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!
Photoshop (almost) right in your browser, desktop or mobile, also as PWA or even selfhosted
MakeHuman is a 3D character creation software designed to simplify the creation of virtual humans through a graphical user interface. The software allows users to create realistic human characters by adjusting parameters like gender, age, height, weight, and ethnicity through slider controls. Characters can be customized with clothes, hair, poses, and materials from the built-in library and exported to 3D soft, like Blender.
I love that it has a gender slider
I imagine it affects several parameters that you can also change separately in a CLI, allowing for a multidimensional gender scale.
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…
PairDrop like Localsend or Airdrop but working on anything that has an internet connection and a resonably new web Browser! You can share files even when on different networks, by pairing devices. Works like a charm.
Typst: A modern typesetting system designed for easy document creation with markup inspired by Markdown but more powerful and programmable.
Linguist translator extension (Chromium, Firefox). Multi-engine (customizable), TTS, translate pages, selected text, words, inclusion in context menu, offline translation, privacy focused, 130 languages.
tag studio It’s a file manager designed to use tags instead of files because tags are a much better system. It’s still in alpha and I haven’t actually tested it yet but I plan to use it instead of regular file managers once it becomes stable and well supported.
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.
Krita is a fantastic program for drawing. It’s made for making beautiful paintings and animations.
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.
alternativeto.net is great for finding these
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.
Shattered pixel dungeon. Open source dungeob crawler roguelike. Extremely fun.
Inkscape - the best vector graphics program out there. So easy to use, and so powerful.
Tox is easy-to-use software that connects you with friends and family without anyone else listening in. While other big-name services require you to pay for features, Tox is completely free and comes without advertising. Chat, P2P serverless, screen/file sharing, voice, video, groups, encrypted.
