Ask Lemmy

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

Making sure to keep it legal, right?

Let's stick with Project Gutenberg - Public domain ebooks and other media, spanning centuries. They're incredibly important for keeping our literary past alive.

I might have more later.

VLC Media Player

https://www.videolan.org/

Closing your eyes, slowly taking a deep breath, and calmly, breathing in, and breathing out, while focusing on the sensations in your body, and how much more relaxed you're feeling right now

i.e. meditation

I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet:

Jellyfin

With just a cheap computer you can have your own Netflix and Spotify.

Libraries. Most even rent video games, power tools, audio/video hardware, baking utensils...SO MUCH STUFF. All free.

https://fmhy.net/

freemediaheckyeah

The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!

Pi hole

https://pi-hole.net/

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Own your own ebooks. Make sure all devices work with whatever format you need.

AntennaPod for podcasts

It's great, customizable, I sent a suggestion to the volunteer development team, and they made it happen.

lichess.org is a fantastic online chess platform for players of all skill levels. it's free and---what's more--it's ad-free (unlike the parasitic organisation that's squatting on the chess.com domain).

it has one-on-one on-demand match-ups, tournaments, puzzles, user-published training courses, multiple chess variants, and so much more.

it's one of only two online resources to which i deem donating regularly worthwhile (the other being wikipedia).

do check it out. chess is one really healthy mental habit to inculcate.

I know lemmy is social media for people with a favorite Linux distro so I’m preaching to the choir here, but so much software is free as in speech it is truly wonderful. It’s like the only thing I love about being a millennial

LibreOffice

Free Office Suite which is excellent for personal use. If you are on mobile Collabora Office if you want an Android/iOS version

I love how chill and helpful everyone is here.

https://rentry.co/megathread

Pretty useful.. when one site fails the other usually work.

khanacademy.org

Great resource for really well taught contents on an extensive variety of fields

What3words.com and app

Basically the earth has been segragated into 10 foot x 10 foot squares that are easily identified by 3 words, super accurate, easy to tell emergency services. No more need to know lat/long to tell someone where you're at.

LMMS - free and open source garage band. It's a little weird on how you do a song, but it's pretty great.

Tips: Look at Beats and Baselines Editor and Piano Roll Editor first to probably get you where you want to be.

A little late but OpenTaxSolver - free desktop tax software that gives you a printout of tax forms that you can mail in. And it includes a few states too. Way easier than the annoying corporate sites that constantly log you out and charge a fee for every little thing.

Edit: To my non-American friends, you don't need to worry about this

In most eu countries the law requires businesses that give out food to also allow you to order free tap water. If youre in a city and dont want to spend money on a bottle of water, walk into mcdonalds and ask for free tap water. A lot of european countries also have strict laws about tap water so for example in france unless otherwise indicated with a warning, tap water is always potable.

Learn a little docker and start self hosting stuff! Pihole is a great one to start with, but there are lots of other awesome projects out there:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Your neighbor's trash. It's stunning what I find and fix, refurbish, repurpose or sell. Had a friend that used to cruise her hood on trash day, her and her husband would load the truck, sell it back to 'em on a Saturday garage sale. 12-14 hours biweekly work, ~$400 every other weekend.

My wife's friends dumpster dive at Walmart, though I question how that's possible. Most big box stores make that impossible. Dunno. In any case, it's wild what these stores chunk out. If Lowe's would let me, I'd haul home a pickup full every week.

Porn

Yucata - online boardgames, take your turn when you can, no pressure.

To add a couple more FOSS programs, OBS Studio and kdenlive are both really robust video production and editing software.

Syncthing.

Connect any two devices' folders together wirelessly, from anywhere.

Don't have a server? You don't need one. Every device is an individual node.

Backup? If you do have a server, offload some of your content and keep on rolling, or set scripts to move files by age.

In Canada, crown land camping and Christmas trees. You can camp on crown land and cut up to 10 cubic metres of wood a year.

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

"First X of the month" at the zoo/a museum/whatever

lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike

lots of great stuff outside!

Maybe this is sorta dumb, but meditation is a free way to feel good and spend time, and also a free method of stress relief and to reduce suffering.

It's not free in terms of your time & energy, and it might cost some money to learn, but the best meditation manual I know of is free online, or at least it used to be - it looks like it was locked down on archive.org (where it used to be freely available), but you can still find it on Anna's Archive, and you can probably find it at your local library. Either way, you can learn to meditate for free, that's how I did it.

Running is likewise relatively free (you do generally have to pay for running shoes, and athletic clothing can be expensive, but it's relatively cheap over the lifetime of those items, and it's cheaper than most other activities). A great and accessible way to feel good and stay healthy.

Kanopy - a website where you can stream movies and TV shows, which is free if you have a library card.

Very location locked, but all Smithsonian museums in DC are free. Even special exhibits that require timed ticketing.