and lastly, Tor Browser: anonymous web browser to evade state censorship and surveillance

Typst: A modern typesetting system designed for easy document creation with markup inspired by Markdown but more powerful and programmable.

Tox is easy-to-use software that connects you with friends and family without anyone else listening in. While other big-name services require you to pay for features, Tox is completely free and comes without advertising. Chat, P2P serverless, screen/file sharing, voice, video, groups, encrypted.

https://tox.chat/

https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore

Copyparty turns almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser

Learned about the mentos thing in 2006. Saw a list of things to flavor coke. This was #4 on the list and I decided to try it (yay mint coke) - at a dollar tree parking lot, in my car. Went off in my mouth and I maintained the pressure until I got the door open and my head out. Thankfully little mess on me or the car. Learned the internet can be full of sneaky assholes that day.

FanControl: superb PC fan manager with custom temperature/fan speed curves and the options to combine sensors whatever way you like

Tenacity - a pre-enshitification fork of Audacity. An audio recorder and editor that does multi-track recording, effects and much more in a really simple UI.

sgt-puzzles. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle collection.

Contains a bunch of simple puzzles, of the minesweeper and sudoku style. Loopy is my favorite.

Available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, and anything with a web browser and a mouse. Packaged in Debian and F-droid, and probably many other places.

I like it for time wasting in lines at the DMV, for a low-stakes game when anxious, and for falling asleep.

Czkawka: A free, fast, and open-source tool for finding and removing duplicate files, cleaning empty folders, and optimizing storage by content-based file comparison across multiple platforms.

screen

a gnu until that let's you run a persistent session, even if you log off. log back in and reattach your screen and whatever you were doing is still running.

This post is a gold mine!

PieFed: a link aggregator and forum platform built for the Fediverse, focusing on individual control, safety, decentralized power, and healthy community interactions, with features like reputation indicators and keyword filters to enhance user experience.

MakeHuman is a 3D character creation software designed to simplify the creation of virtual humans through a graphical user interface. The software allows users to create realistic human characters by adjusting parameters like gender, age, height, weight, and ethnicity through slider controls. Characters can be customized with clothes, hair, poses, and materials from the built-in library and exported to 3D soft, like Blender.

https://static.makehumancommunity.org/makehuman.html

https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman

Logseq: note-taking and knowledge management application that supports Markdown and Org-mode syntax, featuring powerful linking, block-based organization, and full local data storage for privacy

Mihon Manga reader for android. Allows auto aggregation from web sources to make tracking and reading manga smooth and easy

Xournal++: A C++ handwriting note-taking software with PDF annotation support.

Flameshot: screenshotting tool with everything you would ever need for screenshots

Bookwyrm, a book tracker and review sharing plateform that is part of the fediverse allowing you to share your notes and review about books in the threadiverse as well as the twittoverse.

Nicotine+: A lightweight, free, and open-source graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

aria2. From the website:

aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces.

krename is another excellent, but not as well known as it should be, KDE app.

krename can rename files and directories, and directories recursively, to almost anything. You can rename:

• using information from the files or about the files (image info, date / time info, etc)
• with templates (like #### for incrementing 0001, 0002, 0003, etc)
• by adding parts of the original file name (first three characters then the last 4 characters, for example)
• using find and replace (spaces to underscore, remove special characters, etc), including regular expressions
• by changing case

or with a mix of everything.

krename has a simple mode and an advanced mode for renaming, so you don't have to jump into the deep end with the features.

You do have to be careful with some of the file info functions - it will happily try to rename a movie or a pdf with (non-existent) image EXIF info, for example. That would result in a file with a name you did not intend.

PairDrop like Localsend or Airdrop but working on anything that has an internet connection and a resonably new web Browser! You can share files even when on different networks, by pairing devices. Works like a charm.

Helix Editor: A fast, post-modern text editor that combines modal editing and syntax awareness built in Rust for programmers.

ShareX, one of the best Screensho/cast productivity tool, edt tools, OCR, QR codes, scrolling capture, color picker......, storing locally, uploading captures to hosts, sharelink in clipboard. Complement with right click extension for Firefox and Chromium

Sadly Windows only

https://getsharex.com/

https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

GrayJay platform player. I use it for youtube only but it has many sources.

Grayjay enables you to create and watch video content in your own terms, fully retaining ownership and having control over what you watch. Your content on your terms

https://grayjay.app/

https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay/

(Not to poop on NewPipe, but this app is better in my opinion, I swapped after their player was bugged for me and I got a bit annoyed on the devs response to not adding SponsorBlock (you can say no to a feature ofc, but he decided to add reasoning that was bad))

Nuclear: A free, open-source music player that streams content from multiple free sources like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp without ads or subscriptions.

Portmaster, nowadays mandatory, monitor the traffic of all installed apps and even from the OS itself, blocking with a simple click all unwanted traffic, Inbuild DNS crypt with dynamic filterlists (customizable) blocking ads, trackers and unwanted crap from big companies. Optional SPN service (paid). Windows and Linux.

https://safing.io/

https://github.com/safing/portmaster

Mullvad vpn, probably the best vpn imo

emacs, the text editor. it's so powerful and customizable that I feel listing any feature would do so many others a disservice

Audiobookshelf. Not exactly a "hidden" gem at this point, but I'm putting it here for today's lucky 10,000. Simply the best way to store and stream audiobooks. Does podcasts too, and ebooks, although there are better tools for those.

Comaps, navigation from openstreetmap

Open Hardware Monitor: track and visualise CPU/GPU/HDD/etc. performance over time

(I've been using the original repo that I see hasn't been updated in some years, this is a more active fork.)

tomb: Tomb is a minimalistic CLI based hidden file encryption tool based on Linux dm-crypt and LUKS.
In addition to its cool ass name, it also has a GUI that's called Mausoleum.

Silverbullet is like Trilium or Obsidian a markdown notes app, which is lightweight and highly customizable (by css and scripting). And all files could be forever accessed as simple markdown-files in an easy folder structure without much overhead. The database is only for indexing and could be restored anytime.

Subsurface

I recently found out after creating Linux, Linus Torvalds wanted to make a good open source scuba dive log software. Today, it's probably one of the best, if not the best dive log programs out there and I recently used this myself on a recent dive and it's great.