We all love open-source software, but there are so many amazing projects out there that often go unnoticed. Let’s change that! Share your favorite open-source software that you think more people should know about. Here’s how you can contribute:
- Single Option Per Comment: Mention one open-source software per comment to be able to easily find the most popular software.
- No Duplicates: Avoid duplicating software that has already been mentioned to ensure a wide variety of options.
- Upvote What You Love: If you see a software that you also appreciate, upvote it to help others discover it more easily.
Check out last year’s post for more inspiration: Last Year’s Post
Let’s create a comprehensive list of open-source software that everyone should know about!
Syncthing: Continuous, private, and encrypted file synchronization across multiple devices without using the cloud.
Absolutely LOVE syncthing. I recently had to go on an emergency trip and was glad I set up syncthing on my phone but hated that I didn’t set it up properly on my laptop.
I love syncthing, but never managed to get permissions to work right on any of my android phones. I chalk that up to phone vendor fuckery though.
I use Syncthing-Fork on my android phone, which seems to work fine.
I’d love to use this but I just mostly don’t use multiple devices at the same time, so I don’t see how the sync would ever happen.
I’m in the same boat, so I had set up Syncthing more like centralised service - installed one instance on my home server, and made every other device sync only with it. Files propagates without issues.
KDE Connect: An app for iOS, android, pretty much every flavor of linux, windows, etc. that lets you connect any devices together to share files, show notifications of other devices, use your phone as an input device(keyboard, mouse), control multimedia applications(start, play, stop, etc.), trigger commands, and everything else if you make a plugin for it.
FMD (FindMyDevice) - An absolute necessity, especially if you aren’t using Google services.
It allows you to use any device/contact you’ve approved to send commands to enable/disable various settings on your devices, like bluetooth, do not disturb, camera, GPS, etc. via SMS, a FMD server (self-host optional) or from notifications (i.e. use Signal to send commands). So if you’ve simply lost your phone in your house you could make it ring no matter what, or if it got stolen you could lock it, use GPS, or factory reset it entirely.
The dev made it after he lost a phone that didn’t have Find My Device activated.
Copyparty turns almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser
SherpaOnnx TTS for Android. There are many different voices to pick from that sound very life like and are totally worth using with GPS apps like CoMaps.
Also, just found out about Medicat recently but haven’t used it yet. It looks fantastic though: Medicat is a toolkit that helps compile a selection of the latest computer diagnostic and recovery tools into an easy to use toolkit.
Ventoy is a software you put on a USB stick to make it so you can load as many bootable ISOs as you want on it at the same time and still use the leftover space for normal file storage.
I could not believe I didn’t find this fun free gem sooner. I’ll let the description from F-Droid explain the details:
This is a roguelike twist on the original Breakout formula: The goal is to catch as many coins as possible during 7 levels. Coins appear when you break bricks. They fly around, bounce and roll, and you need to catch them with your paddle. At the end of the level, you get to pick upgrades. There are 50+ different upgrades that impact the gameplay in various ways. Many upgrades will impact your combo, that’s the number of coins spawned for each brick broken. Your “combo” is displayed on your paddle. Your score is displayed in the top right corner of the screen. Oh, and don’t miss the ball, you don’t have extra lives.
LocalSend should be called God Send because it’ll save your life. It’s AirDrop, but for everything and open source. Works really well, no setup, no server.
Bookwyrm, a book tracker and review sharing plateform that is part of the fediverse allowing you to share your notes and review about books in the threadiverse as well as the twittoverse.
This is not open source software, it’s licenced under the Anti Capitalist Software Licence.
I still appreciate it in this list, but the caveat is important
TIL about the ACS Licence. Thanks.
I thought that if the source code was available on github, it would count as open-source whatevery the licence, my bad.
Audiobookshelf. Not exactly a “hidden” gem at this point, but I’m putting it here for today’s lucky 10,000. Simply the best way to store and stream audiobooks. Does podcasts too, and ebooks, although there are better tools for those.
Calibre: great e-book manager
MusicBrainz Picard: superb mp3 tagger with online metadata lookup feature and audio track fingerprinting
librewolf a privacy-focused fork of the latest stable firefox (win,linux,mac)
Joplin: An open-source note-taking and to-do app with markdown support and end-to-end encryption.
btw this is powerful. i recently upgraded to Joplin from using colornotes. there’s so much you can do and a ton of QoL things they’ve added that make organizing and searching notes much easier.
Joplin is awesome and I wish I’d known about it sooner.
How does it compare to Obsidian? Other than being FOSS which is a win.
I’ve used Obsidian and just today moved to Joplin. Obsidian has way more features for power users and wider array of community plugins.
BUT
Joplin is FOSS and it still has plenty of features. Think of Obsidian capabilities as Microsoft Excel, whereas Joplin is at the level of Google Sheets. And Joplin notes can be encrypted, meaning .md files won’t be found lying around.
KeePassXC: A modern, secure, open-source password manager that stores and manages sensitive information offline.
I can also recommend Bitwarden which is a hosted password manager (enabling e.g. automatic sync). The commitment to FOSS is not as great (there have been some controversies AFAIK) but self-hosting is possible.
A little trick for people who are worried about putting business / work passwords in web-hosted managers such as Bitwarden: put just the username in Bitwarden, and put all the full information into KeepassXC.
Bitwarden will recognize the site and fill in the username - meaning you are at the correct site and are not being phished. Then, you can fill in the password from KeepassXC. This gives the benefits of browser-based managers while keeping more sensitive passwords (and recovery info) local-only.
If it is only about fishing, why not use the KeePass browser plugin? That can also autofill by domain.
Good question - does the browser plug in sync to the internet or is any part of it internet accessible? I’ve not used it. I just know a lot of people are put off by the idea of their passwords being “in the cloud” or otherwise accessible through the internet. Looking at the add-on for Firefox, it looks like it communicates with the local keepassxc instance, which should be fine for many people.
Thanks. I was not aware of this option.
Mixed with syncthing to sync your database file across your devices and its chef’s kiss
My only complaint with KeePass is that if any corruption occurs, your passwords are borked. I use KeePass for non-critical accounts, like Lemmy, etc. I don’t trust myself or the sync enough for storing my bank or other identity passwords.
KeePassXC can automatically keep a backup when it makes changes.
I have used KeePass for many, many years and have never run into this. Besides, I usually have a copy of the database on some other device so I’m not too worried
Syncthing means it and its backup lives on two laptops, a desktop and my phone.
Beware that syncthing is a bad backup strategy as it will update to sync the broken file (or even file deletion). I advice to do some other sort of backup. Even a simple shell script that copies selected folders into selected location that you run from time to time is a better one.
Edit1: I’ve looked at my script, I use rsync for that.
Syncthing can easily be set to retain the last n copies. And you only need one or two to protect against corruption because you aren’t editing a corrupted file. Likewise a lot of the KeepassX clients can snapshot periodically too. Been doing this for years with no issues over Linux/Win/iOS and Android.
I use rsync for that.
As does syncthing under the hood. The issue is with backing up an open database and getting an inconsistent state, but KeepassXC keeps its database closed except on update. I also tick the backup old before save setting in KeepassXC (the aforementioned ‘and it’s backup’) and use a versioning backup of the sync directory on the desktop with 3-2-1, so I am sanguine.
Portmaster, nowadays mandatory, monitor the traffic of all installed apps and even from the OS itself, blocking with a simple click all unwanted traffic, Inbuild DNS crypt with dynamic filterlists (customizable) blocking ads, trackers and unwanted crap from big companies. Optional SPN service (paid). Windows and Linux.
