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.
Does it backup photos on iOS yet?
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.
KeePassXC: A modern, secure, open-source password manager that stores and manages sensitive information offline.
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.
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.
KeePassXC can automatically keep a backup when it makes changes.
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.
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.
Local send has worked really poorly for me, and so has every program similar to it open source or not. The only network file sharing program that has always worked (mostly) floorlessly for me is AirDrop.
I love LocalSend, the only downside is that both devices must be on the same network. So it won’t work for sending a file to someone else at a bar.
What if they connect to your hotspot?
That works but requires that you hand over a key for the hot-spot which makes it significantly more cumbersome, especially compared to airdrop
Unfortunately, its not reliable. For large media files it gets stuck. Also, sometimes the local server is not discoverable on the other end. Even though I tried the troubleshooting step.
I had tested with windows and android so it could be different on Linux.
librewolf a privacy-focused fork of the latest stable firefox (win,linux,mac)
Newpipe, an YouTube client, which is:
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ad free
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lightweight
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useful, it allows downloading videos, music, and playing them when screen is locked
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usable without account
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multi-platform, it can also serve as client for the PeerTube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud
Also shoutout to Tubular which is the same thing, but with SponsorBlock for youtube
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Shattered pixel dungeon. Open source dungeob crawler roguelike. Extremely fun.
qBittorrent: only for your legal torrenting needs from e.g. archive.org :>
This post is a gold mine!
Yes! I’ve already found several gems
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.
The gods of learning and studying with flashcards. You will never want another flashcard program, especially if you were still using Quizlet (so enshittified now…) because Anki uses SRS (spaced repetition system) which makes you review things right before your brain forgets it to reinforce the subject material.
Add-ons: Bread and butter of Anki, I use several to make beautiful automatic flashcards of reading material/videos/games when I study Japanese. There’s an add-on for literally anything.
Cross platform: Free on desktop, cost $25 on iOS, and free on Android, although Ankidroid is an unofficial app. Still great though!
Cloud: Syncs your anki database across devices. If you don’t use anki for a while, will delete from the cloud, but as long as you have your own local database intact, you can reupload again later. (EDIT: Went through settings, you can self-host your own sync server!)
Sharing Decks: If you don’t feel like making your own decks, download ones that others shared for free.
Anki is used by language learners, college students, med students, etc. If you need to memorize it, use Anki.
lol did they really make it paid on ios
It costs money to be an iOS developer
Serious companies pay their devs.
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.
Zotero: a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files.
I use this for archiving news and magazine articles as well (with snapshots), sorted on topic so that I 1) might be able to remember where I read something and easily find an article again if I discuss it with someone and 2) have a good starting point for researching something I don’t have time for or the will for now.
I have set up the file sync on a self-hosted WebDAV server as well as it quickly racks up storage space with all those snapshots and you fairly quickly reach the top tier storage plan they offer.
Zotero 7 brought some good UI improvements, but it is really resource heavy (at least on Linux). A CLI-interface as was mentioned under here would be interesting.
and lastly, Tor Browser: anonymous web browser to evade state censorship and surveillance
Firefox - the original private webbrowser. Even though some people don’t like the options in it (like those that let you stream Netflix and other DRM content). If people care about privacy, they use this browser, or one that is made from it…
