Desktop Apps

Everyday

Chromium browsers have dropped support for Manifest V2 extensions, meaning uBlock Origin and other similar ad-blockers no longer work. “uBlock Origin Lite” is an alternative, but is a lot less customisable due to the restrictions of Manifest V3

GPT4All and Sanctum are GUI applications whereas Ollama is a CLI AI assistant.

Productivity

If you prefer an open-source app, Joplin and Notesnook are note-taking apps can both be used as a to-do list.

Joplin and Logseq are open-source whereas Obsidian is closed. All of them offer syncing options. Logseq interestingly doesn’t use a folder-based structure like Obsidian does, but both use .md files.

Joplin doesn’t use .md files or similar. There is a Joplin plugin that allows you to save notes as .md files called “Save as .md”. This feature should really be built in though.

Other note-taking apps are also great, it just depends on your personal preference. The ones I have listed here are options that I have tried that have good UI, syncing between devices, and Markdown support in some form or another.

OneCalendar is not open-source and has no Linux desktop app. A good alternative is to use the built-in calendar of your email client, such as Thunderbird.

Documents

LibreOffice’s UI looks terrible in Windows for whatever reason, so I prefer OnlyOffice when I’m using Windows. LibreOffice is fine on Linux though.

Aside from the better UI on Windows, OnlyOffice has better compatibility with MS Office compared to LibreOffice. LibreOffice has more features, however. LibreOffice is also not owned by a company like OnlyOffice is, so that may influence your decision.

Utilities

Cross-Platform

Windows

MacOS

Linux

Media

Windows

MacOS

  • image viewer: Preview
  • media viewer: IINA
  • music viewer: Swinsian
  • pdf viewer: Preview

Linux

Social

Programming

  • code editor: VSCodium
    • alternatives: Kate / Lite XL / Zed / others probably

VSCodium is a build of VSCode with Microsoft’s telemetry disabled.

Zed is built with Rust and is very fast compared to the Electron-based VSCodium. Zed’s plugin selection is not as diverse, however.

Lite XL is a minimal code editor with plenty of extensions, but not as many as VSCodium. I really like it and it is quite customisable, and is also quite fast.

Kate is made by KDE and seems to be a decent code editor as well. I haven’t used it much but it seems quite good.

There are plenty of other good code editors as well, these are just the best ones I’ve personally tried!

  • GUI git client: Fork
    • alternative: Git Graph extension in VSCodium

vim, emacs, and their derivatives have steep learning curves but seem like powerful options. I have never tried either.

The JetBrains IDEs are also very good, each have all sorts of features tailored to the specific programming languages (WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion, etc.). I have personally had great experiences using PyCharm.

There are plenty of other IDEs that I’m sure are great, but I have never tried them before so cannot comment on them, such as Eclipse and Code::Blocks.

Image + Video + Audio Editing

The Serif Affinity suite are also good options, but are closed-source. If you don’t mind that, they are decent alternatives. I would still suggest trying alternatives such as GIMP and Inkscape, they’re really good!

Creative

Security

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