Watching NodeQuery “going down” today I think this would be an interesting thread.
There are some free services that are incredible easy to use and really useful, they shouldn’t die.
I’d like to start with:
NodeQuery of course. This is a really simple service I use to monitor the “not so important” servers I have. Nice and simple design, it gives me uncluttered data.
Google GSuite free edition. I’m really happy I managed to grab an account before the domain restrictions started to be enforced. I have some more but with domains expired and not useful anymore. imok exists thanks to this
Google Picasa Viewer. I haven’t found an alternative to this photo viewer. It was really easy to navigate between photos in fullscreen, I loved its zoom controls. The album manager and photo editor was easy to use too.
Proxmox. I can’t find another well done control panel like Proxmox. Free, clean and easy to use for my basic knowledge. What if they decide to start enforcing payment for it? Oh man.
GSuite free (didn’t exactly die, just the free version).
SparkPost free 100,000 emails/month (didn’t die, but was limited to 500 emails/month).
altern.org free email and webhosting where I would share my PHP FI 2.0 projects with the world (died following lawsuits and parliament bills on hoster responsibility).
Let’s Encrypt, this was a game changer and I hope it’s here to stay (free).
Perl (lots of haters).
PHP (lots of haters).
Linux (not really at risk, but who knows).
FreeBSD/PFSense (might be in slight decline).
TempleOS (not really)
MXroute free (had a 5$ setup).
Altiriis app virtualization (eventually killed by Symantec).
NX Capture free (easiest powerful photo editing for me, never found anything like it).
Firefox. Has been in decline for years and I get asked a lot why I use it. I remember when browsers were not for free, and when IE was the best browser available: Firefox made my online life so much better.
Thunderbird. This one I’m really afraid of losing: not so intuitive, too many bugs, and has alienated almost all plugin authors, at a time when standalone desktop email clients are a vanishing breed.
Hah, the issues I’ve had with Firefox and Google Meet…after months of issues, I found in my situation that it was never actually Firefox’ issue. I was using a MacBook Pro for work, using macOS Catalina. Despite temps being fine, it was due to thermal throttling (verified through the activity monitor).
For those of you who have issues with Firefox privacy-wise (I unfortunately have the compatibility issues too, in that case I fire up Chromium for certain sites) I can recommend Waterfox. I’ve used this fork for years and I’m really happy about it. Mozilla really has a ton of privacy issues with their browser, especially on mobile, despite how they market their brand.
+1 for free Gsuite! Both me and a family member have been using this for years.
Hmm, what else? IFTTT and Pushbullet have decent free plans!