I recently stumbled upon Krita on HN, which I really like. Would be great to collect the most powerful, feature-rich free software that are among the best in their category, and that get close to or even beat the commercial ones. I know some other great pieces like Gimp, Inkscape, but what's the state of the art for animations, music notations, audio mixing, etc? GUI & CLI should be both ok.<p>Here is a list of my favorite software that are worth learning:<p><pre><code> - Gimp: photo editing
- Krita: digital painting, illustration
- Inkscape: vector drawing
- sox: sound processing (command line)
- ffmpeg: video processing (command line)
- imagemagick: image processing (command line)</code></pre>
That may sound silly but humble Notepad++ should be a part of your list of great opensource software. Although at first glance it does not require spending time on learning its functionalities it offers a lot of plugins that allow to replace proprietary software (i.e. I'm using XML-plugin and that allows me to work with XMLs without using specialised software like Altova).<p>Also TrueCrypt - I'm using it all the time (although there are changes in maintenance community the last stable version was proven to be clean - I still trust old good truecrypt)
Natron: for cross-platform video compositing (Adobe After Effects alternative) at <a href="http://natron.inria.fr/" rel="nofollow">http://natron.inria.fr/</a><p>Synfig: for cross-platform 2D vector animation (Adobe Flash alternative) at <a href="http://www.synfig.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.synfig.org</a><p>Scribus: for desktop publishing (Adobe InDesign alternative) at <a href="http://www.scribus.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribus.net</a><p>FlashDevelop: for ActionScript development (Adobe Flash Builder alternative) at <a href="http://www.flashdevelop.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flashdevelop.org/</a><p>MyPaint: for intuitive full screen digital painting (Autodesk Sketchbook alternative) at <a href="http://mypaint.intilinux.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mypaint.intilinux.com/</a>
VirtualDub - video manipulation software that does some things better than 99% of its competitors (including direct-stream processing, which for some reason most commercial editing suites don't). Not a replacement for Avid / FCX / Premiere / whatever by any means, but it does some stuff better than anything else.<p><a href="http://www.virtualdub.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.virtualdub.org/</a><p>Also, grep.
password manager: KeePassX[0] (or MacPass[1] on OS X)<p>KeePassX works cross-platform and there are ports for Android and iOS.<p>0: <a href="https://github.com/keepassx/keepassx" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/keepassx/keepassx</a><p>1: <a href="https://github.com/mstarke/MacPass/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mstarke/MacPass/</a>
I am fond of ardour for mixing audio recordings.<p>Lilypond is my favorite music notation software, but I have a predilection for text-based formats.<p>Of course TeX and its descendents remain world-class for serious document production, even if XSL-FO-based systems have made a big dent there.
OBS - Cross-platform broadcaster software (for recording and live streaming). Better than any of its competition in my opinion.<p><a href="https://obsproject.com/" rel="nofollow">https://obsproject.com/</a>
It's my own, but I'd like to think that Cachet (<a href="https://CachetHQ.io" rel="nofollow">https://CachetHQ.io</a>), although in beta is a good replacement for StatusPage.io
Zotero is an excellent EndNote alternative<p>OpenShot is an imovie like video editor, I like it because it's easy to use<p>Rhythmbox is a featureful itunes-like music player.<p>Audacity isn't protools, but it's great for mixing audio
FFTW -- Fast Discrete Fourier Transform. Reason: it routinely beats proprietary FFT routines on real & complex and single & multidimensional transforms, and with better accuracy.
Free software (not open source) but really great stuff (I use them everyday):<p>Music player: <a href="http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html" rel="nofollow">http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html</a><p>Batch rename tool: <a href="http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk</a><p>Flashcards learning (open source): <a href="http://ankisrs.net/" rel="nofollow">http://ankisrs.net/</a>