Best Free and Open Source Software, howtos and Installations

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 20, 2025

• 8 Best Free and Open Source Restic Wrappers - LinuxLinks

  Whether a computer is being used in a corporate environment, or for private use, the machine’s hard disk may fail without any warning signs. Alternatively, some data loss occurs as a result of human error. Without regular backups being made, data will inevitably be lost even if the services of a specialist recovery organisation are used.

  restic is a backup program that is fast, efficient and secure. It encrypts the backup, it’s easy to script, and offers built-in version control, retention periods, and purging. It also offers cross-platform support with coverage including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Windows.

  The restic command-line interface can be a bit overwhelming and difficult to manage if you have many different locations that you want to backup to multiple locations.

  Step forward these wrappers which help to make restic easier to use.

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

• Awake on Lan remotely wakes up computers - LinuxLinks

  Awake on LAN is a simple application that allows you to wake up computers remotely using Wake-on-LAN packets. You can keep track of computers by adding, removing, and editing them with their MAC addresses, and you can start them remotely with the click of a button.

  This is free and open source software.

• Azahar is a Nintendo 3DS emulator based on Citra - LinuxLinks

  Azahar is a Nintendo 3DS emulator based on Citra

  It was created from the merging of PabloMK7’s Citra fork and the Lime3DS project, both of which emerged shortly after Citra was taken down. The goal of this project is to be the de-facto platform for future development.

  This is free and open source software.

• passage - age-backed password manager - LinuxLinks

  passage is a fork of password-store that uses age as a backend instead of GnuPG.

  This is free and open source software.

• sic offers image processing and conversion - LinuxLinks

  sic (sic image cli) is a command-line tool and image crate to convert images and perform image operations.

  It allows you to manipulate images using image operations and convert images between various formats. Both static and animated images are supported.

  This is free and open source software.

• whalespotter finds big files and directories - LinuxLinks

  whalespotter is a convenient TUI application to quickly locate large files and folders.

  Hit ctrl-q to quit ↑ and ↓ to select and enter to open”, enter to open the selected directory (in whalespotter) or file (with xdg-open) esc to either unselect, or go to parent, or quit pageUp and pageDown to scroll F5 to refresh

  This is free and open source software.

• Wrestic is a Restic wrapper built in Rust - LinuxLinks

  Wrestic is a backup tool that provides a wrapper around Restic, a popular backup program.

  With Wrestic, you can easily configure and run backups of your files and directories, and take advantage of Restic’s powerful features such as deduplication, encryption, and compression. Whether you need to back up your personal files or your organization’s data, Wrestic can help you automate the process and ensure your data is safe and secure.

  This is free and open source software.

• passfzf is a simple fzf wrapper for pass - LinuxLinks

  passfzf is a simple fzf wrapper for pass (the UNIX password-store).

  It supports pass-tomb but does not require it, and allows fuzzy finding your pass passwords to copy, show, edit, delete, rename and duplicate them. It also supports adding add or generating new passwords, as well as synchronizing the password store with a remote git repository.

  fd, fzf and pass are mandatory dependencies and should be available from the package manager of any distribution. git and pass-tomb are optional.

  This is free and open source software.

• Linux Candy: doge - simple motd script - LinuxLinks

  Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only featuring open-source software in this series.

  If you spend all day embroiled in political in-fighting, battling red tape nonsense, coding an innovative program in Python, sit in countless meetings wishing you were relaxing on a Caribbean island, you’ll need some light relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more fun.

  doge is a simple motd (message of the day) script based on the slightly stupid but very funny doge meme. The contents of /etc/motd are displayed by login after a successful login but just before it executes the login shell.