Best Free and Open Source Softwares

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 26, 2024

• 13 Best Free and Open Source Linux Disk Cloning Tools - LinuxLinks

  One of the key responsibilities of a system administrator is to ensure the safety of an organization’s computer data. This is a critical task for any organization, given that the loss of important data could have profound implications on its future prosperity.

  There are a number of different strategies that a system administrator will need to use to ensure that data is preserved. For example, the person will need to maintain the computer system and/or network, by applying operating system updates and patches, by performing regular backups, and ensuring that the system is kept secure at all times. Disk cloning is a highly popular method of performing comprehensive backups of the operating system, installed software, and an organization’s data with the minimum of effort.

• 11 Best Free and Open Source Ray Tracing Software - LinuxLinks

  On a spectrum of computational cost and visual fidelity, ray tracing-based rendering techniques from ray casting, recursive ray tracing, distribution ray tracing, photon mapping to path tracing are generally slower and higher fidelity than scanline rendering methods. Ray tracing was therefore first deployed in applications where taking a relatively long time to render could be tolerated, such as in still computer-generated images, and film and television visual effects (VFX), but was less suited to real-time applications such as video games, where speed is critical in rendering each frame. A good graphics card can use ray tracing to enhance immersion, but not all GPUs can handle this technique.

  Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart. We only include free and open source software.

• Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Blogger - LinuxLinks

  Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

  What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

  In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• Visionaray - C++ ray tracing template library - LinuxLinks

  Visionaray is a cross-platform ray tracing framework.

  There’s also a viewer available. It supports a number of 3D file formats. The viewer is primarily targeted at developers, as a tool for debugging and testing.

  This is free and open source software.

• MiniLight - minimal global illumination renderer - LinuxLinks

  MiniLight is a command-line minimal global illumination renderer. It reads a simple text model file and writes a PPM image file.

  It is primarily an exercise in simplicity. But that makes it a good base and benchmark (in some sense) for development and experimentation. And it just might be the neatest renderer around (on average, about 650 lines). There are translations into several programming languages.

  This is free and open source software.

• MantaRay - advanced open-source renderer - LinuxLinks

  MantaRay is an advanced renderer.

  It uses modern rendering techniques to generate photorealistic images of complex scenes.

  This is free and open source software.

• Embree - high-performance ray tracing library - LinuxLinks

  It targets graphics application developers to improve the performance of photo-realistic rendering applications. Embree is optimized towards production rendering, by putting focus on incoherent ray performance, high quality acceleration structure construction, a rich feature set, accurate primitive intersection, and low memory consumption.

  This is free and open source software.

• Foxclone - image backup, restore and clone tool - LinuxLinks

  Foxclone is a Linux based image backup, restore and clone tool using a simple point and click interface. It takes images of the partitions on your hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) and stores them for later restoration. Image files are compressed to save space.

  Foxclone is a front end for the terminal-based Partclone.

  This is free and open source software.