Free Software

Software is more consumer-friendly when it has a free and open-source software license (not to be confused with freeware). This is because the code is freely available to audit by anyone knowledgeable, as well as create their own fork if they want to modify the original program.

Benefits of free and open source software over proprietary software:

• More software: This form of licensing allows developers to contribute to, use, and create copies of each other's code which often leads to more software and more choice on which software the user wants to use.
• Monetarily free: Most times this software is monetarily free. But developers still have the right to sell distributions of their software even if the code is freely available.
• No ads: 99% of the time this software doesn't contain ads because ads don't usually fit in the ethics and funding models of the organizations and individuals creating free and open source software.
• No spyware: The open nature of this software means there is no where to hide spyware.

Some of the various useful free and open source licensed software:

• Element is an instant messaging client for the Matrix protocol.
• WebCord is a Discord client with many client-side privacy features.

• Brave is a web browser with many built-in features such as ad-block, enhanced privacy, device sync, and more.
• FreeTube is a privacy-oriented YouTube browser that allows you to download audio and videos as well as keep locally-saved playlists and subscriptions without depending on YouTube's mercy for your account.

• Audacity is a digital audio editor and recording application.
• Ardour is a DAW.

• GIMP is a raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
• Inkscape is a vector graphics editor for Linux, Windows and macOS. It offers a rich set of features and is widely used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagramming and flowcharting.

• Shotcut is a cross-platform video, audio, and image editing program.
• MPC-HC is a compact, lightweight, and customizable media player for Microsoft Windows.
• MPV is an advanced customizable media player with a minimal UI and lots of features.
• Handbrake is a transcoder for digital video files.
• LBRY is a video platform that uses blockchain technology. It is impossible for videos to be taken down, making this a proper alternative to YouTube censorship. The web front-end is Odysee.

• KeePassXC is a password manager that saves your passwords on a local encrypted database. The benefit of this is that you can generate brute-force-attack-resistant passwords for each site without having to memorize it. So if one site gets breached, your password can't be cracked and used to login to all your other accounts on other websites.
• Sandboxie isolates programs so they don't access more parts of your system than they need to. This is good for limiting attack surfaces as well as privacy invasion of certain proprietary programs.

• Linux Mint is a user-friendly linux distribution based on Ubuntu.
• GrapheneOS is an android-based, privacy-hardened operating system for Pixel phones that is easy to install.
• Arch Linux is a linux distribution with a focus on simplicity for developers. This also makes it more simple for non-developer power users.

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a survival horror roguelike.
• Mindustry is a factorio-like tower defense for desktop and mobile.
• OpenTTD is a transport tycoon recreation.
• Unciv is a 2D recreation of Civilization V for desktop and Android.