This is essentially a master list of all open-source programs you'll need for any purpose. This list will be expanded to accommodate as many programs as possible.
Most of these will be cross-platform, but you'll have to check. All of these will be open-source, with no exceptions. No proprietary software allowed, even if it is light-years apart from open-source versions.
I want to mention common ones as well as some less common ones, as it's important to have a good selection of those.
Table of Contents
This article will get long, so it's better to add a table of contents sooner rather than later.
Photo
GIMP
GIMP is hands-down the best photo manipulation utility ever. It's easy-to-use, fast, with a well-supported community, and supports a wide variety of use cases and formats.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Inkscape
While GIMP is used to modify raster images, you need a separate tool for vector images. Vector images (such as SVG) files have numerous advantages, such as infinite scaling, and Inkscape is a good alternative to the industry standard, Adobe Illustrator.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Audio
Audacity
If you want to edit audio quickly, Audacity is the way to go. It has over 200 million downloads, and lets you record, edit, sample, mix, and so much more. It even has a rich community developing plugins and giving support to new users.
While it has gained a bit of controversy over newer versions including opt-out telemetry, it's anonymised and can be disabled entirely.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
MuseScore
MuseScore is digital notation done right. If you're interested in making music the "traditional way", composing sheet music, MuseScore is the only game in town. It blows its other competition out of the water, being easy to use and powerful once you learn it. Unlike other software, it doesn't have the "jank" traditionally associated with notation software (I'm coming for you, Sibelius.)
It has support for many instruments, notes, etc. and can play back SoundFont, VST and MIDI sounds, and even has an optional proprietary sound library called Muse Sounds which sounds incredible; it's literally the most realistic audio you'll ever hear coming from a computer.
MuseScore probably deserves its own post, but it's genuinely really good.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Video
Kdenlive
If you're getting into video editing, there really isn't an open-source video editor quite like Kdenlive. It's rather buggy, and it's not particularly simple to use, but if you get good at it, it's a surprisingly good replacement for Adobe's suite of video editing applications.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
VLC Media Player
VLC is the de facto media player for loading many different audio and video files. It's easy to use, and supports a wide variety of features, such as subtitles, deinterlacing, streaming from the web, and even plugins and skins.
Get it (Windows/Mac/Linux/Android)
Office
LibreOffice
Libre, as in free. LibreOffice is worse than Office, but, sadly, there hasn't been an effort to make an Office-like office suite yet. I should point out that I am using the ribbon layout, which is not the default.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
OnlyOffice
OnlyOffice aims to be more like Office, but it only sort of gets there. It's quite slow and seems to be tailored towards cloud storage, which I don't fancy. It's also designed quite similarly to Word Online, as seen there. I guess the MS Office compatibility is a plus, but LibreOffice has that as well.
Get It (Windows/Linux)
File Conversion
Converting files is a particularly difficult job to get right, since there is so much noise, with many programs doing weird shit, such as malware. I would know.
MystiQ Video Converter
MystiQ is a video/audio converter that acts as a frontend for ffmpeg. It's easy to use and is really fast, supporting a large amount of codecs. MP4 to MP3? Sure. MP3 to AAC? Sure. FLAC to WAV? Got it. You get the point.
Unfortunately, it's only available on Linux, but you can get it working on Windows if you use a VM or WSL on Windows 11.
Get It (Linux)
Handbrake
If you need to encode a video into another format, this is the tool for you. It supports encoding to MP4 (MPEG-4), MKV (Matroska), and WebM. This may be a small collection of formats, however the encoding is incredibly customisable. Whether you're compressing a video to save space or bypass upload restrictions or converting it to a format supported by a software platform, Handbrake is the tool for you.
Get It (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Other Lists
The scope of my list is rather narrow. For that reason, I have added a few lists of free-and-open-source software.
FSF Directory
The FSF directory is a list of free programs maintained by the Free Software Foundation.
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