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Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?

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Re: Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?

#31

KDE Plasma for me, it's amazing how good it is and how stable it has become. I've been using KDE for years and I've recommended it to almost anyone I could - and they always stuck with it, because it was simply too much well done. Compared to gnome 3 and other new desktop environments, KDE has always been so easy to use, predictable and customisable, a very joy to use.

I don´t want to enter the eternal debate but predictability is definitely not the greatest kde features.

Re: Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?

#37
Any number of programming languages and their implementations. My personal favorites being Nim, Lua, and the sadly forgotten Tcl/Tk.

Linux. Arch for my fancy stuff, Alpine for my servers.

SQLite and Fossil, from the inimitable D. Richard Hipp, plus rsync and rclone to keep everything in its place.

Yes, I'm a minimalist.

Of course, good is so intrinsically tied up with free that we cannot pry them apart. Not for the sake of money (I do contribute, I do donate), but for the convenience and accessability, and of course the principle.

Oh, and GIMP. How could I forget?

Re: Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free?

#40
TreeSheets: http://strlen.com/treesheets/ - infinitely nestable spreadsheets, great for organizers

TreeProjects Personal Database: http://personaldatabase.org/ - searchable, inter-linkable, hierarchical notes and media tracking for projects

Godot Game Engine: https://godotengine.org/ - the scene graph system wherein a "scene" is just a saved subtree of nodes and can be instantiated at any point within a parent scene is so far beyond the clumsy scene/prefab split in eg. Unity

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