A curated list of amazing open source software you may have not heard of

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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Ever since I learned about Aegis when someone mentioned it here on this very forum I’ve never looked back.

Later I ran into Scroll Reverser and Rectangle for Mac and those utilities are so useful that I’m just amazed how is that not part of the operating system itself.

Today I was asked about a good OTP manager for iOS and I had no Idea what to say, after checking that Aegis is sadly Android only. Raivo OTP is showing some promise, maybe?

What are your go to open source apps/utilities that transform UX so much that you can’t go back anymore?

Feel free to repeat what others have said, if you use it go ahead and list it, I’m interested in count as well.

Goal:

  • Discover, explore, fall in love and wonder “how the hell did I live without this”.

Rules:

  • I’d like to focus on applications/utilities first, not so much on self hosted client-server software. We have pretty good thread on that here.

  • All software must have a free version available, developers selling pro versions, donations, donation subscriptions, paid app store versions and similar are fine - as long as there is a free easy to install version.

Disclamer:

The open-source software listed is provided “as is” without any warranty of any kind. By choosing to install or use any of the mentioned software, you acknowledge and assume full responsibility for any and all risks associated with that decision. I make no representations, warranties, or guarantees as to the software’s suitability, reliability, or potential impact on your system or data. Use at your own risk.

Multi platform

Blender [Linux, MacOS, Windows]- 3D modeling, rendering, video production and more.
LibreWolf Browser [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - A custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom.
Fish Shell [Linux, MacOS] - The friendly interactive shell.
Workrave [Linux, Windows] - Recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury.
Helix [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - A post-modern text editor.
Ventoy [Linux, Windows, LiveCD] - Create multiboot USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
Gimp [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Photo editor.
LibreOffice [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Office suite.
Audacity [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Audio recording and editing.
Signal [Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS] - Encrypted messaging and (video) calling.
OBS Studio [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Video recording and broadcast.
VLC [Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, AppleTV, ChromeOS, BSD, QNX, OS/2, Solaris] - Media Player, now with AI upscaling support.
HandBrake [Linux. Windows, MacOS] - Video transcoding with hardware acceleration.
VirtualBox [Linux, Windows, MacOS Intel, Solaris] - Virtualization.
htop [Linux, MacOS] - an interactive process viewer.
K9s [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Kubernetes CLI To Manage Your Clusters In Style!
GNU Stow [Linux, MacOS] - Symlink manager.
Kdenlive [Linux, Windows, MacOS (Intel)] - Video editor.
Darktable [Linux, Windows, MacOS] - Photography workflow application and raw developer.
FreeCAD [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Your own 3D parametric modeler.
Restic [Linux, MacOS, BSD, Windows] - Fast, encrypted, deduplicated, verifiable backups.
Thunderbird [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Email, contacts and calendar.
KiCad [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Design and simulation of electronic hardware for PCB manufacturing.
Prusa Slicer [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Converts your 3D models to G-Code or PNG layers for 3D printer.
Inkscape [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Draw (vectors) freely.
Tailscale [Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android] - zero-config, no-fuss VPN using WireGuard.
WireGuard [Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android, BSD, Router distros] - Modern, fast and secure VPN tunnel.
pass [Linux, MacOS] - the standard unix password manager.
Transmission [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Simple BitTorrent Client.
Calibre [Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android] - e-book manager.
F3 [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - test flash disk true capacity and performance.
vim-anywhere [Linux, MacOS] - Sometimes, you edit text outside of Vim. These are sad times. Enter vim-anywhere!
Wireshark [Linux, MacOS, Windows, *nix] - Analyze your packets.
Czkawka [Linux, MacOS, Windows, *nix] - Multi functional app to find duplicates, empty folders, similar images etc.
LICEcap [MacOS, Windows, Linux via WINE] - Configurable screen ‘video’ capture recording to GIF or LCF format
KeePassXC [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Cross-platform Password Manager.
Syncthing [Linux, MacOS, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD] - a continuous file synchronization program.
Thonny IDE [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - super easy Python IDE with plug and play MicroPython support
NAPS2 [Linux, MacOS, Windows] - Scan with any WIA, TWAIN, SANE, and ESCL compatible scanner. Save to PDF, OCR, share scanner to other NAPS2 instances.

Linux

Remmina - Remote access.
Annotator - Image annotation for Elementary OS.
Radeontop - View your GPU utilization.
LinuxCNC - Runs your milling machines, lathes, 3D printers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, robot arms, hexapods, and more.
NVTOP - view your GPU utilization (h)top style - AMD , Apple M1 & M2, Huawei, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Adreno.

MacOS

Rectangle - Take control of your windows.
Scroll Reverser - Scroll naturally with your touch pad and your mouse. At the same time.
Keka - File archiver.
Raivo Receiver - Receive OTP codes from iOS app.
UTM - QEMU based VM host.
Karabiner-Elements - powerful utility for keyboard customization on macOS Sierra (10.12) or later.
smcFanControl - Fan control for Intel Mac
MiddleClick - Emulate middle click with MacOS Sonoma support

Windows

PowerToys - Power user utilities.
Notepad++ - Powerful text/source code editor
WinNUT-Client - Easy to use Windows client for Network UPS Tools
Remote App Tool - Easy remote app creation and management

Android

Aegis - OTP manager.
Simple Mobile Tools - A collection of simple apps such as Calendar, Contacts, Gallery, Music Player… Sale appears to be in progress Sold to ZipoApps
Fossify - A collection of simple apps such as Calendar, Contacts, Gallery, Music Player… Fork of Simple Mobile Tools.
K9-Mail - Email client, taken over by MZLA Technologies. Planned rebranding to Thunderbird.
F-Droid - Google Play Store alternative
DAVx⁵ - WebDAV client
Etar Calendar - Calendar
SpMp - A YouTube Music client with a focus on customization of colors and song metadata
SimpMusic - A simple music app using YouTube Music for backend
InnerTune - A Material 3 YouTube Music client for Android
Rethink App - VPN, DNS, and Firewall.
KeePassDX - Android client for KeePassXC

iOS

Raivo - OTP manager. Apparently silently bought a while ago. Latest update nuked my OTPs. Looking into Bitwarden Authenticator as alternative.
Bitwarden Authenticator - OTP manager

Web based

Open Street Map - Community maintained maps

Couple of notes:

I decided to list some of the popular, but maybe less known outside of specific industry “S-Tier” software, because Linux, terminals and Blender have changed the way I work forever, and I never ever, ever, ever, ever dreamed that tooling engineer could ever, ever, ever use 3D animation software to get paid more.

I’ll expand the list as I discover more, or more suggestions come from members.

If it gets out of hand, it may get a Git repo or something.

27 Likes
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Bump :slight_smile:

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To me that are mainly shell and text editor.

The Fish shell is amazing. I’m not coming from the point of reference of someone ricing the terminal with pretty colors. IT autocompletes kubernetes resources out of the box! I mean you can tab complete those annoying long pod names! Maybe oh-my-zsh has something similar but with fish it’s out of the box.

I’ve been trying to readjust my muscle memory from vim to Helix text editor. Helix is a very modern command line text editor with auto highlighting support for various laguages and formats. I dislike [that_popular_electrum_ide_from_a_certain_evil_company] but would like to use something that is a bit more modern than vim, and again, without the need for ricing and plugins.

Fedora toolbox is basically podman with a tidy configuration but it is setup in a way that is insanely convenient. Want to install ROCm crap? Go with toolbox. It’s like having instant noodles LXC containers which automatically maps your home folder and device tree.

On a Mac UTM leverages Qemu and the OS virtualization framework to give you a product that, if you are like me who don’t need fluff, puts comercial offerings like Parallels to shame. It’s cheaper (if bought from app store - still open source) and since its Qemu it wont suffer from the bullshit predatory subscription service and need for heavily modified images.

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I’d like to submit the hardened and privacy focused Librewolf browser. It shows very good results in a browser comparison. I have been using it for quite a while now and am very pleased with how it performs, it certainly is an improved Firefox. Only downside is that there is no mobile version of it.

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I use these every day at work

Gridmove

Gridmove with xipher grid is underrated. Window tiling app that lets me resize windows to a grid to take full advantage of my 43 in 4k monitor
https://www.dcmembers.com/jgpaiva/

Workrave

Timer to remind me to get up every hour and stretch

Vscodium

Open source fork of vs code. Their website can explain the licensing

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I found this at onepoint somehow… theres a little of everything…

Not sure if its all good, but its all opensource self hosted software for what its worth. Lots of diffrent types of software…

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NetBox Community - I have no idea if everyone has heard of this or not but I hadn’t until recently and i love it

Also EdUBudgie Linux :slight_smile: iiizzz da goat!!!

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It’s been a while and I finally managed to get started on the actual list. I’ve found a couple of gems since I started the thread as well.

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

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I have something to add. When you need to learn or study something, be it languages, your next IT software stack or university notes, have a look at Anki Flash Cards. There is software for most operating systems, including Android to learn on the go. You can create so called flash cards containing text, links, pictures or videos containing both a question as well as it’s answer. The flash cards are shown you multiple times until you were able to answer them correctly, and the more often you correctly answer them the less they will be shown to you, or in turn, if you answer them wrongly they will be shown to you again until you begin to answer them correctly. It’s really one of the most efficient ways to learn certain content and the software, even the online storage of cards, is currently free of charge.

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The latest for me in the “tools that make life easier” is NixOS and by extension the nix package manager. Getting the entire OS configured with one file is crazy enough, but you can use the nix package manager on any other linux distros and on macOS. Portable packages without weird confining / sandboxing tricks like flatpaks, just well engineers file system hierarchy. You can also run multiple versions of the same program with nix.

The weird part of using the nix pkgman has yet to be mentioned. Nix fixes an issue with OCI containers that no container technology solves: reproducibility. When you build a container, say using alpine and nginx, you get the latest packages of each, but might find yourself you needed a specific version for some reason. Nix containers can pin the version and a container built today can be rebuilt in 20 years from now, given that you have the source (since if packages aren’t available in nix cache, they get compiled).

Other tools I find myself using often are nnn terminal file manager (finding, selecting and moving files around is such an ease), qrencode (convert string into a qr code, I use it to share links from my PC to my phone mostly), exiftool (to clear jpg metadata), figlet (ascii art).

On my android phone (which I don’t use often) I use kiss launcher (keep it simple stupid) - helped me avoid all the stupid google ui modifications for more than 8 years now I think and it’s just simple and distraction free launcher (and it’s similar to how you’d open a programs menu on a pc and either scroll through them or start typing to search for programs). I also use almost the full stack of “Simple” suite from fdroid (file manager, gallery, clock etc.), but at this point, who hasn’t heard of those.

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Perfect timing on this for me @H-i-v-e . I just started looking into flash card apps and this looks incredibly promising.

1 Like
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Talking about UX behaviour in different OS. The fact that Right Mouse Click triggers only on the release of the mouse button always push me away from going back to Windows.

Scroll Reverser - Scroll naturally with your touch pad and your mouse. At the same time.

Windows’s way of mouse scroll is “natural” only by convention. MacOS way is “natural” in the sense it’s consistent with touch screen UX and movement of your finger.

Personally I find MacOS way is the more natural way.

1 Like
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Yes, agree when you use the touch pad it feels “right” to me, but plug in a mouse and I have to go to settings and change scroll wheel to reverse the scrolling. I guess enough people feel the same way, thus Scroll Reverser was born. And others use Apple mouse I guess?

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I chose touch pad over mouse when I bought my iMac. Used a 3rd party mouse with scroll wheel ever since. Mouse with scroll wheel follows the natural way. I’ve never used a Magic Mouse. So wasn’t aware of the issue. Good to know.

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On Windows:
Greenshot: a very nice and snappy snipping tool replacement. GitHub - greenshot/greenshot: Greenshot for Windows - Report bugs & features go here: https://greenshot.atlassian.net or look for information on:

Screen2Gif: record your desktop or windows directly into gifs. Great for documentation. GitHub - NickeManarin/ScreenToGif: 🎬 ScreenToGif allows you to record a selected area of your screen, edit and save it as a gif or video.

On Linux:
Peek: record your desktop or windows directly into gifs. Great for documentation. (the closest thing to Screen2Gif on linux). GitHub - phw/peek: Simple animated GIF screen recorder with an easy to use interface
Unfortunately, its being deprecated…it still works quite well for me but may soon need an alternative.

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For me it would be paperless-ng server. I definitely cannot imagine living without it any more. At this point I have almost 2k of documents there, and yet searching for any document is as fast as clicking few buttons.

For me, it is the best thing since sliced bread.

Although a bit of a warning: read their documentation and pages with recommended use. When I first started to use it, it felt a bit odd and strange, but I quickly got used to it. The main thing is - there is no tree or directory structure, it is flat hierarchy. But thanks to tags and other things, it gets super simple and intuitive once you understand the philosophy.

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Remmina RDP - https://remmina.org/
Gimp - https://www.gimp.org/
LibreOffice - https://www.libreoffice.org/
Audacity - https://www.audacityteam.org/
Signal - https://www.signal.org/
OBS - https://obsproject.com/
htop
VLC - Official download of VLC media player, the best Open Source player - VideoLAN
Handbrake - https://handbrake.fr/
Oracle VirtualBox - https://www.virtualbox.org/

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edit: acquired by ZipoApps, no longer trusted…

Android: The “Simple Tools” Suite by Tibor Kaputa
They are all just very simple base utilities like:

  • notes
  • calendar
  • voice recorder
  • file manager

They are all orange and GPLv3. No ads.

Can be found on Fdroid or goggle Play. I like the notes one in particular:

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Tibor Kuptas Calendar Pro and it’s widget are great! Simple, free, open source.

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The beauty of these apps is they are pretty close to the simplest possible implementation of the problem they are trying to solve.

It does exactly what you expect. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

1 Like