Good Software

Zen Browser – based on Firefox, has a bunch of unique features that make Firefox and Chrome feel ancient

Make sure to use an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin

Other cool extensions:

Dark Reader – dark mode on any site

SponsorBlock – skips over sponsored sections in YouTube videos and has settings for other things including skipping Like/Subscribe reminders, and options for you to just press a button to skip instead of auto skipping.

VSCodium – It’s the open source version of VSCode with all the same features and extensions, without any of the MS stuff forced at you.

It should be available in whatever Distro package manager or App Store you use. Like Discover on KDE. Or just from their github on Mac/Windows.

I recommend initializing a git repo for every project. You don’t need to publish it somewhere like GitHub, in fact you don’t even need internet at all. It’ll basically allow you to use version history, branches, commit messages, diffs, etc. for any local project, and it takes very little setup. If you are already logged into a git account, or you completed these steps once already to do so, you can skip straight to step 4 to initialize a repo for your new project.

1. Open VSCodium/VSCode/equivalent terminal
2. Type git config --global user.name NAME
   • Replace NAME with whatever you want the commit message author to say.
   • Press enter when done.
3. Type git config --global user.email EMAIL
   • Replace EMAIL with whatever you want the commit message email to say. It doesn’t even need to be an email, it can just be your name again.
   • I make mine NAME@local.
   • Press enter when done.
4. Now on any project you want to use version history or branches on you can do so privately, offline. Just click the Git/Repo icon on the left, and click “Initialize Repository”.

That’s it! You can make changes and commit them and you’ll have a commit graph like normal. You can make branches for features, merge them, go back in time, compare diffs, revert changes, etc., all the normal source control features. For future projects, just complete step 4 on the new project and it’s good to go.

FreeCAD – a parametric CAD modeling program that is free, cross-platform, open-source, and does most things you’ll need, including having community plugins.

I think it’s more similar to Solidworks, that’s what it seems to be based on. Tool names and workflows are more similar to it than Inventor.

RapidRaw – free, open source, and very easy to use. I found a nice youtube video/pdf guide to help you through the workflow if this is your first time ever editing photos or just using RapidRAW. It’s very intuitive software.

Affinity – previously 3 paid apps, now a single, unified free software published by Canva, this all-in-one app is good for any vector art design you might need to do, like making professional logos or icons, and is a suitable replacement for Adobe Illustrator.

On top of that, it can also do full scale Desktop Publishing, and replace the now discontinued MS Publisher, and the very expensive Adobe InDesign. It works well for brochures, newsletters, and other digital or print media.

It even goes further and has a full pixel artwork editing and drawing Studio to replace Photoshop, and additionally, it even has fully featured RAW photo editing and color grading Studios to replace Adobe Lightroom, or the RapidRaw program mentioned on this page. That said, I think RapidRaw is better for editing multiple photos, but Affinity would be perfectly suitable for just touching up one image at a time.

All of these “Studios” exist in a single, free app. It’s officially supported only on Mac and Windows but the Linux community wasn’t going to let that slide, so now we have a fully functional AffinityOnLinux. Make sure to install the per-distribution dependencies for your specific distro before running the .AppImage.