I first saw this on reddit, but I figured it would be good to make sure that this also stays accessible on another platform
This list is mostly not software. It’s free as in free beer but free software mostly describes free as in freedom. That means open source and free to copy, redistribute and modify. Which a lot of these are not
It really bugs me after all these years that we haven’t simply started calling Open Source software just OSS or Open Software to get rid of the ambiguity.
The whole, that’s “free” software, not “FREE” software thing is older than sin and I think it might be Richard Stallman’s fault we even have this discussion.
But Open Source Software isnt neccesarily free software. For example Chromium is Open Source but not Free Software. That’s why the distinction is needed
I’m sympathetic to your idea of calling it OSS or Open Software. But Richard Stallman and people who agree with his arguments really stress the “freedom” of what they call free software. They lost that battle ages ago, but they aren’t going to give it up since it’s more than just pedantry, it’s a value statement.
Yo where’s Krita under digital image tools? This list is missing some basic stuff :P
This seems to be really dated, shouldn’t really be promoting things like OpenOffice now.
And nobody’s used Xvid for at least the last like 10 years. And even back when the Xvid codec was used, ffmpeg was the way to do it lol
Why not?
Apache OpenOffice hasn’t had a major release since 2014 whereas LibreOffice, its de facto successor, is actively developed and modern.
Unfortunately OpenOffice still has name recognition which leads casual users to still download it as a replacement to commercial office suites, despite being very out of date. It’s kind of become a bit of an embarrassment to open source software and really should be discontinued, but a small handful of developers insist on keeping it on life support.
See this open letter https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
And I would really put OnlyOffice in there. It’s by far the most polished of the bunch nowadays.
As a power user, who uses spreadsheets every day professionally, OnlyOffice isn’t full-featured enough for my needs. LibreOffice is the only free software that’s adequate for my job.
Never heard of OpenOffice, but googled it now and it looks really impressive!
As I’ve said above, it’s not OpenOffice you want, it’s LibreOffice, please don’t download OpenOffice. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
If love to see Python under “Data and Statistics”.
The whole list seems old though, are all of those programs still available? I suspect there are other great new programs that could go on a list like this.
Note taking software has changed a lot over the years since this image was made. Obsidian, Logseq, and Trillium Notes being some of the more preferred note taking apps around.
There are a few others but I can’t remember them off the top of my head.
Most students have probably used Google drive by now, but it’s still worth adding. Additionally, I personally find Overleaf to be great for LaTeX documents.
Edit: Also worth mentioning Notion for note-taking/studying/planning, and if slack is on the list for study groups, discord might as well be also. This might be because I’m a CS major, but nearly every class I’ve taken has had students make a discord server for studying/working on homework
@Angry_Maple As someone who uses Keepass, I highly recommend KeepassXC over the regular release. There is an open security vulnerability that the original devs aren’t really addressing: www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/… the XC release team has mitigated this and has generally been better about improving the UX.
Bitwarden for password
For meetings, https://meet.jit.si/ is like Zoom or MS Teams but open source and free. You don’t even need to create an account.
I would add Obsidian for note taking!
Shout out to ninite.com
If you’re on windows then ShareX is a free open source tool for screenshots and screen recording. I’ve used it for years and it’s my favorite one.
Obsidian.md beats all the other note taking apps. Fantastic tool
I would not really recommend LaTeX or any of those other programs just for writing student papers. LaTeX is for academic papers and it’s pretty cumbersome and technical to learn, it would be very very extra to use it for writing just like your random freshman comp paper. I’m not sure why that list doesn’t have LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever.
Unless my definition for media player is wrong, I wouldn’t call OBS a media player, it better fits into screen recording than anything else, heck even video editing works better than media player.
