Asklemmy

This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?

Beyond All Reason

This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.

• labor of love
• fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
• tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
• all shots actively rendered, leading to:
• realistic friendly fire
• even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
• redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
• meaningful terrain
• radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
• radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
• two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
• crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
• free server hosting (!)
• active servers all times of day

The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.

Fam and friends play together often.

I'll go with FreeCAD. I've known about it for a while and tried it about 5-10 years ago but have given it another look as I try to get back into CAD stuff and hate the restrictive licenses of commercial products. It has come a LONG way and is far more intuitive to use than it used to be.

My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.

Now that most of my friends and family are using it, I'm on Briar Messaging every day. Since there are no central servers, is entirely encrypted, and runs on the Tor network, I think it is probably the most secure messaging platform out there. It also has private groups and forums but I am not yet involved in any of those outside of a couple of small ones that are just for sharing family news.

My choice is screen on the CLI. It's an old one, but I just learned about it this year and it's been amazing helpful doing complex, long-running tasks via SSH.

Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.

paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.

Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.

My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.

conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.

Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack

Freetube.

Once they added quick playlist functionality earlier this year, it was over for YouTube for me.

At this point it has everything I need and could only use small QoL improvements to be absolutely perfect for me.

orange pi running samba as a file server. it's behind a wireguard vpn.

huge improvement in my quality of life.

Syncthing

Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.

For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.