Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?

I think Linux is one of the great accomplishments of modern human society, together with Wikipedia. OpenSSL and the other Open Source cryptographic libraries for providing a safety net when our politicians decide to tighten their grip on privacy and secure communications. At least we as developers can still fall back on all the OpenSSL cloned repos and see from there.

curl, atuin, zed

Surprised we made it this far with no love for Firebird... err... Firefox.

(It's got tabs!)

Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me.

Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course.

Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year.

KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project.

The entire python "data science" stack, numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work. Tiny projects too, like nptdms.

The raspberry pi foundation, in particular for the pico, rp2040 and rp2350. Joy to work with, great documentation, super cheap and available, perfect for one-off projects, prototypes and hobby stuff, which is pretty much always neglected by the big silicon vendors.

I set up my own NAS this year, running many self-hosted apps. I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.

So many cli apps that I use daily:

- starship prompt - fd - ripgrep - fzf - lazygit - yazi

Firefox gets sometimes deserved criticism, but I have been using it continuously since Firebird 0.7 and I believe it contributes to keeping the web open.

FreeTube [1], and yt-dlp [2], especially in combination with a ready supply of VPNs. Switching them around to avoid being blocked by Google reminds me of adjusting the tuner for better reception on an old analog tv. Infant me might have imagined a malevolent being who inhabits the airwaves deliberately causing interference, and in the world we've created since then that's not far from the truth. Many thanks to the developers tirelessly compensating for Google's frequent deliberate breakage.

[1] https://freetubeapp.io/

[2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp