Free and Open Source Software

My last experience with Win10 vs now:

(FOSS in bold)

• Edge -> LibreWolf, ~~Brave~~
• Windows Mail & Calendar -> Thunderbird, Tutanota
• Windows Explorer -> Thunar, PCManFM
• Todoist/iCal -> fruux + Thunderbird
• NCH VideoPad -> Kdenlive
• iTunes, Spotify -> CDs, Audacious, DeaDBeeF, Bandcamp
• VLC -> mpv, Parole
• OneNote -> ~~Obsidian~~ Joplin + Backblaze B2
• Firefox Lockwise -> Bitwarden
• WPS Office -> LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE
• VSCode -> Micro
• Visual Studio -> Micro + GCC + Glade
• Finale -> MuseScore
• NT -> Linux (obviously)
• Windows 10 -> Debian, Arch Linux

And now, the online services:

• Ecosia -> LibreX
• YouTube -> CloudTube
• Twitter -> Mastodon
• Reddit -> Libreddit, Lemmy
• Dropbox, Google Drive -> MEGA, Filen, USB sticks
• Blogger -> Neocities, Flounder (gemini protocol)

Sorry for the long post. Here are some potatoes:

I think most of them I'd be using on windows as well. Like blender, gimp, krita, librewolf, libreoffice, thunderbird, virtualbox, etc.. etc.. etc.. Although it was 15 years ago I had switched to mostly open source applications in the years prior to eventually switching to linux entirely.

Not a replacement per se, but I am just amazed by how much better some common FOSS apps feel in Linux compared to Windows. Apps like VLC, Calibre, FreeCAD, Libreoffice, hell even Firefox are so much smoother in a UNIX system, almost like THIS is their real home!

Calibre is very powerful for book management, you should stick with it.

This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

Photography and Image manipulation

• Darktable → RAW photo processing
• GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
• Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it's good)
• Inkscape → Vector Graphics
• Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI's Shap-E)

3D modeling and Printing

• Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
• Meshroom → Photogrammetry
• PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

Video editing and Processing

• Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
• FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
• Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

Misc

• Calibre → E-book management
• Serge → Self hosted Local LLM's made a bit easier to deal with
• Firefox → Web browser

FOSS I'm excited for

• DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
• CoDi → "Composable Diffusion" Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
• Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF's for 3D models (don't know if it will be FOSS but I'm hopeful)

LibreOffice (and not OpenOffice) is a must.

I have tried really hard to make the switch to GIMP, but Photoshop is too engraved within me.

I will probably keep using Photopea instead.

I've never heard of Logseq. But I use an obsidian alternative called trilium. I'll give logseq a shot.

I will say, despite how old and outdated calibre looks, it's an absolute beast and contains every feature you would need. I use it to tag all my pdfs with the correct book information (which calibre with find for you) and use it to export my books into a specific folder hierarchy for easy browsing using KOReader on my Kobo e-reader (which runs on linux!)