Reddit: What free software is so good you can’t believe it’s available for free?

This is a “your mileage may vary” I do NOT support all of these as useful…but it was on the Internet. List was sent in by a former student

Over 1000 upvotes:

  1. Google Maps: Navigation app – https://www.google.com/maps
  2. Blender: 3D modeling software – https://www.blender.org/
  3. VLC: Video player – https://www.videolan.org/index.html
  4. The Windows Snipping Tool: Screen capture tool – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027213/windows-open-snipping-tool-and-take-a-screenshot
  5. Space Engine: Space exploration simulator – http://spaceengine.org/
  6. Wikipedia: Online encyclopedia – https://www.wikipedia.org/
  7. MuseScore: Music notation software – https://musescore.org/en
  8. Audacity: Audio editing software – https://www.audacityteam.org/
  9. Handbrake: video converter – https://handbrake.fr/
  10. Zotero: Reference manager – https://www.zotero.org/
  11. Desmos.com: Online Calculator – https://www.desmos.com/
  12. Calibre: ebook manager – https://calibre-ebook.com/download
  13. Notepad++: Text Editor – https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
  14. stud.io: Lego simulator – https://studio.bricklink.com/v2/build/studio.page
  15. Search Everything: Instant file search software – https://www.voidtools.com/
  16. LaTeX: Document software – https://www.latex-project.org/
  17. http://archive.org/: Contains music, movies, books, software, games, and webpages – http://archive.org/
  18. Linux/Apache/Postgres/Gcc: Various Linux based OS’s, webservers, compilers, etc. – https://www.linux.org/
  19. Discord: Chat and Communication software – https://discordapp.com/
  20. OBS Studio: Streaming and Recording software – https://obsproject.com/
  21. Krita: Digital design – https://krita.org/en/
  22. R: Statistics software – https://www.r-project.org/
  23. pfSense: Firewall software – https://www.pfsense.org/
  24. FreeNAS: File server software – http://www.freenas.org/
  25. Gimp: Digital design – https://www.gimp.org/
  26. OpenSCAD: 3D Model scripting software – http://www.openscad.org/
  27. This list – https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7x639l/what_free_software_is_so_good_you_cant_believe/
  28. Malwarebytes: Malware protection – https://www.malwarebytes.com/
  29. Unity: Game design software – https://unity3d.com/
  30. https://www.draw.io/: Online diagram software – https://www.draw.io/
  31. Paint.NET: Image design – https://www.getpaint.net/
  32. Draftsight: Free CAD – https://www.3ds.com/products-services/draftsight-cad-software/free-download/
  33. 7Zip: File archiving – http://www.7-zip.org/
  34. Plex: Media storage access – https://www.plex.tv/
  35. Libre Office: Document editing suite – https://www.libreoffice.org/
  36. KeePass: Password manager – https://keepass.info/
  37. DaVinci Resolve: Video color correcting/editing – https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
  38. Inkscape: Vector art software – https://inkscape.org/en/
  39. Google’s Apps: Google’s document suite (Docs, Sheets, Gmail, etc) – https://www.google.com/
  40. Duolingo: Language learning – https://www.duolingo.com/
  41. Darktable: Photo workflow a la lightroom – https://www.musicpd.org/ and https://www.darktable.org/
  42. MPD/Mopidy: F/OSS music player daemon – https://www.mopidy.com/
  43. Doom shareware: A classic game – a 3.5” floppy disk

Free Online Programming & Computer Science Courses You Can Start in April

Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central compiled this list of over 515 such free online courses that you can start this month. For this, he leveraged Class Central’s database of over 7,000 courses.  https://medium.freecodecamp.com/515-free-online-programming-computer-science-courses-you-can-start-in-april-8b0ce1817d61

Class Central

Class-central’s landing page.

These courses are sorted based on their difficulty level:

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Advanced

Many of these courses are completely self-paced. The rest will start at various times later this month. You can find complete lists of the technology-related courses starting later in 2017 on our Computer Science and Programming subject pages.