R! If you're a data person and you've never used R, give it a shot. It's a lovely language for cleaning and analyzing data, and the core development team keeps making improvements.
Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me.
Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course.
Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year.
KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project.
The entire python "data science" stack, numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work. Tiny projects too, like nptdms.
The raspberry pi foundation, in particular for the pico, rp2040 and rp2350. Joy to work with, great documentation, super cheap and available, perfect for one-off projects, prototypes and hobby stuff, which is pretty much always neglected by the big silicon vendors.
I set up my own NAS this year, running many self-hosted apps. I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.
Firefox gets sometimes deserved criticism, but I have been using it continuously since Firebird 0.7 and I believe it contributes to keeping the web open.
I think Linux is one of the great accomplishments of modern human society, together with Wikipedia. OpenSSL and the other Open Source cryptographic libraries for providing a safety net when our politicians decide to tighten their grip on privacy and secure communications. At least we as developers can still fall back on all the OpenSSL cloned repos and see from there.
https://github.com/ShawInnes/SshKeyGenerator change your life. this saves me so many clicks of what would otherwise be a really stupid alternative method of automation regarding these deployments i have to do. i couldn't prompt chatgpt for this code if my life depended on it.
A lot of them. They might not always look nice, unfortunately, but there sure are a ton of tools that equal or rival professional stuff (and professional stuff often uses a bunch of them anyway nowadays)
FreeTube [1], and yt-dlp [2], especially in combination with a
ready supply of VPNs. Switching them around to avoid being
blocked by Google reminds me of adjusting the tuner for better
reception on an old analog tv. Infant me might have imagined a
malevolent being who inhabits the airwaves deliberately causing
interference, and in the world we've created since then that's
not far from the truth. Many thanks to the developers
tirelessly compensating for Google's frequent deliberate
breakage.
https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
Also the OpenBSD foundation is ~5% away from its fundraising goal for 2025! :-)
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2025.html