InkScape.

I don’t fully know why but vector graphics just work for me in a way that pixel graphics don’t. I love fiddling with vectors.

Darkstone (1999) - Good game for a Diablo clone.

Debian-flavored Linux - My only complaints are hardware compatibility-related, and that is primarily because Nvidia and Intel both suck Microsoft’s floppy disk.

Krita, Gimp, Blender - Never needed another art program. Adobe can eat my paintbrush.

LibreOffice - I would literally have this over MSOffice any and every day of the week.

VLC - It just frickin’ works. And it’s good at its job. It plays anything!

Firefox (including recent forks) Antennapod Linux Cyanogen mod / LineageOS Thunderbird K9 Mail GIMP Inkscape Steam DOTA2 (bots only) apt Debian

Probably many more…

Most of 'em. Here are some highlights.

• vi/vim. The one true text editor
• thunderbird. Standard email client
• musicbee. Absolutely the BEST audio player/organizer anywhere. Sadly, not available on Linux
• potplayer. Just a simple, high quality video player
• LibreOffice. Used to be almost as good as MS. Now it is far better.
• FIrefox, sort of. I’ve lately switched to Waterfox, which is from the same code base as ff.

vim/neovim

Well I haven’t been using Newpipe for ten years… Maybe Skyrim…no, I haven’t played that in years… Well it seems my list is gonna be short:

VLC
GIMP
7zip

Too many OSS tools to really be able to mention them all. Thank you to so many GNU/Linus, OpenBSD, BSD*, and other developers!

I’ll mention these:

• LaTeX
• Jabref

Without TeX I’d go insane writing technical and scientific documents. You’ve saved me thousands of hours of work!

Oh, and my current time waster game: Kohan: Immortal Sovreigns.

Age of Empires 2, my true love xoxoxo

I’ve used ls, cat, echo, cd, mkdir, mv, cp, rm, & ssh pretty much every day I’ve touched a computer since some time near the end of the twentieth century. Honorable mention to sudo, find, rename, ffmpeg, Gimp, & VLC. If you count ROMs for games, the list gets into the deeper past, though I don’t use them as often. I guess I still need to get around a few Windows/DOS machines, so DIR and (I don’t love DIR) CD are is probably the absolute oldest when at the keyboard, but it’s technically a different thing for different systems even though it does the same task.

As for loving it, I love when shit just works and I love the command line.

XnView MP - cross-platform image viewer and organizer that I love for it batch convert tool. Besides many work tasks that required simple leveling or watermarking automation, I used it to make my couple of underpowered and lowres e-ink books show me manga in the best possible way. I chained up grayscale, rotation to portrait if landscape, posterisation, cutting white borders and resizing the result to the book’s screen, the entire Gutz or Berserk or Uzumaki processed in one go and saved to another folder keeping the structure intact. This way I sprinted through so many works I probably outdid my real wage in the month I started, calculating the price of each tome in Eastern Europe.

TotalCMD - Win darling that I rarely ever use now, but it’s the first thing I think of (and miss on Linux) when I need batch renaming of files. Find&replace, adding counting numbers, using regular expressions (while looking them up each time, lol). It says a lot when I come to task and think of it in a logic that this exact tool allowed me to use.

AIMP - surprise-surprise, another batch editing tool that primarily a music player, and also Win only. It is the slickest way I found to mass convert files to other formar via a context menu item, and it also provides a tool to mass edit metadata of music files, with a pretty flexible data rearranging patterns, e.g. I could fill a blank metadata table sourcing from it’s name deftones_-_shove-it.mp3 and other kinds of manipulation.

I just really like that some programs provide nice GUIs for reliable automatisation of repetitive tasks, that you don’t need to write macros over programs instead. The closest I felt like that from a corporate software is MS Office Word’s Find&Replace in older editions, where you could use regexp, target specific styles and tags, etc, but it still felt too limiting and dumbed down, so for some context aware replacement tasks I wrote macros and was scaredly considering going to either edit their lunatic XMLs on the code level or learning the hell of VBA scripting if I’d have time and zero self-respect. The two only persons I know who wrote some VBAs in my circle actively encouraged me not to 🤪

Easy - VLC

• 7zip
• Firefox
• LibreOffice
• Various Linux distros, but mostly Ubuntu variants and Raspbian
• Cura
• OpenVPN
• Blender
• Gimp
• Windows - sorry everyone, it just works, but I stopped at 10.
• VLC
• Virtual Clone Drive

Steam? Though I’m not sure I’m loving it… 22 years now… But it worked back then, it still works now, and it hasn’t lost itself to enshitification. It even followed me to linux.

• vlc
• vim
• tmux
• neomutt
• FreeBSD / Linux
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Firefox
• KDE’s Dolphin
• SwayWM
• pass

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it’s fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people’s PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts “RAW” files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee’s edit is all I need. It’s feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several “RAW” converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I’ve got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It’s got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it’s got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I’m not aware of any security issues with it, it’s just not actively developed anymore.