

Keen live is a good alternative but it feels like an advanced form of movie maker to me and lacks polish. If you learn it KDEN Live can be powerful.

BeyondCompare. I've used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.

Balatro on me iPhone

Reaper.

MakeMKV

Moonreader Pro. It's an ebook readers for Android. The Pro/paid version has any feature you could ask for:

• reads just about any file format (epub/mobi/pdf/etc)
• has text-to-speech (everything can now be an audio book)
• you can add annotations/notes/bookmarks (and color code them)
• the annotations/notes/etc will sync to a remote server (Dropbox, your own self-hosted webdav, etc)
• it can pull/fetch books from your own remote server
• where you are in the book is also synced to the remote server, meaning you can read on your phone, but switch to a tablet and immediately continue.

Any feature, I wish an ebook reader would have - moon reader delivered (but finding these features is not intuitive).

It’s FOSS software but I use it so much I donate to support it. FreeCAD. Yeah its interface isn’t the best. But compared to Fusion for my workflow it’s so much bettwr

donate the money to somebody who runs a fediverse server. running servers costs money every month, and that can't be eliminated either because hardware can't be optimized out of existence.

Linux, KDE, Firefox, etc... we are ALL supposed to "pay" somehow for it, whatever our means and however we can.

When we consider free and open source software NOT paid software, we are sabotaging the very things we love.

mine was voicemeeter. so much nicer manipulating audio on windows with voicemeeter and never looking at windows settings again.

wish it worked with Linux tbh, but I'm making due

I do not use MacOS anymore but when I did I have bought Pixelmator, it's really good. Atleast when I have used it, the company behind it was bought by Apple since then.

Wish there would be something similar for Linux :( Gimp is like the opposite of intuitive.

Gimp.

Kagi search. It made cutting Google out of my life easy. I’d rather not pay for search but none of the free alternatives really worked like I needed. I tried out Kagi on a whim and haven’t looked back.

Total Commander on Windows. It can be used for free with the nag dialog, but I paid for it since I was using it every day.

Automate on Android: it's an automation tool with its own programming ‘language’ like Tasker, except visual. Tasker has some weird and cumbersome idioms, while Automate is mostly regular programming mapped onto its visual blocks. Plus it doesn't require buying more apps for additional functionality like Tasker. Alas, it can't do custom dialogs or onscreen buttons, so I might still need Tasker for that.

Unified Remote on Android: nice remote control for the desktop machine, with the ability to add custom controls programmed in Lua (iirc).

Magic Dosbox on Android: it allows adding custom onscreen controls tailored to each game.

Functional Ear Trainer and Perfect Ear on Android: nice training for hearing notes and rhythm, though I can't say they did much for my lazy ass.

Sunvox on Android: a music tracker with modular synths. Seems to be the only full-blown tracker on Android. Alas, doesn't seem to be very good with samples, the workflow is a bit cumbersome, but I need to properly try that yet. The app has been around for ages, I've seen it twenty years ago for Palm and Windows CE. There are also desktop versions, which are free iirc. (Also, the author can't currently receive payments from Google Play since he's in Russia. It's better to write to him and arrange payment via bitcoin or such, afaik he's happy to provide the full app that way.)

On Mac, there are many open-source utils for tweaking the interface, but paid Bartender and Hazeover are better than alternatives. One hides extra menu icons, the other dims background windows.

Alfred on Mac, a launcher: you call it up with a hotkey, and type a few letters to run an app or, crucially, a custom action. It's unmatched by alternatives, especially on Windows and Linux. Typing a couple letters into Alfred is often quicker than cmd-tabbing to an app. And it's way better for frequent actions than mousing around.

I'm also planning to buy Renoise, the cross-platform music tracker. It does about everything the big DAWs do, but with the keyboard-centric workflow. Pretty cheap too.

Just a teensy iOS/macos extension, but Vinegar is awesome for watching YouTube.

I would have said the Affinity suite of stuff, but they recently sold out to Canva, and fuuuuuuuck them.

Personally: Synergy (a formerly OSS software KVM). GlassWire.

Professionally: IntelliJ. Datadog.

I would say for myself;

• Real-Debrid (RD).
• VPN (if RD isn’t enough).
• DayOne Diary.

Photoshop used to be worth the money. The move to subscription based comes at a time when alternatives are starting to catch up though, so that time (of being worth it) may be coming to an end.