Software Endorsements

[Bungleboy]

>Torrenting software

Null, have you gone commie on us?

 

[Spicy Hog]

I remember updating utorrent and getting sound ads, I immediately downloaded the older version, you don't have to update it. 2.2.1 works well enough for me.

 

[The Fool]

uTorrent users are the modern LimeWire users

 

[tehpope]

There should be a Linux distros section. I've had good experiences with Void, Ubuntu Mate, and Debian (though Debian does have a learning curve, especially since it doesn't contain the firmware by default.)

Arch or nothing. Antergos is easy as shit to install (no terminal to manually install shit) and I've had very little issue with the OS. The Arch wiki is great too. Had a major problem with Gnome 3, Arch, and OpenVPN. Couldn't run it normally and had to run it through terminal to get it working. No issues with Antergos.

Edit: 07/21/19
Antergos is dead. I've been using Manjaro and its pretty great. On par with Antergos. I think a bit better with GPUs. It also has support for a ton more Desktop Enviorments. I'm growing to like Budgie. Very Windows like. Gnome 3 and xfce are great too. Also, its not as bleeding edge as Arch or Antergos. Still has the latest and greatest but you don't have to update everything daily.

Something diffrent but

I endorse the mpc-hc video player


It plays every video file i have, can switch audio on the fly, supports subtitles and is highly customizable

https://mpc-hc.org/

If you're on linux, check out MPC-QT. Basically a recreation of MPC-HC in linux using MPV as its backend. Had issues with VLC on my new laptop (would freeze and cause me to reboot) but 0 with MPC-QT.

Edit: Sept. 2018 - VLC seems to work fine on my laptop now. Might have been a GPU driver issue. I have one of those combo units (Intel / Nvidia). MPC-QT is still great, but DVD playback kind of sucks. Menus don't work and that is by design in MPV. Also VLC has great deinterlacing support over the default Gnome video player and MPV. MPV is great for everything but SD interlaced content, unless you don't mind the interlaced look.

DuckDuckGo is probably the most user friendly of search engines that claim to be "Pro Privacy" in my opinion.

I use startpage as my main search engine. Uses google results but keeps everything private. Also as an excellent dark skin built-in to the site.

No-one uses Netscape Navigator? ;ronery face;

A) Firefox is the modern descendant of Netscape. B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

 

[Pickle Inspector]

MKVToolNix: Lets you set the default audio track on a MKV movie file, also delete audio tracks, good if you're wanting to put a video file on a TV or Console but it defaults to a language you don't want and it doesn't let you change audio track or you just want to save some space.

A pretty niche use but useful, it's free and has versions for Linux, BSD distributions, macOS and Microsoft Windows (Including an easy to use GUI version).

 

[OgreSan]

I'm too stupid to use Brave. I wanted to use it with plugins last time I tried but it wasn't dumbproof.

For the time being Vivaldi is pretty good for people like me.

TY for the post.

 

[Sebben Crudele]

I use the Android version of Brave and I can confirm it rocks.

 

[Kiwi Jeff]

I use the Android version of Brave and I can confirm it rocks.

The only problem I have is with some YouTube videos, but I can just go into desktop mode, and they work just fine. I can even play them in other tabs in desktop mode.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

There are tools you can use to enjoy the Internet more. I am a crazy person on the Internet 24/7 and this is what works best for me.

Browser

Brave
Pros

• Heavy privacy emphasis.
• Far and away the best mobile browser. Allows mobile extensions.
• Built-in ad block.
• Supports cryptocurrency "Basic Attention Token" natively, and is a promising way for casual web users (you) to support sites (kiwi farms) anonymously and easily by paying pennies to websites and content creators you frequent the most.
  
• Headed by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and founding/former CEO of Mozilla.

Cons

• Extensions are centrally organized, so people with heavy extension dependencies absolutely will not have everything they want.
• Desktop browser has performance issues after being open for a long time.
• Just shit for web developers. The element inspector is far inferior to both FireFox and Chrome. Fuck, it's worse than IE's.

...

Search Engines

DuckDuckGo
Pros

• It's its own thing. A lot of privacy-centric search engines are just Google in a candy wrapper.
• Pretty good. Sometimes even has a leg up on Google. DDG had StackOverflow previews before Google did, for instance.
• Google obfuscates results it does not want you to see. DDG does not.
• "DDG it" is much better sounding than "Bing it".

Cons

• Results are sometimes much poorer than Google's, but most of the time they're fine.

Vivaldi is also good. It is chromium based, so I don't know if that disqualifies it, but it is in my experience excellent.
It has wonderful features such as gestures, whereby you can bind commands like new tab, switch tab, reload page, or really just any key command to a simple mouse gesture. Great for browsing when you are eating, or otherwise just efficiently navigating. I seriously can't understate how good Vivaldi is for power users. It also has access to all chrome addons, and is ridiculously customizable in it's own right.

Honestly Brave was a let down for me, seemed like a good idea, but as a browser it is lacking. It is very minimalist, and lacks all the features I've become acclimatized to, such as detailed bookmark and history management, and customizable startpages (ok so technically it has this, but it's really not very good), and that is before mentioning the lack of features for power users. I hope that Brave's micropayment system or something similar is ported to an addon, as that is certainly a good idea (that I haven't tested).

...

TBH at this point, when I do use google, it just feels wrong. I'm completely used to DuckDuckGo by this point, and --I don't know if they just steal googles search results, or are comparably powerful in their own right-- they almost always find what I'm looking for. Only thing DDG suffers at slightly is image/video searching, but that might just be me.

Spoiler: The Chad Vivaldi

 

[Marvin]

Transmission used to be my torrent client of choice, because it's simple and gets the job done. However they don't support (or at least don't have an option for it in their settings) proxies.

I went for years without using proxies and without using private trackers, just to prove I could. But about two years ago, I got my first copyright complaint letter, so had to change my policy. So now I'm using a proxy and I had to switch clients.

Now I'm using qBittorrent. It's a little more complicated but it gets the job done.

DDG is amazing, more people need to use it and stop shilling for google

TBH at this point, when I do use google, it just feels wrong. I'm completely used to DuckDuckGo by this point, and --I don't know if they just steal googles search results, or are comparably powerful in their own right-- they almost always find what I'm looking for. Only thing DDG suffers at slightly is image/video searching, but that might just be me.

When it comes to the quality of the results you get, DDG is decent. Not good and certainly not great. Per user results are the crucial missing ingredient, I think.

Arch or nothing. Antergos is easy as shit to install (no terminal to manually install shit) and I've had very little issue with the OS. The Arch wiki is great too. Had a major problem with Gnome 3, Arch, and OpenVPN. Couldn't run it normally and had to run it through terminal to get it working. No issues with Antergos.

Arch's wiki and the AUR are what set it apart. I don't see myself switching anytime soon. (Maybe I'd check out some kind of docker-esque based package manager at some point, I think there's been a few experiments with that kind of setup.)

 

[SpessCaptain]

If you are looking for a hands off way to archive a website, HTTrack Website Copier is what I use, I usually just limit it to a subdomain if its a tumblr or deviantart account and let it do it's work. It works better for websites that are smaller or ones without protection, otherwise your search might be cut short. I'm sure there is a way to limit the amount of times it clicks on links and make it look like natural browisng, but I'm not so sure.

I used to use Foxyspider, but it's no longer compatible with new Firefox.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

Transmission used to be my torrent client of choice, because it's simple and gets the job done. However they don't support (or at least don't have an option for it in their settings) proxies.

I went for years without using proxies and without using private trackers, just to prove I could. But about two years ago, I got my first copyright complaint letter, so had to change my policy. So now I'm using a proxy and I had to switch clients.

Now I'm using qBittorrent. It's a little more complicated but it gets the job done.


When it comes to the quality of the results you get, DDG is decent. Not good and certainly not great. Per user results are the crucial missing ingredient, I think.

Arch's wiki and the AUR are what set it apart. I don't see myself switching anytime soon. (Maybe I'd check out some kind of docker-esque based package manager at some point, I think there's been a few experiments with that kind of setup.)

TBH I have noticed DDG frequently try to give me Java results when I'm explicitly looking for C# results. I guess they're similar? not helpful though. It's certainly true, the customized search results were quite a convenience. Too bad Google had to fuck up the whole "don't be evil" thing.

 

[neger psykolog]

VPNs are pleb tier you need a shell account with PuTTy. VPNs are the first thing that most websites block because they're the most accessible way for people to shitpost without revealing their IP.

Also with a VPS you can have like 20 different browser instances all with separate IP addresses.

If you go the shell account route you can also have more flexibility with what entities host your IPs and then you can go for something like a bulletproof host located in a legally ambiguous country.

Transmission used to be my torrent client of choice, because it's simple and gets the job done. However they don't support (or at least don't have an option for it in their settings) proxies.

I went for years without using proxies and without using private trackers, just to prove I could. But about two years ago, I got my first copyright complaint letter, so had to change my policy. So now I'm using a proxy and I had to switch clients.

Now I'm using qBittorrent. It's a little more complicated but it gets the job done.

Just get a seedbox and save yourself a whole bunch of trouble.

 

[dumpzone]

https://streamlink.github.io/

It pipes a stream straight into a media player of choice (mpc-hc, mpv, potplayer, VLC, you pick). It supersedes livestreamer, which had the same purpose. You can even "stream" videos like YouTube videos if you're that desperate (mpc-hc for instance has a function to let you watch YouTube videos already).

You need to be OK with a command line. It's not very difficult to understand, you write "streamlink twitch.tv/bigfucker best" and you get the best quality stream from bigfucker. Before this you need to set up your config file, which is not that complex either.

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

This is if you actually want to download a video. Even though it says youtube-dl, like streamlink, it has a bunch of plugins and support for several sites, like Twitch for instance, so you can download an archived Twitch stream (or a live Twitch stream I think) in case that's ever necessary because some streams get deleted and so on. It also uses the command line.

 

[AnOminous]

nmap

How has nobody listed that yet?

 

[OgreSan]

Startpage is also a great search engine. But I hear good results for DDG. I'll try using DDG if I can't find something on startpage.

 

[Raging Capybara]

I still use uTorrent 2.2.1

 

[Somsnosa]

Who and why still uses torrent programs when you can support and pay stuff legally with just a few bucks nowadays?

 

[BrunoMattei]

What would you recommend for private email?

 

[Branchland Count]

Who and why still uses torrent programs when you can support and pay stuff legally with just a few bucks nowadays?

Downloading GNU/Linux distros.
A better question is who in their right mind would use Windows nowadays?