[aseipp]

The Cyclone 10 GX line is the most advanced thing you can get for free, but it doesn't seem to have had much popular uptake anywhere (nearly no dev boards, etc.)

Intel recently announced their new "Sundance Mesa" series of FPGAs, which are Agilex, and designed as low-end replacements for Cyclone, etc. And they said that they'll be offering Quartus Pro free for Sundance Mesa devices. This really surprised me; generally speaking, in terms of software availability, Xilinx is much more approachable and there are plenty of high-end choices while using Vivado for free.

But beyond that: I just run Quartus in eval mode and rm -rf ~/.altera* once every 30 days and reset it. One of these days I'll get a license for my giant Stratix 10 board when my designs are more finished...