Best Free and Open Source Software, howtos and Installations

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 12, 2025

• 3 Best Free and Open Source Linux Magnifying Tools - LinuxLinks

  Accessibility is the degree to which products, devices, services, or environments are available to as many people as possible whatever their circumstances. Accessibility can be viewed as the ability to access and benefit from a system or entity. Accessibility is paramount. Social inclusion is not an act of charity but a fundamental human right.

  This roundup focuses on screen magnification accessibility tools.

  Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

• Tangram is an interesting Linux web browser - LinuxLinks

  This type of software application is responsible for retrieving and presenting information held on the World Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the internet. Web browsers allow users to view web pages which often contain a mixture of text, images, videos, and other multimedia.

  There are many different web browsers available for Linux, the most used are Google Chrome and Firefox. However, the market dominance of Google Chrome and Firefox does not mean that they are necessarily the best web browser for every situation.

  Tangram is a different type of browser. This software is designed to organise and run web applications with each tab being persistent and independent.

• grim - screenshot utility for Wayland - LinuxLinks

  grim is a command-line utility to take screenshots of Wayland desktops.

  It currently needs support for the screencopy protocol to work. Support for the xdg-output protocol is optional, but improves fractional scaling support.

• Defold is a cross-platform game engine - LinuxLinks

  Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of console, desktop, mobile and web games. There are no up-front costs, no licensing fees and no royalties.

• Pluto - simple reactive notebooks for Julia - LinuxLinks

  Notebooks are saved as pure Julia files (sample), which you can then import as if you had been programming in a regular editor all along. You can also export your notebook with cell outputs as attractive HTML and PDF documents. By reordering cells and hiding code, you have full control over how you tell your story.

  Pluto needs Julia to be installed.

  This is free and open source software.

• Bitwarden CLI - access and manage your vault - LinuxLinks

  The Bitwarden command-line interface (CLI) is a powerful, fully-featured tool for accessing and managing your vault. Most features that you find in other Bitwarden client applications (desktop, browser extension, etc.) are available from the CLI.

  This is free and open source software.

• Quarto is a scientific and technical publishing system - LinuxLinks

  Quarto is also a multi-language, next generation version of R Markdown from Posit, with many new features and capabilities. Like R Markdown, Quarto uses knitr to execute R code, and is therefore able to render most existing Rmd files without modification.

  Quarto includes native support for Observable JS, a set of JavaScript enhancements created by the author of D3. Observable JS uses a reactive execution model, and is especially well suited for interactive data exploration and analysis.

  This is free and open source software.

• Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data - LinuxLinks

  Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of 46 tools and 156 plugins dedicated to making working with structured data as productive as possible.

  This is free and open source software.