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.
For some reason, I just can’t get my Kubuntu desktop and Android phone to talk to each other with this. It does weirdly connect just fine on Arch/EndeavourOS, though.
The craziest thing I discovered when I started using it was when I noticed that because my desktop was now connected to my phone and my phone was connected to my watch, I could completely control the media on both from my watch and the integration felt natural - but also something I haven’t seen work that well in the proprietary world.
For me it was, that the video i was watching paused when i got a call and repeated the moment i hung up. FUTURE (or apple ecosystem, i suppose.)
I wish I could send a whole folder of files at once with this, mine seems to only work one file at a time.
You can also share access to your phones entire filesystem with kde connect, so you can browse you phones storage from dolphin as if ot was connected through usb and copy entire folders to/from you phone.
Doesn’t seem to work on my phone, even thouvgh I have given it the permissions it asked…
Did you enable the plugin called expose filesystem?
…Yes, I just said that.
Tbf you only mentioned the permissions, but ok
This might read as a stupid question but ; Do you have to use KDE Plasma as a DE for it to work ?
no! there is GSConnect which is a gnome extension that provides the protocol as well
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
In my experience, PipePipe updates more frequently and works better, while also having sponsorblock
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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)
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.
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
Immich is a photo/video hosting solution à la Google photos
Shattered pixel dungeon. Open source dungeob crawler roguelike. Extremely fun.
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.
LibreOffice - simply the best office suite there is (IMHO). I was a MS-office user for years, but since I switched, I haven’t looked back…
Forgejo: A self-hosted, lightweight software forge offering Git repository hosting with an easy-to-install, low-maintenance platform focused on collaboration, federation, and privacy.
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.
OsmAnd, mobile app for navigation and maps. Offline, based on OSM, can do anything. I use it for checking out and bookmarking places, finding POIs and pubic transport stations, routing (especially for bike and foot), measuring distances, and so on. It can also show and record tracks, do car navigation, edit OSM points, and more stuff that I don’t use. Pro/plus/full version free on FDroid
It also works really well for routing on water. One feature I really like is being able to specify the dimensions of your boat and then having it take that into account when calculating a route.
I want to like this, but because there’s no GTFS/public transport timetables, it makes it kinda impossible to use it to get around cities that publish their transport data.
PT is the one thing I’m still stuck on Google maps for. I REALLY want an open source alternative.
The comments below say “local transit app”, but I don’t get it - those could be proprietary and pretty invasive. So instead, I use the “undesired” maps in the browser. Both for when public transit arrives and for more up-to-date information on businesses.
Yeah, it’s a shame because some of those OSM-based ones are really close to being perfect. It just seems like it’s really difficult for the open source devs to reconcile OSM data with GTFS and timetables for some reason.
Often the “local app” is basically a proprietary wrapper around Google maps.
qBittorrent: only for your legal torrenting needs from e.g. archive.org :>
Don’t forget the automated acquisition of Linux ISOs!
Typst: A modern typesetting system designed for easy document creation with markup inspired by Markdown but more powerful and programmable.
And it compiles crazy fast to pdf!
