Easy - VLC

Steam? Though I'm not sure I'm loving it... 22 years now... But it worked back then, it still works now, and it hasn't lost itself to enshitification. It even followed me to linux.

• vlc
• vim
• tmux
• neomutt
• FreeBSD / Linux
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Firefox
• KDE's Dolphin
• SwayWM
• pass

VLC

7-Zip

Steam

FireFox

Everything else deteriorates beyond recognition over time.

For some 20 years VLC has been installed on my computers though streaming has made it less used than before.

Steam: not been enshittified yet. Also one of the great forces behind Linux gaming being more mainstream.

Does the Linux kernel count? It's been 12 years since I tilted at a faulty network driver on windows 7 and just uninstalled it and did not look back. There has been many different distributions since (now I use arch btw) but the kernel is the same.

VLC maybe 20 years. How long has it even been around?

GIMP 10+ years for sure.

Winamp. It really whips the llama’s ass. (Edit fixed)

• 7zip
• Firefox
• LibreOffice
• Various Linux distros, but mostly Ubuntu variants and Raspbian
• Cura
• OpenVPN
• Blender
• Gimp
• Windows - sorry everyone, it just works, but I stopped at 10.
• VLC
• Virtual Clone Drive

I have no fucking clue why this thing is still running. Why do we even make new gpus?

Many. The oldest and most popular ones are maybe

vi
bash
putty
Firefox
Notepad++
Irfanview
Vlc
OBS

>= 33 years

• Unix
• C
• the shell and commands like cd, ls, find, xarg, cp, mv, ln, df, du

>= 32 years

• vi/vim
• LaTeX
• tar

>= 28 years

• Emacs
• awk, bash
• C++
• Linux

>= 26 years

• Python & Numerical Python
• screen and tmux
• rsync
• ssh
• InkScape

>= 20 years

• git
• literate programming tools

>= 17 years

• Thunderbird & forks
• Debian & Ubuntu
• GNOME

>= 15 years

• MeeGo, Maemo, Sailfish & siblings
• Lisps (Clojure, Guile, Racket)

>= 11 years

• tiling WMs (i3)
• Arch (as second system)

what I use now and will very, very likely still use in 10 years

• Rust
• Guix
• Gollum wiki
• Gemini protocol

InkScape.

I don't fully know why but vector graphics just work for me in a way that pixel graphics don't. I love fiddling with vectors.

Is it stupid to say Linux

VLC for video MediaMonkey for audio

Neither have ever failed me unless the files themselves have errors, then that's beyond their control

Only ten years?

KDE, better then ever.

Sumatra PDF Reader is no-frills and distraction free. Even on my ancient PC, it's fast as heck. I have rather rudely installed it on other people's PCs, because their slow all-singing all-dancing PDF readers drove me up the wall.

RawTherapee converts "RAW" files from digital cameras to friendlier image formats, and pretty often RawTherapee's edit is all I need. It's feature packed, it can do film simulations, image de-noising, tone-mapping, and now it has the ability to do some local adjustments, too. I have several "RAW" converters, including a commercial one, but I keep coming back to RawTherapee as the mainstay, the most productive for me.

I've got foobar2000 set up as a pretty plain-looking, non-distracting music player. It's got great library features, it has a wildly customizable interface, it's got a plugin architecture to extend its abilities in many ways. It has stayed on my PC for years because of its quiet competence, always serving without demanding my time or attention.

I used to keep my password file and other confidential stuff inside a TrueCrypt virtual volume. Now I use the successor, VeraCrypt. Both have always worked flawlessly; in fact, TrueCrypt is way smaller and I'm not aware of any security issues with it, it's just not actively developed anymore.

VLC

Age of Empires 2, my true love xoxoxo

vim mutt tmux curl bash ksh WindowMaker Firefox OpenBSD Debian Krita Inkscape ffmpeg VLC git

Linux.

Linux, Firefox, Thunderbird, vi/vim, VLC, Mutt (only occasionally), Irssi

KiCAD for 10 years now. Leaps and bounds better than then!

Steam 15 years or so

VLC since windows XP

Firefox since then also

Arduino for quick things for 12 years about

Discord since 2016 (and now looking to change)

Darkstone (1999) - Good game for a Diablo clone.

Debian-flavored Linux - My only complaints are hardware compatibility-related, and that is primarily because Nvidia and Intel both suck Microsoft's floppy disk.

Krita, Gimp, Blender - Never needed another art program. Adobe can eat my paintbrush.

LibreOffice - I would literally have this over MSOffice any and every day of the week.

VLC - It just frickin' works. And it's good at its job. It plays anything!

SSH.

Well I haven't been using Newpipe for ten years... Maybe Skyrim...no, I haven't played that in years... Well it seems my list is gonna be short:

VLC
GIMP
7zip

• Firefox (now using Waterfox), I started using when it was still Mosaic and no idea it would one day become Mozilla Firefox..
• LibreOffice.
• In a couple years, maybe three, I'll be on Mint for 10 years and, yep, I do like it. And I certainly love many GNU apps that came with my distro: they're lightweight, focused and so incredibly useful <3
• I used to love Mac OS (previous to Linux, since the early 80s I had been an Apple user) and many small third party apps. But I moved away from Apple and have no desire to go back.

Steam

Firefox

VLC

Winamp

Notepad++

7-Zip, Steam, Firefox

Plex+Sonarr+Radarr. Netflix raising subscription rates again? Yarrr, not my concern. Studios locking away their content behind exclusivity agreements? Yarrr. "This program is not available in your country"? YARRR!

VLC, notepad++

WinRAR. And I paid for it.

Not quite 10 years but will be by 2029:

• Blender - idc what anyone says about it. It's the most user friendly that it's ever been

Firefox (including recent forks) Antennapod Linux Cyanogen mod / LineageOS Thunderbird K9 Mail GIMP Inkscape Steam DOTA2 (bots only) apt Debian

Probably many more...

SSH in first place. No explanation needed.

But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.

I dread the day where I will be forced to "progress" to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.

Skyrim, firefox, blender, libre office, heroes of might and magic 3

Linux, vim, zfs

AntennaPod on my android. An open source podcast player with no ads that has all the features I need to enjoy podcasts.

Damn Small Media Player. Loads instantly. Plays mp3s. Takes up 850 KB on my hard drive and ~15 MB RAM while playing a song in a large playlist. Now that's what I call software.

Factorio

On Windows machines probably since more than 20 years: TotalCommander

Wish they would offer a linux port. (Though Krusader is quite a good replacement.)

OurGroceries.

The year was 2010, and the iPhone was not yet available where I lived. I could have bought one, and I could have activated service with it, but I would never be able to use it at home or anywhere around home. So it would have been pointless. I wanted one. Android was cool, but it wasn't really what I wanted. Wife needed a new phone, and our carrier had a deal. Two Android phones for $100, and each came with a $20 Android Market (what Google Play Store was called then) gift card. So yeah, we took that deal. The phones were ass, but I was able to put CyanogenMod (now called Lineage) on them and make them a little better.

We wanted a grocery app, and we discovered an app called OurGroceries. Free with ads, or $5 to remove the little banner at the bottom. Even without paying, it offered synced grocery lists and even Web access. As in, my wife is at the store and I'm on the computer, I just hit the bookmark and add something to the list, she sees it in a second or two (provided she has signal or WiFi). We both paid. The app was useful and it was nice.

When I got an iPhone, I immediately paid the $5 again. They since changed it to where only ONE person on the sync account needs to pay. That is to say, if you and five family members all download it, all six of you get ads. But if ONE person connected to the sync account pays, the paid status syncs and nobody has ads. That said, I'm not mad because $10 of the $15 I've paid wasn't even mine to start with, it was on a gift card. It's been 16 years, and we still use it.

Is it the best grocery app? I think it still ranks highly. Personally I think the one in Paprika is a little better. Our first requirement is that it must support iPhone, Android (my wife still uses Android), and computer. Paprika checks those boxes — so does Google Keep, which is another good option (that is also free!). Apple has shopping list support in Notes, and our computers are Macs, so that works, but Apple Notes doesn't really work on Android. It actually does, I think, through the browser (since my wife has an Apple account, on the Mac and on her iPad), but it's not as robust if you actually have an iPhone. Any note taking app should work, but the sync won't be there.

So if you don't want to pay, Google Keep should be your first stop. If you don't like Google for privacy or whatever reason, you'll probably have to pay. OurGroceries is either a single developer or a small team, and they're independent, and deserve at least the $5 they're asking for a whole family to use their app indefinitely (as long as they keep the server up — I hope, should they ever decide to take their server down, they allow a self-hosted option). If you want more features, Paprika is definitely a solid choice, but you'll want to wait for a sale. Normally it's like $10 on phones and $20 on computers or something. But it's actually not a shopping list app. It's a recipe manager that has a shopping list and a pantry inventory. And a couple other things. (OurGroceries also has a recipe manager, but it's not great, it's really just another kind of shopping list that can be copied into an actual shopping list — you can have multiple.)

Warcraft III

LYX
It combines the advantages of L^A^TEX with the ease of use of LibreOffice.

GIMP
It has some rough edges (fewer than it used to), but it's all I need for editing my photos.

darktable
A fully capable Adobe Lightroom alternative

cmus
A TUI music player that plays music. Nothing else.

And of course VLC and Firefox, which aren't just the best FOSS programs for their use case, but the best, period.

Too many OSS tools to really be able to mention them all. Thank you to so many GNU/Linus, OpenBSD, BSD*, and other developers!

I'll mention these:

• LaTeX
• Jabref

Without TeX I'd go insane writing technical and scientific documents. You've saved me thousands of hours of work!

Oh, and my current time waster game: Kohan: Immortal Sovreigns.

I've used ls, cat, echo, cd, mkdir, mv, cp, rm, & ssh pretty much every day I've touched a computer since some time near the end of the twentieth century. Honorable mention to sudo, find, rename, ffmpeg, Gimp, & VLC. If you count ROMs for games, the list gets into the deeper past, though I don't use them as often. I guess I still need to get around a few Windows/DOS machines, so DIR and (I don't love DIR) CD are is probably the absolute oldest when at the keyboard, but it's technically a different thing for different systems even though it does the same task.

As for loving it, I love when shit just works and I love the command line.

I've been using this app on my android forever called J4T it's a 4 track recorder. Love it. Might not count but I think it does.

VLC, IDM, Krita, Sharex

Blender.

10 years ago it was scarcely believable that a FOSS package for such a niche purpose could be so fucking good. And it got better in the meantime. If Blender had existed when I was a kid I would have probably spent every waking hour creating stuff with it. As an adult, I get limited time to do that, but I appreciate that it exists.

Most of 'em. Here are some highlights.

• vi/vim. The one true text editor
• thunderbird. Standard email client
• musicbee. Absolutely the BEST audio player/organizer anywhere. Sadly, not available on Linux
• potplayer. Just a simple, high quality video player
• LibreOffice. Used to be almost as good as MS. Now it is far better.
• FIrefox, sort of. I've lately switched to Waterfox, which is from the same code base as ff.

7zip, notepad++, ScreenShotAssistant, git

Greenshot, although MS snipping tool has a cool OCR that can grab text from screenshots which is really cool so I use both at work.

7zip, VLC, MS PowerToys, KeepassX, Firefox, been using those for a long time now.

Ah, OneNote, been using that for work since I was in University, around 2005ish. Unfortunately they stopped development on the old version, made a shit mobile version which also seems to have stalled, so not sure if it's going to get any future updates. But it's still good. If people have good alternatives please let me know.

Switched to being a full-time Linux user around 2005, still love it ...

Used AwesomeWM for a long time but a few years ago I switched to an even more minimalist WM a friend of mine is developing ... still love it despite some bugs ...

Tried a variety of IDEs but always ended up with Emacs ...

And, last but not least, I've been developing my own software for music composition and performance for more than 10 years now, and use it every day ... can't say it's the same because it always changes, but I use it practically every day :)

WINAMP WINAMP WINAMP

It really whips the llama's ass

I like Paint.NET. It's easy to use for simple image edits.

Krita (a digital painting and Photoshop alternative). I've been enjoying using it for probably 10 years now, and it's only continued to steadily improve. Fantastic program.

gcc

Linux.

Im coming up on 15 years of being a Linux user. From playing around/tinkering to leading to my first Job to now working as a Linux Sysadmin for a couple of years.

XNview. This was a screen capture & basic editing tool I started using in like the Windows95 era. Yes, the latest couple of version of Windows also do this, but I've got the hotkeys memorized at this point.

I reckon I should point out that I'm transitioning to Linux, so I rarely use it anymore. But we had a helluva run together.

For that long? There are only a few left:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird (not loving it, but it is ok)
• 7zip
• My own app for sorting and moving files
• My own password manager

If I include games then:

• OpenTTD
• Quake III Arena (for LAN parties)

There were more that I loved, but I have stopped using them a month ago. (Because I switched to Linux):

• MusicBee
• FastStone Image Viewer
• MPC-HC + madVR
• StrokesPlus
• Q-Dir
• Malwarebytes Firewall Control
• Input Director

mIRC (or for you guys, any IRC client). Not as vibrent as in the old days and some missing functions in comparison to modern clients such as Discord and many more.

Kubuntu & it's default KDE apps. LibreOffice VLC CherryTree Firefox Thunderbird Gimp Kid3 Filelight UNetbootin Krename

Kodi/XBMC - a little over 20 years ago I jailbroke my old X-Box gen 1 and after about a week I installed XBMC (X-Box Media Center), which was about 2 years old. I just was looking for a way to save space because I could fit a whole season of a show as AVIs on a single burned DVD and XBMC could be used to play it. 20 years and a name change later it’s still my TV front end. I’ve moved from a jailbroke X-Box to a Linux based media center PC but I still automatically boot to Kodi which plays anything I throw at it, keeps track of all the shows and movies I’ve watched, is front end for playing retro games and spawns Steam if I needed all off MCE remote and a Xbox controller to game with.

Bettertouchtool

I can’t use a Mac without it. Just read the website, it does damn near everything, and just as good as Apple would in most cases.

But if I had to describe it (poorly) it remaps gestures on nearly any input device, including the stream deck and many Logitech devices (MxMaster!). The custom gesture support is linear, meaning that the animations track with your fingers/input rather than just pop onto place (like how you can “peek” into Mission Control” and the old launchpad with trackpad gestures).

KDE.

It's the only one I have used more than 10 years and loved the entire time. Everything else has been replaced, not loved or not used for 10 years.

Definitely MediaMonkey, though I’ve had it for 16 years instead of 10 after paying $40 for a lifetime license. The license format changed once and I’ve misplaced my key a couple of times, but their support has always been great at getting me back on track.

Internet Explorer

WinAMP

KeepassXC

Openstreetmap and all the things based on it

Irfanview

vim/neovim

WinRAR. Probably over 20 years by now.

I’m a big fan of Smooth Video Project (SVP) for video interpolation: https://www.svp-team.com/

Say what you will about high frame rate video/animation, I paid like $10 for it in 2014 and it’s still getting updates!

Totalcommander.

Even went so far as to get a licence.

OpenLDAP. Have been running that as the backend of several of my services since 2015.

I use it for authentication/authorization, either directly or via Authelia, as well as the backend storage for my DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, email servers, and a few internal / self-built applications. I even registered an official IANA PEN so my custom LDAP schema are properly implemented. It's setup with a 4-way multi-master replication strategy and highly available via two load balancers in different data centers (plus one locally).

Runner up is Nginx as I've been running it for just as long or a bit longer, and it also underpins most of my services in some way (at least as the frontend proxy/WAF).

Skyrim

The switch from Premiere Pro to Davinci Resolve was happiness every step of the way. Current workplace uses premiere pro… it’s like a time capsule. Barely any changes in 7 years and still subscription.

termux

Guitar Pro. Ableton. Microsoft Excel.

I don't think any software I regularly used has changed since 2016( lemmy being an obvious exception. Rip reddit). Maybe home assistant. Not sure when that started. Most used: Obviously gnu+Linux+gnome. Gimp, beersmith, sabnzdb, deluge, plex. Vscode, Firefox. I'm sure many others

Reaper (DAW)

Age of Empires 1 is old enough, but does one "use" it?

It's got a unique co-op feature where you actally control the same people and can divide tasks (not like other RTS where you can play in a team but still need to do everything yourself, with any resource sharing being a manual (or even taxed) action in a menu somewhere), so my gf and I are sticking with this game. I think it's the only game we've been playing consistently for our 10 years together. Crap, did I say playing? I meant using! It's a relationship tool. Try it today! xD

Any terminal emulator, but I prefer the suckless terminal. After that I guess zsh and neovim.

Gimp

Papyrus on my android. It's not even in the playstore anymore, but i keep -and backup- apk's. It's just the simplest notes app, without any markup. It saves as simple text files.

I just open it, jot something down, and leave it. Saves automatically. It might be way more than 10 years even, 15 plus years?

Had to say goodbye because of leaving Windows but Bulk Rename Utility was a tool that never let me down.

foobar2000 - My primary music player since 2012

jasc paintshop pro 7.0

xnview

vim

fvwm

seamonkey

midnight commander

Unpopular opinion here: YouTube

Note: Been using it through my Brave browser and also without any account. Hence, why I'm still loving it

I still love Illustrator and Fusion360. I've been using AI since 1995! When F360 came out solidworks was at its lowest for reliability and I was constantly losing work. They cost money but the revenue both provide me makes those costs a rounding error at most.

I'd probably say Steam or VLC player.

Blender. It's been almost 20 years now since I started working with it, and the time I spent learning it was worth every minute. It is an incredibly powerful tool.

QGIS
It just keeps getting better

It was Trello until December. Enshitification.

7zip or Steam now

There are plenty of answers in this thread that lists applications that have kept being updated over the years, which I don't know if it is a valid answer, it depends on the definition of the question, and how you interpret the software of Theseus.

I am going to be semi pedantic, no binary updates but config updates and compabillity layers are ok.

I still play Unreal Tournament 2004, I have three copies, one on CD, one on Steam and one on GOG, it is an awesome game, that even has an official native Linux version with an installer on the CD.

It is fantastically fun, well balanced and just amazing.

You have to edit the config files to support modern resolutions, and make it connect to the community master server, but that is a one time change and then you can just start blasting.

The game is available on Archive.org.

AdGuard lifetime membership in 2017 for Android.

Best. App. Ever.

Only one I can think of that hasn't already been mentioned: rsync

Blender3D. My first use of Blender was... I think... Version 2.49b. The UI was... Quite something back then.

Sublime Text. Used it to write web a year or two before VS Code was released (2015). I never started with VS Code because of that and still use Sublime Text for anything that does not require an IDE.

I wish my answer was wobbly windows. But I'll go with Emacs and eclipse.

Tweakybeat for the iPhone. One of the first music apps to come out on iOS. I bought it before I had an iPhone - to play with on the test phones at work.
It’s a monophonic sequencer with a single noise source which can be tweaked to make drums, beeps, swoops and gurgles. Such fun and always go back to it for a quick bleep session ever so often

that one [piece of] software that you are using

Zero-k, the successor to the Total Annihilation game from 1998.

I used emacs today, in bash, with a host of other commands like xargs and sort. None of it was fucking Systemd related, like systemctl, nor raging because network manager took a nap on my server, so it was a great day.

Scrivener

Firefox, probably tmux.

I know it's a Google product! But I've been using the android Gboard keyboard on my phone for about as long as android phones have been a thing. The slide typing has always been great. I've tried many other keyboards because, y'know, Google, but I've not found any as good.

VLC

Firefox

WINISD (more of a love hate relationship)

I know you say "that one" , but there are several that are kind of tied, that I use every day.

• Firefox --> but since last year, the Librewolf fork.
• emacs
• Thunderbird
• LibreOffice Calc

Minecraft, YouTube (now I use it through FreeTube)

• winrar
• truecrypt

there's probably more, but most of it is pretty common these days or has already been mentioned.

Transmit

XnView MP - cross-platform image viewer and organizer that I love for it batch convert tool. Besides many work tasks that required simple leveling or watermarking automation, I used it to make my couple of underpowered and lowres e-ink books show me manga in the best possible way. I chained up grayscale, rotation to portrait if landscape, posterisation, cutting white borders and resizing the result to the book's screen, the entire Gutz or Berserk or Uzumaki processed in one go and saved to another folder keeping the structure intact. This way I sprinted through so many works I probably outdid my real wage in the month I started, calculating the price of each tome in Eastern Europe.

TotalCMD - Win darling that I rarely ever use now, but it's the first thing I think of (and miss on Linux) when I need batch renaming of files. Find&replace, adding counting numbers, using regular expressions (while looking them up each time, lol). It says a lot when I come to task and think of it in a logic that this exact tool allowed me to use.

AIMP - surprise-surprise, another batch editing tool that primarily a music player, and also Win only. It is the slickest way I found to mass convert files to other formar via a context menu item, and it also provides a tool to mass edit metadata of music files, with a pretty flexible data rearranging patterns, e.g. I could fill a blank metadata table sourcing from it's name deftones_-_shove-it.mp3 and other kinds of manipulation.

I just really like that some programs provide nice GUIs for reliable automatisation of repetitive tasks, that you don't need to write macros over programs instead. The closest I felt like that from a corporate software is MS Office Word's Find&Replace in older editions, where you could use regexp, target specific styles and tags, etc, but it still felt too limiting and dumbed down, so for some context aware replacement tasks I wrote macros and was scaredly considering going to either edit their lunatic XMLs on the code level or learning the hell of VBA scripting if I'd have time and zero self-respect. The two only persons I know who wrote some VBAs in my circle actively encouraged me not to 🤪

Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet, Zim Wiki. Lacks some of the more modern features in a notes app, but I think that’s one of its strong points.

I moved to linux but if there are any folks still foolish enough to be on windows then portable apps is huge. Get a new machine and just move the folder over and your good to go. I really with either appman could get a gui going like it or a gui project for appimages would use appman as a repo base.

Haven't seen mentioned yet:

PDFgear, does all the things to PDFs and it's free.

XYplorer file manager for windows

VNC VLC Notepad

ePSXe is still awesome for PS1 games, even as our computers get more bloated and shittier.

Caustic 3 on my mobile.

I've still not found a better android DAW. (Anyone have suggestions? )

I have a manjaro install that old. Im holding out to see what they do with themselves before I switch that laptop to something else

I'm still playing Civ2 from time to time. And sometimes Minesweeper

StartAllBack - classic start menu in windows

Well till my Windows 10 machine died, it was Reason. Reason is an all in one DAW. Program, record, mix and master with super tactile graphics and an intuitive layout. Been two years without. I miss it.

Other than pc games of that vintage I don’t think there is a single piece of software I enjoy using these days, they all hog all the ram and fill your screen with login prompts and popups about how useless AI features can further ruin your day.

Sketch, a Mac UI design app similar to Adobe XD and Figma, but you own the fucking app and can keep using a 10 year old license if you don’t need major version updates like me.

DisplayFusion for monitor backgrounds. Bought a license like 15+ years ago and it's still getting updates 🕺

All the apps using QT, so therefore QT.

Lighter than KDE ( which I used back 'round the turn of the millenium ), & sane.

_ /\ _