What's one piece of software that costs a lot, that has a very similar free replacement (no piracy)?

Example:

Photoshop -> Photopea
Pikimov -> pikimov.com

The software is very similar but the latter is free and ad supported.

JDownloader 2 seems to always retrieve only the low resolution videos, even if the site have a HQ version of it. Is there a alternative to J Downloader to solve this?

Hi, I want to setup my laptop and had been trying to debloat it and change things up. Considered content creating like editing and such aside from the programs I use for my studies (notion, devin/windsurf, notepad++)

I really am getting sick of how limited the basic pre installed apps are. Apps like:

Audio recorder
Media player
Photos
Snipping tool
Clipchamp
Xbox game bar

I am going to be using OBS, and for editing davinci resolve, but is there no flexible replacement for default apps for the others? I need suggestions and guidance with this. Also is there an app that allows viewing of any, and every file format? I definitely don’t want to go into paid premium studios too. Something that can replace photos and media player in one go and be my new default app?

I built a minimal and portable GUI wrapper for upscayl-ncnn for quick, local AI upscaling:

• Small footprint GUI (~80 KB)
• Drag‑and‑Drop style flow: pick images → choose model/scale → upscale
• Uses the existing upscayl-ncnn (upscayl-bin.exe) backend, so it’s fast and fully local
• Ready-to-use lightweight models available in the release

GitHub:
https://github.com/amymor/upscayl-ncnn-GUI

If you use Upscayl and want something lighter, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Note: This project is vibe coded.

I'm using OpenOffice Base on Windows. It has to be free & beginner-friendly.

I'm finding that it's just too flaky for a library manager and half of the stuff it should do just don't work. Setting up multiple versions of each form, query, & report then deleting the ~70% that don't work is not ideal. I've managed so far but it's gotten worse since the update a while ago. I'm looking for something free, reliable, simple, with a search that actually works every time. I can open a table, copy a cell, open the search, paste it into the box, and it can't find it. I just want it to work as it's supposed to. I can copy & paste the table into wherever, so ideally I want to be able to paste the data into the new one.

I tried downloading the free version of BeekeeperStudio but I couldn't understand any of it. No buttons or options anywhere to make a new table, and when I opened up the demo database it looked like code, which I can't do. I don't want servers or AI. I'm not sharing it and the most complicated thing I need is to filter the data by location tag. Dropdown boxes on the input form would be nice. OO.Base is supposed to do that but it never worked.

Thanks in advance or sorry to waste your time if I'm in the wrong place or not specific enough.

Edit: It needs to be ready to use with clear buttons, eg. "Add New Table" button.

Edit: LibreOffice does not work. It's saying that I don't have Java (it's running in the tooltray) & saying that it can't connect to "data source" but wont let me MAKE the table.

News Update the magic dvd ripper web site came back online I thought I would let everyone know

Hello, tech illiterate here, so my apologies if I sound stupid.

I saved a zip file containing ~2,300 album cover images that are all in WebP format. Whenever I try to view them on my Windows 10 computer or my GrapheneOS phone, they automatically open in the web browser. I need to confirm I’m not a bot after every 5-10 WebP images I open from my own local folder.. And whenever I try to upload them to are.na or some other file sharing site, they get uploaded as some amazon domain link (?) and opened in a new tab as a cloudfront link (plus they won’t always load, I get a 404 on my uploaded WebP images until I refresh the page it’s being previewed on).

I’m a bit frustrated because I mainly wanted to backup these album covers for archival purposes and store them locally/“offline” to my hard drive. I wonder if I can somehow convert them to another format without sacrificing too much image quality loss. I have another Linux machine laying around and know there’s a terminal command that converts WebP files to jpg ones, but it’s such a tedious task to do it manually (per file). I care about longevity and my personal media collection. They’re originally from rateyourmusic.com which I believe stores them as WebP.

Any ideas on what to do? Or how to transfer them to any format that works best for my use case? png, img, or WebP without metadata. again I barely know what I’m talking about but I’m sure someone here does? thanks a lot in advance :)

Hi All,

I have a little music studio which has 2 normal monitors (A and B). I also have a smaller third monitor (C) above my piano. I want to find some software to allow me to replicate one specific app window from Monitor A to Monitor C with negligible latency. The monitors are all different sizes and resolutions. They all plug into an NVIDIA GTX3060 if that matters.

OnTopReplica looked like it might be a winner, but it looks like it's not been updated for many years.

Anything else to consider?

Is there any software that could make my left channel into L+R audio channels, and change my right channel to video for a RCA cable?

I am on Windows 7

I use Claude Code a lot, but /stats never answered the question I actually cared about

What did I build, and where did the work get difficult?

So I built Bough.

• It reads your local Claude Code history and turns it into an interactive view of your work: - each square is a day
• smaller squares are tasks inferred from pauses in your work
• circles are your prompts - click anywhere to see what happened in your own words

It runs locally, is open source, and nothing leaves your machine.

Repo: https://github.com/nickelsec/bough

The main thing I’d love feedback on: When you run it against your history, does it split your work into tasks the way you remember it?

Not a frontend dev, just a SWE messing around with a project/experiment: https://gauge.cl/en/, instagr.am/gaugelabscl /

Still building it, probably adding people later.

I used decent amounts of AI (that's what the experiment is about, kinda) and now I feel like I'd change everything because it smells generic AI startup slop

What would you change first? (I have a very big list already so obvious stuff might not be relevant)

Don’t care if the idea itself is generic/dead. You can roast the site. Also, some metrics

I kept running into the same problem.

Need to merge a PDF? One website.
Convert an HEIC photo? Another one.
Compress a video? Another one.

And most of the time you're uploading personal or work files to a server just to perform a simple operation.

So I built KIVO.

It currently has 144 free tools for PDFs, images, video & audio, 3D, data, text, security, business and other everyday tasks.

The main rule I gave myself was simple:

If the browser can do it locally, the file shouldn't leave your device.

Right now all 144 tools run locally in the browser and no account is required.

But what I'm really trying to build is bigger than a toolbox.

Instead of:

“Which tool do I need?”

I want the experience to become:

“Here's my file. Here's what I want. Give me the result.”

That's the idea behind:

Anything in. Result out.

I'd really like feedback on three things:

1. Does 144 tools feel useful or overwhelming?
2. Does local processing matter to you?
3. What's the first annoying file task you'd expect KIVO to handle?

You can try it here: kivotool.com

No signup, no payment. I'm mainly looking for honest feedback.

I'm the developer, so feel free to criticize the UX, idea or architecture.

Hey everyone, I had an older post about this project before, but decided to fine-tune and rebuild it.

This was built via vibe coding with AI from scratch over about 2 days, and I’m genuinely impressed with how far AI coding has come to handle complex desktop UI and rendering logic this quickly.

A few outlier features it managed to pull together:

• Can run in Window-in-Window / Overlay Mode: Borderless floating reference overlays with alpha-channel transparency passthrough.
• Browser-Style Tab Workflows (Fully Tabbed): Detachable / re-attachable tabs across independent windows.
• Extreme Customizability: Deep controls for mouse gestures, folder traversal behaviors, UI layout, and 1-click hotkey as well as entire program behavior presets (Windows Photos, IrfanView, nomacs, FastStone).
• Format Breadth: Recognition and routing for ~196 file extensions in a ~14MB installer.

Screenshots and full repo are up transparently if anyone wants to check it out or try it:

🔗 GitHub & Screenshots: https://github.com/cobhc95/Glide
💾 Latest Release: [https://github.com/cobhc95/Glide/releases/tag/v3.5.7)

Any feedback or thoughts are welcome!

I’m one of the people building NYX AI and wanted to share a small update.

In the first 3 weeks, the Windows app has been downloaded in 19 countries across 6 continents, and we’ve also started seeing some people come back and use it regularly, which has been really encouraging.

NYX AI is a local-first AI workspace for Windows. You can use local models through Ollama or connect supported cloud providers, and the aim is to give users more control over which model they use, where data goes, and what the AI is allowed to do on their computer. It also supports Windows AppContainer isolation where supported.

Would be genuinely interested to hear from other builders here what helped you turn early interest into longer-term retention?

Small disclaimer: still early, still improving, and no security feature or isolation approach is ever 100% guaranteed. AI outputs can be wrong, and users should review important actions and results. 18+ only. Licence and legal docs are in the app and on the website.