Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Okay.... Day 1....
Inkscape
A vector graphics editor (edits SVG documents).
I use this in a lot of different ways whenever I need a drawing:
* Presentation slides
* Graphic illustrations/diagrams
* "Decal" graphics for 3D textures
* Layout of images or other graphics
* Video poster/cover graphics
* Book design
Also included in most desktop Linux distributions, I believe.
Inkscape - Draw Freely. | Inkscape
Inkscape is professional vector graphics software which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows desktop computers.inkscape.org
Questa voce è stata modificata (2 settimane fa)
reshared this
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •#FreeSoftwareAdvent
Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Day 2:
Gnu Image Manipulation Program
Known as #GIMP or as #GnuIMP by those who don't like the other name.
This is my go-to tool for basic image processing of photos and images for publication. It's a pretty common workflow for me to crop and/or enhance photos in Gimp and then load the output into Inkscape for layout work.
Also, FWIW, I learned it before I learned Photoshop, which frankly seemed kind of like a backward step to me, particularly in the way that Photoshop filters never seemed to have any controls (at the time -- this was 25 years ago and I haven't used Photoshop since then).
Which fuels my general belief that terms like "more intuitive" or "more powerful" are mostly a function of what you are familiar with.
It's one of the earliest graphics creation software packages I learned on Linux, and so it's become so much second nature that I hardly think about it anymore.
These days I use it all the time to crop and rescale screen captures, so I've attached one of cropping a screencap of itself.
gimp.org/
GIMP
GIMPSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •#FreeSoftwareAdvent
Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Day 3:
Krita
I think it's particularly important to mention Krita in the context of Inkscape and Gimp to differentiate them. For a long time, I basically thought of Gimp and Krita as competitors, but they serve different goals:
Gimp is, as the name says, for "image manipulation", whereas Krita is a DIGITAL PAINTING application. It is more focused on creating the art in the application than on tweaking existing elements. And while Krita and Gimp have limited vector art capabilities, they come nowhere near Inkscape in that category.
Since I'm not much of a digital painter, though, I have not really put Krita through its paces, nor trained myself extensively on it.
My daughter HAS, and she creates a LOT of character art using it. So she is the real Krita expert in the family. The "KitCAT" logo below is one I commissioned from her as a studio mascot.
But it has some other useful features for me -- the one I use the most is that it can open 16-bit graphics I use for some backdrop textures in Blender and also the Multilayer EXR files generated from Blender. This makes it the easiest way for me to check them (the attachment below shows a recent "Ink" render, including masks for "billboard extras").
krita.org/en/
#Krita
Digital Painting. Creative Freedom.
Digital Painting. Creative Freedom.Anban Govender likes this.
reshared this
endecasillabo e Anban Govender reshared this.
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 4:
Papagayo NG
This one fills a very important niche in my pipeline. It is a tool to make it much easier to line up lip movements to speech.
This is not an AI tool and does not do the alignment for you, but it makes it much it easier to do.
We used this extensively in "Lunatics!", particularly for the long dialogues in the Press Conference.
Morevna Project maintains this program, which is a fork of the original "Papagayo" with some enhancements. Hence the "NG":
morevnaproject.org/papagayo-ng…
I've attached the 2015 "2-Min Tutorial" in which I briefly explained how to use the program.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Papagayo #PapagayoNG #Lipsync #Animation
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •The follow-up tutorial explained how to import the file exported from Papagayo into Blender:
tv.filmfreedom.net/w/jSp1opgLK…
#Animation #Lipsync #Blender3D #PapagayoNG
Two-Minute Tutorial: Importing Lipsync into Blender (Part 2)
Film Freedom PeerTubeSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •"...on our production website..."
I guess that's another thing I need to find and upload.
I've also got a language patch for Japanese for Papagayo... SOMEWHERE.
Ah well. I think Morevna has a copy of the Blender extension, too.
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 5:
Wordpress
Here's a program I regularly use at least once a month when I write up my project summaries. And I've been using it for a little over ten years now.
It is both a blogging platform and a content management system, which makes it a very good hub for my site.
At current count, I have published 386 articles and 3537 images on this site. I think I'm getting my investment back on this one.
I currently get the program via YunoHost:
apps.yunohost.org/app/wordpres…
That page includes links to the upstream sites if you'd rather install it some other way. There are MANY options.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Wordpress #Blogging #Writing #Illustration
YunoHost app store | WordPress
apps.yunohost.orgSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 6:
Audacity
Another old one! I think I've been using Audacity for about 25 years, now.
It is a "destructive audio editor", which means it is kind of the audio equivalent to a bitmap editor in graphics -- you are actually changing the values of the samples in the recording when you make changes, rather than applying filters on top of them as non-destructive editors do.
This makes Audacity particularly good at constructing sound effects from recorded sources.
I do most of my audio processing in Audacity, but even if I do involve a non-destructive "DAW" platform, I would probably continue to use Audacity for creating effects and recording voices.
It is an excellent tool for recording audio directly or reviewing and selecting audio from field recordings.
audacityteam.org/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Audacity #Audio #DAW #Sound
Audacity ® | Free Audio editor, recorder, music making and more!
www.audacityteam.orgR.L. Dane :Debian: :OpenBSD: :FreeBSD: 🍵 :MiraLovesYou:
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Suggestion: make a custom #hashtag for each of these series so that it's easy to find/read them all, once you have read one of them.
It could be something as simple as #TerryHancockFreeSoftwareAdvent
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to R.L. Dane :Debian: :OpenBSD: :FreeBSD: 🍵 :MiraLovesYou: • • •@rl_dane
Just click on any one of them -- they're a thread.
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 7:
ImageMagick
This is actually a small suite of tools that can be used from the command line, although it also has a GUI interface. Pretty old school software; been around for ages; still very handy.
Not as powerful as Gimp or Krita for manipulating a single image, but with ImageMagick and a bash script you can make changes en masse ("convert" and "mogrify" -- which does the job in place). You can quickly check the format and size of images from the command line ("identify") or simply pop up the image with "display".
Finally, with "compose" you can make an image combining multiple images in many different ways, including making a grid with or without labels.
I don't use it as much as I used to, but it is still the simplest way to check image content from the command line. And it's really the only option when you need to change a whole lot of images at once.
Also often used on server back ends to manipulate images for display in web applications.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #ImageMagick #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
reshared this
Elena ``of Valhalla'', Mre. Dartigen [maker mode] e Paolo Redaelli reshared this.
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 8:
Blender
This one's a gimme. Blender is the single most important free software tool in my project toolbox.
Weirdly, I still use Blender 2.79, because I built my project on the "Blender Internal" render which they removed in 2.8 (more about that in a comment). Meanwhile Blender is on at least v4 now.
I'm sure you've heard of it, but you may not realize Blender's full scope. It is designed to be a complete 3D animation suite in one package:
* 3D surface modeler
* Materials editor, shader, rendering engine
* 3D armature & shape key animation
* 2D annotations
* 2D "grease pencil" animation tool
* video clip editor with rotoscoping and tracking for VFX work
* video sequence editor for editing clips together
It is pretty complete, and many people have made animated films entirely in Blender, although it can also be integrated into a pipeline with other tools, as I've done on Lunatics Project.
It's popular with indy film makers and Hollywood alike.
blender.org
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Blender3D #Blender #Animation #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
Blender - The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Software — blender.org
BlenderSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •We built Lunatics around the Blender Internal renderer, which was removed along with the game engine when they went to v2.8. Switching rendering engines would be too big an ask, so we just stuck with 2.79 (for now).
There IS a fork of the program, called "UPBGE" that incorporates both BI and the Game Engine (also removed with 2.8).
Later Blender includes the "Eevee" renderer, which I understand was based on the previous "viewport renderer" (that's also when "annotations" became separate from "grease pencil").
And the "Cycles" renderer, which is meant to be more photorealistic was retained.
But they junked "Blender Internal". I understand it had a lot of "technical debt". And the Blender Game Engine I think was considered to be out of scope and not competitive with other game engines, so they dropped that.
There are also 3rd party renderers. I haven't tried them, myself, but I hear good things about them from time to time.
One of particular interest to me is "BEER" the "Blender Extended Expressive Renderer" which is explicitly designed for NPR3D work, and it's successor (I think), called "Malt".
I might give those a go before long. Maybe next year.
It occurs to me to wonder if UPBGE or some other package of BI can be used for rendering from later versions of Blender? 🤔
UPBGE:
upbge.org
BNPR - BEER & MALT:
github.com/bnpr
#Blender3D #NPR3D
UPBGE
UPBGECraig P
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Craig P • • •@Craigp
Yes. Eevee is pretty good. There are some trouble spots, and in any case, adapting existing models represents a significant amount of work.
Not to mention loads of "look testing".
My top options (for future episodes) are:
* Adapt to Eevee
* Adopt BEER or Malt engines
* Keep on keeping on with Blender 2.79
* Find some way to plug BI in as a 3rd party renderer, perhaps via UPBGE..?
* I might even consider Cycles, though I doubt it
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 9:
YunoHost
This is technically more of a distribution than an individual software. There's a portal, and a large volunteer packaging effort to create apps for it. And a large catalog of applications already packaged.
I definitely rely on it. So I'm counting it.
YunoHost is how I have Wordpress (which I've already mentioned) installed -- along with other software I haven't got to yet.
It is based on Debian Linux: a particular install with applications already configured to work on it, pretty close to "plug and play". It's like the packaging systems for Linux desktop systems -- but for the Internet.
It makes managing a web application site SO much easier. I decided to adopt it as the basis of my "virtual studio" instead of trying to write something new.
yunohost.org/
apps.yunohost.org/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #YunoHost #Debian #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
YunoHost: garden your own piece of the Internet!
yunohost.orgSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 10:
Open Camera
I'm stuck on my phone today, so today's free software is an Android smartphone app from the F-Droid repo: Open Camera.
I use it to record the "real life" parts for my daily logs. A particularly useful feature is the "photo stamp" so I have the date and time on screen.
f-droid.org/packages/net.sourc…
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #OpenCamera #FDroid #Android
Open Camera | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
f-droid.orgSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 11:
Seafile
I like Seafile, it's simple. It does one thing well, which is make it easy to share files between different machines. It reminds me of Google Drive before they junked it up.
And if you run your own Seafile server on your LAN, this is totally secure, without your data ever having to leave your control at all.
It's weird that that has become a luxury, but such is 21st century corporate-platform computing.
Anyway, none of that with Seafile running on your own LAN. I run it on my household file server, with clients on my phone and my workstation.
For several years, this has been my go-to solution for transferring photos and note files from my phone to my workstation, where I edit my logs.
manual.seafile.com/latest/
seafile.com
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Seafile #FileSharing
Seafile - Open Source File Sync and Share Software
www.seafile.comSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 12:
Gwenview
For this list, I've been trying to focus not so much on the most exciting applications as the ones I use so often I forget they exist -- and Gwenview definitely fits in that category. I literally use it every day.
It's an image/multimedia browsing utility. Ostensibly for KDE, although I routinely use it in XFCE.
In any case, it's very low-maintenance and the fastest way for me to check out a tree of images -- whether they're PR collections or a series of frames in a PNG stream. Helps a lot when I'm looking for an image and can't quite remember what I called the file.
I've tried some other image browsing apps, but this is the one I keep coming back to.
apps.kde.org/gwenview/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Gwenview #Images #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
Gwenview
GwenviewSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 13:
VideoLAN Client, a.k.a. VLC
Some distro maintainers apparently hate it. It is very customizable, which results in multiple and frequent UI changes.
But damn is it useful! I MUST have it.
I have found very few video formats that VLC won't play, at least if you install all the codecs (some of which are non-free, which is why you have to install them later -- but that's not VLC's fault).
It is my usual music player, and video player. I use it to check my newly-edited videos.
Somewhere in there is a way to edit metadata in files -- I know I've used it, though not in a long time.
And if I go to "Media -> Convert/Save", it can convert video formats, which can be a life-saver.
If my computer should shut down suddenly, my screenlogging script will produce a corrupted video. VLC can read it and convert into a corrected format that other programs can read. Handy!
videolan.org/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #VLC #VideoLan #MusicPlayer #VideoPlayer #Multimedia
VLC: Official site - Free multimedia solutions for all OS! - VideoLAN
www.videolan.orgElena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Stefano Marinelli reshared this.
VLC 2.9 Foundation
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Paolo Redaelli
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Paolo Redaelli • • •Well, Ubuntu Studio decided to abandon the Debian installation, requiring use of the sandboxed Snap distribution, which would be one of the top reasons I switched to AV Linux.
They were trying to push some other video player as default -- I've forgotten the name, now. It's been a few years.
EDIT: It was "Parole", perhaps because I was using XFCE..?
en.ubunlog.com/parole-the-xfce…
For example.
Parole the XFCE desktop environment media player
Darkcrizt (Ubunlog)Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 14:
FFMPEG
Under the hood, most open-source multimedia application software relies heavily on ffmpeg -- either the core libraries, or its scriptable command-line interface.
ffmpeg.org/
The man page is HUGE. Why there are so many GUI front-ends!
For daily use, I wrote a 75-line Python script that calls FFMPEG to record my whole virtual screen at 1 FPS to log my workdays.
It sends something like this to FFMPEG:
`/usr/bin/ffmpeg -report -loglevel quiet -f x11grab -draw_mouse 1 -framerate 1 -video_size 5760x2160 -i :0.0+0,0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -q:v 1 -s 5760x2160 -f matroska /worklog/capture sintel-2025-12-13_13-37-37.mkv`
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #FFMPEG #Multimedia #Video
FFmpeg
ffmpeg.orgSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 15:
Vokoscreen
I use my special script for daily screen recordings, but I started by using Vokoscreen, and I still use it when I want to make a more intentional screen recording (often at a faster rate like 10fps).
Vokoscreen gives me the flexibility to choose what part of the screen I want to record, frame rate, whether I want to record audio from microphone or output from the system. Which is what I need.
There is also OBS Studio, which I know some people love, and which has more options for live-streaming. But I don't do that. I record, and then I edit. So it's just more complexity than I need.
Upstream:
linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen…
But I just get the Debian package:
packages.debian.org/trixie/vok…
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Vokoscreen #Video #Multimedia
Debian -- Details of package vokoscreen-ng in trixie
packages.debian.orgSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 16:
Kdenlive
I'm pretty sure this is that rarity among modern software package names -- an *actual* acronym for (I think): "K Desktop Environment Non-Linear Interactive Video Editor".
Well, in any case, that's what it is, so it fits.
This is a pretty featureful video editor and it is my choice for editing everything from my daily screen logs to my animated project, "Lunatics!"
It's difficult to overstate the importance of this one to me.
The only notable flaws are that it does crash more often than I would like (but it recovers very well), and it might be on the slow side for rendering. Definitely good to use "proxy workflow" for high-definition projects. Which I do.
I'm using v22.12. I believe the most recent is v25.08 stable or v25.12 testing.
kdenlive.org/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Kdenlive #Video #VideoEditor
Kdenlive - Free and Open Source Video Editor
Kdenlive - Free and Open Source Video EditorSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 17:
Kate
Hang around Linux and FOSS circles long enough, and you will encounter the Editor Wars, in which the battle of the ancient superpowers of Vi versus Emacs continues to burn in the dulled flames of their Cold War.
But some of us like cocoa, with sprinkles!
✨
My favorite text editor is (horrors) a GUI application: Kate.
The "KDE Advanced Text Editor".
It's an excellent general purpose tool, whether you want to write in plain text, Markdown, HTML, CSS, or code for any of several dozen programming languages.
It lacks IDE-like features, such as test-runners or compilers, although you can add scripts to trigger from the "Tools" menu, so it could be used as an IDE with a little tinkering.
kate-editor.org/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #TextEditor #Kate
Kate - Get an Edge in Editing
Kate - Get an Edge in EditingSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 18:
MKVToolNix
This is a tool kit of utilities, including a GUI front end, for manipulating Matroska streaming multimedia files (usually "MKV" or "MKA" files).
The Matroska container format allows for multiple audio, video, and text streams, which means you can encode a video with multiple options for audio and subtitles (as well as alternate video tracks).
It also supports setting up "Chapter" marks.
A must-have for authoring and checking complex videos for streaming and download use.
mkvtoolnix.download/
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #MKVToolNix #MKV #Multimedia #Matroska
MKVToolNix news – Matroska tools for Linux/Unix and Windows
mkvtoolnix.downloadSpace Catitude 🚀
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 19:
PeerTube
PeerTube is the main federated video publishing platform, with an interface similar to YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc.
Videos are federated like other posts on the Fediverse, as are comments.
It supports many channels and playlists per user.
Discoverability is still a little weak, and the total volume is small compared to the corporate behemoths, but we do have Framasoft's "Sepia Search" service, and the PeerTube universe is growing.
Our PeerTube server is probably the 2nd most important web application I'm running on our server. This has become my primary publication point for both "Lunatics!" and "Film Freedom".
joinpeertube.org
sepiasearch.org/
Our own server:
tv.filmfreedom.net
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #PeerTube #Video #Publishing #Fediverse
What is PeerTube? | JoinPeerTube
JoinPeerTubeDeeAnn Little
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •JoannePaixa
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to JoannePaixa • • •@JoannePaixa
YunoHost is officially a derivative distribution of Debian, and now follows the Debian versioning system -- so "YunoHost 12" is based on "Debian 12", etc.
YunoHost is exclusively a server-oriented distribution. It has no desktop environment -- you interact via command line or web.
If I had to, I could get a desktop environment running on the same machine as YunoHost, but I can think of several reasons why that's a bad idea.
FWIW, I currently run AV Linux on my desktop workstation.
Alexis Bushnell
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • • •Was that a myth?
Space Catitude 🚀
in reply to Alexis Bushnell • • •@alexisbushnell
Well, I think the Russians part is a myth. 🤭
What happened was that, starting in v3 or so, the new management wanted to make it a default that the program would report metrics back to the project -- i.e. "phone home". The motivation being that this is helpful for development.
This is very upsetting to most open-source folks, who are pretty hostile about this kind of privacy issue.
However, it was easy to turn off, and also any version built by a distro team (e.g. the Debian package) would simply have this feature turned off by default. It's a build issue.
I suspect the project probably backed off, though I haven't followed up. I always used a version that did not have this issue, so it was never an issue for me (or Linux users in general).
On Windows, of course, the culture is very different and a lot of software has "phone home" features, so Audacity would not particularly stand out by having this.
Space Catitude 🚀
Unknown parent • • •@JoannePaixa
AV is derived from MX which is derived from Debian. It's a multimedia focused distribution.
It provides both Systemd and Sys5Init boot modes, uses XFCE as the default, relies on APT (.deb) packages, and provides support for a wide range of multimedia applications (some are AppImages that were converted to DEB packages).
No Snaps, which was my main complaint about Ubuntu Studio (which is otherwise quite good for multimedia, IMHO -- I used it for years).
Support is a bit thin -- I think it's mostly one guy. So I am a little concerned about future stability, but it's a good place for me now at least.
I don't really want to try to adapt Debian to my needs from scratch (then I would be the one guy!).
Space Catitude 🚀
Unknown parent • • •@JoannePaixa
I don't like the sandboxing.
I don't like the enforcement of system folder structure.
Linux Standard Base is great for Linux distributions -- and as the name suggests, it's a good *base*.
But for a production environment, there are good reasons to manage projects on separate high-level disk mounts. And if other people don't like that, that's fine -- but when they try to dictate that to me, that's an overstep. I won't put up with it.
And the sandboxing system makes a horrific mess out of the output from "df" with all the loopback devices. I literally had to get in the habit of filtering out loopback devices with grep to see the status of my real disk mounts.
I found this infuriating, and the Ubuntu commitment to Snaps was an irreconcilable difference for me. So I left for a distro that didn't do this to me.
AppImages don't do this stuff. I don't have experience with Flatpak. But I also don't really get what's wrong with just using APT.
Perhaps this makes me a curmudgeon?
🤷♂️
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Space Catitude 🚀 • •@Space Catitude 🚀 @JoannePaixa my guess is that using APT it's harder for people to sell you their proprietary apps
I'll just keep using APT from the distribution repository, thanks, and yell at those youngsters