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What HN commenters recommend, ranked by distinct recommenders. Under each: what people praise most and the most common caveat, or the strongest quote where there is no summary yet.
- 1.Loved for Easier than LaTeX, Templated PDF generation · Caveat Ecosystem gaps
- 2.Loved for Real daily work, Linux desktop · Caveat Dated, clunky UI
- 3.Loved for Hiking and cycling, Offline maps · Caveat Search
- 4.Loved for Speed, Cheap hosting · Caveat Template syntax
- 5.Loved for Language learning, Retention · Caveat Clunky UX
- 6.Loved for Main app source, Trust and vetting · Caveat Client UI
- 7.Loved for Service and container management, Sandboxing · Caveat Complexity
- 8.Loved for GDScript, Open source · Caveat C# second-class
- 9.Loved for AI pairing, Trusted checking · Caveat Kernel trust
- 10.Loved for Accessible power, Hard to replace · Caveat Declining quality
- 11.Loved for Power-user features, Hiking and topo · Caveat Confusing UI
- 12.Loved for Daily driving, Improves over time · Caveat Needs supervision
- 13.Loved for Business & POI search, Street View · Caveat Poor routing
- 14.Loved for Game library, Beginner friendly · Caveat Tight limits
- 15.Loved for Library organization, Reading and annotation · Caveat BibTeX interop
- 16.Loved for Fewer Wayland issues, Stability · Caveat Nouveau driver
- 17.Loved for Offline use, Hiking and walking · Caveat Governance concerns
- 18.Loved for Stability, Multi-monitor scaling · Caveat Breaks workflows
- 19.Loved for Low barrier, Fun quests · Caveat No edit history
- 20.Loved for Technical computation, Notebooks & visuals · Caveat Proprietary
- 21.Loved for Plugin ecosystem, Easy simple sites · Caveat Plugin security
- 22.Loved for Customization, Long-term favorite · Caveat Narrow width
- 23.Loved for Precise specification, Finds subtle bugs · Caveat Spec-code drift
- 24.Loved for Many client devices, Low latency · Caveat Needs wired network
- 25.Loved for De-Googled Android, Direct from developers · Caveat Usability
- 26.Loved for No Google account, Play Store access · Caveat Anonymous accounts
- 27.Loved for Research value, Data views · Caveat Doxxing risk
- 28.Loved for DRM-free installers, Lasting ownership · Caveat Online co-op
- 29.Loved for Linux gaming, Old software · Caveat Tricky setup
- 30.Loved for Turn-by-turn navigation, Beats Google locally · Caveat Weak POI data
- 31.Loved for Long-term reliability, Original tool · Caveat Launch handling
- 32.Loved for Card privacy, Fallback availability · Caveat Fees
- 33.Loved for Typesetting quality, Academic standard · Caveat Finicky and brittle
- 34.Loved for Works with AI agents, Binary decompilation · Caveat Decompiler reliability
- 35.Loved for Easy checkout, Wide acceptance · Caveat Little in-store gain
- 36.Loved for Teaching kids, Career gateway · Caveat Large-project lag
- 37.Loved for Weather app backend, Historical data · Caveat Timeouts
- 38.Loved for LLM-friendly, Markdown docs · Caveat Ugly rendering
- 39.Loved for Snapshots, Data features · Caveat Data corruption
- 40.Loved for Birdsong recognition, Habitual use · Caveat Shy singers
- 41.Loved for Multi-machine setup, Replaces scripts · Caveat Learning curve
- 42.Loved for Rust integration, Works with LLMs · Caveat Custom syntax
- 43.Loved for Rain accuracy, Interface design · Caveat Discontinued
- 44.Loved for Valuable public service, Recovering lost content · Caveat Failed captures
- 45.Loved for Daily driver, Hotkey integration · Caveat Wayland support
- 46.Loved for Astral toolchain fit, Better type checking · Caveat Gradual typing
- 47.Loved for Saves time, No car needed · Caveat Shopper care
- 48.Loved for Office alternative, Lighter than LibreOffice · Caveat Openness disputes
- 49.Loved for Mobile and PWA, Fast time controls · Caveat Missing variants
- 50.Loved for LLM integration, Data tooling · Caveat Output placement
- 51.Loved for Worth paying for, Habit forming · Caveat Can get boring
- 52.Loved for DNS validation, Self-hosted certs · Caveat ZeroSSL default
- 53.Loved for Modern toolchain fit, LLM code guardrail · Caveat No plugin support
- 54.Loved for Free Synergy alternative, Cross-platform · Caveat No trackpad support
- 55.Loved for Live environment, Image-based deployment · Caveat Memory use
- 56.Loved for Server management, Systemd integration · Caveat RAID disk swaps
- 57.Loved for Enjoyable to use, Obsidian plugin · Caveat Multiple canvases
- 58.Loved for Paywall access, Quick redirects · Caveat Reliability
- 59.Loved for Heavy document work, Familiarity · Caveat Lock-in
- 60.Stripe's API is great, especially the pre-built checkout and the ability to attach any metadata to charges.
- 61.QGIS is great. One of the truly good open source projects.
- 62.a pay-once use forever app (pushover), that works great on my phone
- 63.Bevy has an extremely impressive voxel collision system
- 64.
- 65.I've switched to D2Lang for its easier syntax and the fact Mermaid is hard pushing AI.
- 66.I use the third-party app Harmonic to browse HN and it has a dark mode. It's quite nice, actually.
- 67.I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible
- 68.The first thing I recommend everyone using is devcontainers
- 69.try https://bearblog.dev (no connection, just appreciate Herman’s work).
- 70.It's totally helpful and useful, and as a bonus, has an excellent and intuitive display
- 71.I have been using Quint for some time now, both for verification of my designs via simulation and model checking
- 72.I used this to check if I could see today's eclipse in Barcelona from my apartment buildings roof. Worked pretty well.
- 73.I switched to https://bento.page/ when it showed up here on HN and that’s been much more accurate
- 74.I highly recommend running your tests through Miri (cargo miri nextest) and seeing what spills out.
- 75.All around, for everything, I cannot recommend the Chris Titus (and friends) WinUtil enough
- 76.I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab app I use on macOS.
- 77.Challenging game for sure, but very, very rewarding.
- 78.Every one of my new projects uses Renovate. Not having to worry about having to check dependencies, manually bump them, etc. is a great thing
- 79.Ice (might be sketchy now; had an ownership change): Lack of menu bar overflow on MacOS is awful.
- 80.I like CUE a lot. We use it pretty heavily for schema enforcement of CRDs.
- 81.I find NetHack more enjoyable to play because it has real character/soul/heart.
- 82.that's what I use personally for local PDF generation
- 83.If you run an Apple HomeKit stack and don’t need all the other stuff HA offers, I recommend checking out https://homebridge.io
- 84.I use Google Translate quite a lot and it's pretty good even for obscure languages.
- 85.Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also.
- 86.I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard.
- 87.So I am glad to see the momentum, the cleanups, and most of all, the continued dedication
- 88.Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight
- 89.I ditched reCaptcha and switched to Cloudflare Turnstile recently. It’s been a lot more effective.
- 90.numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work
- 91.check out gnu stow for this! i place my config files in ~/dots, mirroring the structure as if it were my home directory, and gnu stow can symlink everything
- 92.rustdesk[0] works pretty well for casual use despite wayland support being labelled experimental
- 93.boringBar addressing the "show me what is in this Space" problem is exactly right.
- 94.This is the most useful calculator.. bit shifts..radix conversations...
- 95.Zola[1] is less well-known, but it's easy to install and fast.
- 96.MTurk was pure magic if you knew how to use it to its full potential.
- 97.Privacy.com won that dispute and I got that money back.
- 98.Quartz for converting obsidian-generated .md files into static websites
- 99.no other software exists with such easy-to-use tools for importing GPS tracks, creating custom points, and exporting KMZ files
- 100.Eslint runs as a post-tool use hook on edit and write, so each file an agent writes gets immediate feedback and fixes.
- 101.My go-to for spinning up a site has been Jekyll + Bootstrap with the occasional bit of React for well over 10 years now.
- 102.I Love this project, works on Mac, Linux & Windows!
- 103.LLD would work fine for the whole tree, and did previously, but is much much slower than mold which is why we switched to mold.
- 104.and redbean (redbean.dev - although the tls certs are expired and it seems scrubbed off of github)
- 105.recently switched to Commit Mono [0]. It hits all the right spots for me, is customizable, and does smart kerning which is neat.
- 106.I use this app fairly regularly to locate public toilets
- 107.This is awesome! Thank you so much for great work! I love it
- 108.I use amphetamine [1] (free on the app store). It has configurable timeouts with optional warnings/notifications
- 109.
- 110.This is a good example of human-agent teaming tbh. Nice one.
- 111.For pixel art games, I personally recommend GameMaker.
- 112.Try wordcraft: https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft
- 113.I loved Google Wave. The first time I used it, I said out loud, "Wow, this really has possibilities."
- 114.I wouldn't dismiss Denuvo. It is intended for a particular use case, which is games where a week or more delay between the release of a game and the appearance of a crack would make a meaningful difference.
- 115.Copybara is one of those things that you should have set up yesterday.
- 116.
- 117.Now, is it nutty that we're using TypeScript for JSON validation? A little. But it's extremely powerful.
- 118.It also has something critical that Stripe does not: proper customer service.
- 119.The one thing that did change anything was giving the agent a type checker. It ran mypy on nearly every change, and no type errors got through.
- 120.I've been very happy with it, and wish I'd installed it years earlier than I did.
- 121.I love Octave, it's one of my favourite languages.
- 122.I love this. I wanted the disk noise, and I got it.
- 123.And also use SPICE in the LTSpice incarnation; I should give ngspice a spin one of these days.
- 124.Circuitjs https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html allows you to edit components live unlike spice simulators
- 125.I use it for privacy and security. I pay maybe 1% to convert it, and since it's a better currency than fiat, I don't think that's too steep.
- 126.Hevy existed before gen AI took the world by storm and it's still being actively maintained, highly recommend checking it out
- 127.It's so good (and beautiful) that even though I use iPhone as primary device, I receive most of my notifications on android
- 128.It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device.
- 129.I am still glad that children are playing Minecraft.
- 130.In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments
- 131.QMK/ZMK firmware so you can add stuff like mod-taps and whatnot
- 132.I use O&O ShutUp10++ to completely get rid of OneDrive and other annoying Microsoft tools
- 133.Karabiner: MacOS's keyboard mapping is incredibly underpowered.
- 134.There's also SteerMouse, which I use to configure my MX Master settings.
- 135.It fires up Aqua Voice and begins transcribing. My fingers appreciate the break from typing.
- 136.Bought MonoLisa back in 2022, never even considered switching coding typeface since.
- 137.I found it very useful and impressive, also its mostly free.
- 138.Yosys is a super lightweight open-source FPGA toolchain that really easy to get up and running.
- 139.Linux has Waydroid so Android apps can be run on Linux at full speed without emulation.
- 140.It would be nice to use something like SOPS[1] + age right from the start
- 141.It's a really good way to share check definitions between local development and CI
- 142.I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever.
- 143.I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data
- 144.Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back.
- 145.Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great!
- 146.a tutor so you have a roadmap and more motivation. I found mine on italki.
- 147.HyperCard gave you a somewhat natural language, instant persistent database and UI builder, and objects (stack, card, field ...) and messages.
- 148.What I can highly recommend is the (free) RetroArch app for AppleTV.
- 149.I use bellard.org/jslinux to test compilation of strange code sometimes
- 150.I really respect OpenFGA & team behind it, I used it in multiple projects and it completely eliminate the AuthZ from our code.
- 151.I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen.
- 152.I will also shout out monodraw as a really nice little application for building generic ASCII diagrams
- 153.I’ve started donating monthly to Accrescent instead, download as many apps as I can from there
- 154.I use this on NixOS[0] with the Matrix digital rain animation and enjoy it way too much :)
- 155.I remember enjoying https://meldmerge.org/ in the past for interactive visual file merging.
- 156.I migrated to from ISC to Kea in OPNSense and it was relatively painless, and it's been working well since.
- 157.I love using [difftastic] for my diffing tool to get context aware diffs.
- 158.if you want all the bells and whistles on a platter: Squarespace, Wix, etc.
- 159.Instapaper has excellent text-to-speech with their Premium subscription.
- 160.I don't know the internals of Kafka, RabbitMQ, or PostgreSQL. I just know how to use them. And yet they work fine.
- 161.Am I in the minority for thinking ScreenStudio is actually worth the money?
- 162.Removing Xorg while Nvidia users make up the majority is insane.
- 163.I have bought Berkeley Mono back in the day, and I use it everywhere, everyday.
- 164.I moved to Windy and I just look at the weather radar
- 165.You could add support also for the Woxi[1][2] for most of the symbolic math, also should be way faster
- 166.It’s extremely effective and I highly recommend it.
- 167.Not sure why you'd use this sketchy vibecoded proprietary app over the same thing that's open source and existed for a while
- 168.it plays GTA V and RDR2 almost perfectly, using FEX nonetheless
- 169.Thanks to Erin for such a useful piece of software!
- 170.I love systemd timers! I've slowly moved all of my ansible-deployed cron jobs to timers
- 171.If you don't know the Taler project, it's a very good idea as an alternative to crypto
- 172.DoorDash has a ton of grocery delivery, it's the only one i use for that now because instacart has a payments bug.
- 173.I choose Grab mainly because I always have installed for GrabPay payments.
- 174.I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.
- 175.i use google family link - which allows me to limit any apps/websites my child could view.
- 176.VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day
- 177.Namecheap is the easy go-to for me today. Their support is extremely good.
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