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Justin's Digital Garden

Free and/or Open Source Software (FOSS)

Free/Libre and/or Open Source Software

Section titled “Free/Libre and/or Open Source Software”

Software sorted by categories from AlternativeTo site.

AI Tools & Services

Section titled “AI Tools & Services”
  • GPT4All - Run Local LLMs on Any Device. Open-source and available for commercial use.
  • MLflow - AI engineering platform for agents, LLMs, and ML models. MLflow enables teams of all sizes to debug, evaluate, monitor, and optimize AI applications while controlling costs and managing access to models and data. Used for data science machine learning.
  • oobabooga/TextGen - aka Text generation web UI. App for local LLMs. Text, vision and tool-calling
  • Open WebUI - AI platform for offline or online operation which supports various LLM runners like Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs, with built-in inference engine for RAG
  • OpenCode - AI coding agent, Free models included or connect any model from any provider
  • Capture2Text - OCR part of the screen and save resulting text to clipboard

Audio & Music

Section titled “Audio & Music”
  • ABC Music Notation - text-based music notation system and the de facto standard for folk and traditional music
  • Ardour - digital audio workstation (DAW)
  • Audacity - digital audio editor and recording application software
  • Easy Effects - formerly known as PulseEffects, Linux audio enhancement application that improves sound quality through advanced real-time processing. Built for modern PipeWire audio systems, the software allows users to apply professional audio effects to system output and microphone input.
  • Elisa - music player, you can browse your local music collection by genre, artist, album, or track, listen to online radio, create and manage playlists, display lyrics, and more
  • eSpeak NG Text-to-Speech - speech synthesizer, TTS that supports more than hundred languages and accents.
  • Kokoro TTS - CLI text-to-speech tool using the Kokoro model, supporting multiple languages, voices (with blending), and various input formats including EPUB books and PDF documents
  • MaryTTS (Multimodal Interaction Architecture) - multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system written in pure java
  • NewPipe - Streaming app for Android supporting YouTube, PeerTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and media.
  • Piper - A fast and local neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization.
  • Speaches - OpenAI API-compatible server supporting streaming transcription, translation, and speech generation. Speach-to-Text is powered by faster-whisper and for Text-to-Speech piper and Kokoro are used. This project aims to be Ollama, but for text to speech TTS / speech to text STT models.
  • Speech Note - take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so. Text and voice processing take place entirely offline, locally on your computer, without using a network connection. Your privacy is always respected. No data is sent to the Internet. Download models to use and generate subtitle SRT files.
  • Whisper - Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision

Backup & Sync

Section titled “Backup & Sync”
  • Garage - S3-compatible object store for small self-hosted geo-distributed deployments

Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency

Section titled “Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency”
  • Proton Wallet - self-custody wallet, meaning we use end-to-end encryption to ensure that you are the only one with access to your wallet’s encryption keys

Business & Commerce

Section titled “Business & Commerce”
  • Apache Superset - modern data exploration and visualization platform
  • Drawy - whiteboard, lets you create ideas, diagrams, and visual notes on an infinite whiteboard with a smooth and responsive canvas

CD/DVD Tools

Section titled “CD/DVD Tools”

Development

Section titled “Development”
  • Ansible - software tools that enables infrastructure as code
  • Bruno - Opensource IDE For Exploring and Testing API’s (lightweight alternative to Postman/Insomnia)
  • Bun - toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript apps include runtime, bundler, test runner and package manager. Fast JavaScript runtime designed as a drop-in replacement for Node.js. Written in Rust and powered by JavaScriptCore under the hood, reducing startup times and memory usage
  • Catppuccin - Soothing pastel themes for different software programs
  • ctags, etags - Generate tag files for source code
  • Data Display Debugger DDD - GNU DDD graphical front end for GDB and CUDA-GDB
  • DB Browser for SQLite - SQLite management, editing browser
  • DBeaver - Universal Database Manager and SQL Client for developers and database administrators. Strong in usability. Based on open source framework and allows writing of various extensions (plugins). It supports any database having a JDBC driver. There is a set of plugins for certain databases (MySQL, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra and Redis and different database management utilities (ER diagrams, data migration, metadata editors, and others.
  • Deno - JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly runtime with secure defaults and a great developer experience. It’s built on V8, Rust, and Tokio.
  • DevDocs - API Documentation Browser for online and offline, including programming languages, APIs and others
  • devenv - Define packages, languages, services, tasks, secrets, and tooling once. Gives developers and continuous integration (CI) fast, reproducible environments. Requires Nix package manager.
  • Drupal - web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License
  • Espanso - Privacy-first, cross-platform text expander
  • Faker - Test/fake data generation, also a Python package
  • Flatpak - formerly known as xdg-app is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. Offers a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation
  • Forgejo - self-hosted lightweight software code forge, easy to install and low maintenance
  • GCC - GNU Compiler Collection is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems
  • GDB - GNU Project Debugger for various languages
  • GDBGUI - browser front end to GDB (GNU debugger)
  • Gitea - software code forge that is fork of Gogs. Private self-hosted DevOps platform that gives teams and developers high-efficiency, easy-to-run operations from planning to production
  • Git - distributed version control
  • GitLab - software code forge with DevOps, security, software development life cycle, deployment and other functionality
  • GNOME - GNU Network Object Model Environment desktop environment for Linux/Unix like
  • GNU Emacs - An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
  • Helix - modal editor like vim with modern defaults and more built in features
  • Jujutsu JJ - Git-compatible VCS that is simple and powerful
  • Kate - Kate Advanced Text Editor for multi-document, multi-view text editor for programmers
  • KCachegrind - profile data visualization tool, used to determine the most time consuming parts in the execution of a program
  • KDiff3 - file and folder diff and merge tool
  • kondo - Cleans dependencies and build artifacts from your projects
  • Lazarus - Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development, uses Free Pascal
  • MariaDB - community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License
  • Mermaid Diagrams - create diagrams and visualizations using text and code
  • MkDocs and Material for MkDocs - documentation framework, static site for building project documentation
  • Neovim - hyperextensible Vim-based text editor
  • Notepad++ - text editor
  • PlantUML - Textual descriptions to draw UML diagrams. The generator can run anywhere within JVM and integrated with various application such as wiki, text editor, IDE, programming language, documentation generator, and others. Mostly based on Graphviz. Can render various diagram syntax such as PlantUML, Dot, and Ditaa.
  • Python programming language - Interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language. It provides combination of clarity and versatility, and is free and comprehensively ported
  • Radicle - peer-to-peer code collaboration stack, code forge built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow. Support local first work and P2P collaboration.
  • RStudio - IDE for R
  • Rust programming language - Multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety—meaning that all references point to valid memory without a garbage collector.
  • Spyder - IDE for scientific programming in the Python language
  • sqlc - generates fully type-safe idiomatic code from SQL in various programming language
  • Terraform or OpenTofu - infrastructure as code build and maintenance
  • Vim - text editor
  • WordPress - content management system (CMS), publishing platform of choice for millions of websites worldwide—from creators and small businesses to enterprises
  • Worktrunk - Git worktree management for parallel AI agent workflows

Education & Reference

Section titled “Education & Reference”
  • Gcompris - educational game used in schools
  • KTouch - typing tutor
  • Lokalize - locational tool, translation for free and open source software. It is also a general computer-aided translation system (CAT) with which you can translate OpenDocument files (*.odt). Translate-Toolkit extracts text for translation from .odt to .xliff files and merge translation back into .odt file.
  • Wikipedia - Free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration, using a wiki-based editing system
  • Zotero - Manage bibliographic data and research materials by helping you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research.

File Management

Section titled “File Management”
  • 7zip - file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as “archives”
  • Ark - graphical file compression/decompression utility with support for multiple formats, including tar, gzip, bzip2, rar and zip, as well as CD-ROM images. Ark can be used to browse, extract, create, and modify archives.
  • Clonezilla - drive cloning, drive imaging and system deployment utilities used to simplify deployment and maintenance of a group of computers
  • Dolphin - file manager to navigate and browse the contents of your hard drives, USB sticks, SD cards, and other storage. Creating, moving, or deleting files and folders. Feature rich like tabs, split view, view configuration, and integrated terminal and plugins.
  • Nautilus aka GNOME Files - file browser for GNOME, internally known by its historical name nautilus
  • Gopeed - Lightweight download manager (HTTP, BitTorrent, Magnet, others)
  • PeaZip - cross platform file manager and file archiver
  • Persepolis Download Manager - Download manager in Python
  • superfile - terminal file manager cross platform
  • Yazi - terminal file manager with previews and async I/O

File Sharing

Section titled “File Sharing”
  • qBittorrent - alternative to µTorrent and ad free, runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, OS/2, Windows).
  • croc - Easily and securely send things from one computer to another
  • LocalSend - Share files without the cloud. Fast, private, offline and cross platform.
  • Syncthing - Continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers/devices in real time
  • Transmission - BitTorrent client which features a variety of user interfaces on top of a cross-platform back-end
  • Varia - Download manager that supports regular downloads, torrents and videos
  • wormhole - private file transfer from computer to computer

Games

Section titled “Games”
  • GNU Emacs - An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor with games like Tetris, Towers of Hanoi

Gaming Software

Section titled “Gaming Software”
  • EmuDeck - installation script for setting up emulation on the SteamOS platform. It provides pre-configured official options for users, managing emulator installation, configuration, bezels, hotkeys, and performance enhancements.
  • Lemuroid - emulation project for Android based on Libretro with goal of ease of use, Android integration and good user experience
  • Lutris - open gaming platform for Linux. Lutris helps you install and play video games from all eras and from most gaming systems

Home & Family

Section titled “Home & Family”
  • Home assistant - Home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts

Network & Admin

Section titled “Network & Admin”
  • Argo CD - declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes
  • Azure Resource Inventory - create inventory of Azure Resources, including resource view, documentation, network diagrams
  • Caddy - Reverse proxy, Fast and extensible multi-platform HTTP/1-2-3 web server with automatic HTTPS
  • Cockpit - web based interface for servers, intended for everyone like Linux admins and new users
  • Docker - set of products that uses operating system-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Docker automates the deployment of applications within lightweight containers, enabling them to run consistently across different computing environments
  • Dozzle - Realtime log viewer for containers. Supports Docker, Swarm and K8s
  • frp - Fast reverse proxy to help you expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet
  • GNOME Boxes - Select an operating system and let Boxes download and install it for you in a virtual machine. Virtualization platform
  • Grafana - full stack observability with Loki for logging.
  • Headlamp - Kubernetes web UI for local or in cluster use
  • Helm - find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes; managing Kubernetes applications with charts, which are easy to create, version, share, and publish
  • iroh - IP addresses break, dial keys instead. Modular networking stack - The fastest route is a direct connection, so if necessary, iroh tries to hole-punch. Should this fail, it can fall back to an open ecosystem of public relay servers
  • Kamal - Application deployment anywhere from bare metal, VMs, to cloud, will work with any type of containerized web app
  • Kitty - Terminal that is cross-platform (MacOS, Linux), fast, feature-rich, and GPU based
  • Kubernetes - also known as K8s, is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications
  • Netbox - platform for network and infrastructure management and automation, network source of truth, asset inventory, machine management
  • Podman desktop - Manage Podman and other container engines from a single UI and tray
  • Podman TUI - Podman terminal user interface
  • Portainer - lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and ACI environments
  • Prometheus - Monitor applications, systems, and services. Instrument, collect, store, and query your metrics for alerting, dashboarding, and other use cases
  • Qemu - Machine emulator (Quick EMUlator) and virtualizer for virtualization. It emulates the machine’s processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems
  • Remmina - Remote access screen and file sharing to your desktop
  • Teleport - connectivity, authentication, access controls and audit for infrastructure including single sign on (SSO)
  • Virtman - Virtual Machine manager
  • VirtualBox - general-purpose full virtualization software for various hardware, targeted at laptop, desktop, server and embedded use.
  • Winboat - Windows apps on Linux using virtualization and containers.
  • Wine - Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just “Wine” is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems
  • Wireshark - packet analyzer used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education

News & Books

Section titled “News & Books”
  • Calibre - cross-platform suite of e-book software
  • Newsboat - RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals

Office & Productivity

Section titled “Office & Productivity”
  • Fairmail - privacy oriented email app for Android
  • LibreOffice - office productivity software suite, like Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others for document creation, spreadsheets, presentations, and other office documents.
  • Nextcloud - suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services
  • Okular - document viewer supporting PDF, images, books, epub, and more
  • Onlyoffice - office suite
  • Org Mode - Mode for keeping notes, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and more — in a fast and effective plain text system.
  • Pandoc - universal document converter
  • Proton tools - Mail, VPN, Drive open source tools
  • Thunderbird - cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client
  • ttyd - Share your terminal over the web
  • Visidata - tool for tabular data which combines the clarity of a spreadsheet and efficiency of the terminal

Online Services

Section titled “Online Services”
  • F-Droid - app store and software repository for Android, serving a similar function to the Google Play store

OS & Utilities

Section titled “OS & Utilities”
  • alacritty - terminal emulator, URLs can open, search, VI bindings
  • Bash - Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell
  • BleachBit - Tool to delete junk files, shred sensitive data, and keep your system running clean. It deletes unnecessary files such as cache and cookies to enhance privacy and disk space efficiency on Linux and Windows. It supports numerous applications including web browsers, office suites, and multimedia tools.
  • BusyBox - a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file
  • Ceph - software-defined storage platform that implements object storage
  • CopyQ - Clipboard manager that saves everything you copy and lets you search, edit, and organize it across tabs. Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux
  • Cursor Clip - Reliable Wayland clipboard manager with Windows 11–style clipboard history interface with native GNOME design, which is always positioned at the current mouse pointer location
  • Ghostty - Fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
  • GNU - “GNU is Not Unix” core software to GNU/Linux systems
  • GNU/Linux - operating system
  • grex - Generate a matching regular expression from the test cases you provide, also has Rust library and Python bindings
  • Grub - GNU project’s bootloader software
  • htop - interactive system-monitor process-viewer and process-manager
  • Kanata - cross-platform software keyboard remapper
  • KDE Desktop environment for Linux/Unix like
  • Konsole - terminal
  • KVM - virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor
  • Linux Kernel - family of free and open-source software Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Distributions include Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Mint, Arch, openSUSE, RedHat, Kali and others.
  • MicroG - Implementation of proprietary Google libraries that serves as a replacement for Google Play Services on the Android operating system
  • Microsoft PowerToys - Collection of utilities for productivity and customization on Windows
  • Nix and NixOS - Tool for package management and system configuration to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems
  • Recoll - Full-text search for desktop, covering files, contents, messages, and other document formats
  • Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way
  • systemd - provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems - aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions
  • Termux - terminal emulator for Android
  • The Fuck - corrects errors in previous console commands
  • Xonsh - full-featured and cross-platform Python-based shell

Photos & Graphics

Section titled “Photos & Graphics”
  • Inkscape - vector image and graphics editor for illustrator, designer, web designer and others. Flexible drawing, broad file formats, text tools, and curve tools.
  • Blender - Blender 3D computer graphics software tool set
  • Excalidraw - virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard, collaborative and end-to-end encrypted
  • gImageReader - Optical Character Recognition (OCR), A Gtk/Qt front-end to tesseract-ocr
  • Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor[5] used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats
  • ImageMagick - editing and manipulating digital images. It can be used to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images, and supports a wide range of file formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and Ultra HDR
  • ImageMagick
  • Terminal

References

Section titled “References”

Mobile Apps

Section titled “Mobile Apps”
Section titled “External Links”

Archived Software

Section titled “Archived Software”
  • Kottster - Instant Node.js admin panel. Secure, self-hosted, and easy to set up