For the creatives out there (the Kritatives?), this is possibly on of the best kept secrets on the internet. Which is strange, because it’s free and open-source! This is a wonderfully in-depth digital painting and graphics editing tool that’s a great for both those trying their hand at digital art and full-on professionals.

It uses a layer-based system, and despite its complexity it has a very accessible UI and puts much less load on your system than, say Photoshop.

From the broadstrokes to the fine details like colour management, it is such a robust tool that you’ll be amazed how it’s offered for free.

Still going strong after all these years, it has firmly entrenched itself as the most viable free alternative to Adobe Photoshop that you’ll ever need. Its UI doesn’t hide its debts to Photoshop, and each of its rich features, such as layers, curvature pens, masking controls, you-name-it, is more or less where you’d find it in Photoshop.

It was tastefully updated with a new dark theme and added customization with icon sizes that makes it easier to tailor to HiDPI screens. Crucially, it now takes advantage of modern tech like multi-threading, high bit-depth support and GPU-side processing for those with graphical firepower.

This Software has established itself as one of the best free alternatives you can get to the pricey Microsoft Visio suite (see our full list here). The diagramming software is packed with a diverse array of native shapes that allows you to create all kinds of diagrams from flowcharts to network architectures.

It’s one of those open source programs that really demonstrates how much a dedicated development community can improve a platform given time.

This video tool supports non-destructive audio and video editing, meaning you can compile effects without any quality loss. You can also use this platform to do color keying and grading operations, as well as more basic clip splicing and trimming. 

Perhaps the coolest thing about this is its ability to work with more or less any format of video, audio, or photo media.

After installing this nifty little package, you’ll find everything you need to record, edit, and enhance sound files. What’s more, thanks to the enormous developer community supporting the program, you can use software’s library of third-party extensions to add any features that aren’t included by default. These will allow you to do everything from adding sound effects to auto-tuning your tracks. 

The software interface might look a little complex at first, but given the professional-grade tools available through the program, it’s easy to see why this is the go-to application for musicians and podcast creators.