Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on May 08, 2025

• Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Siri - LinuxLinks

  Apple Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) is a digital assistant which helps you with the things you need to find, know or do every day.

  Siri is proprietary software and is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives. There are very few options available.

• Typewriter - create documents with typst - LinuxLinks

  Typewriter lets you create documents with typst, a new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.

  This is free and open source software.

• bandwhich is a terminal bandwidth utilization tool - LinuxLinks

  bandwhich sniffs a given network interface and records IP packet size, cross referencing it with the /proc filesystem on linux, lsof on macOS, or using WinApi on windows. It is responsive to the terminal window size, displaying less info if there is no room for it. It will also attempt to resolve ips to their host name in the background using reverse DNS on a best effort basis.

  This is free and open source software.

• buku - bookmark management utility written in Python - LinuxLinks

  buku is a powerful bookmark manager and a personal textual mini-web. There’s no tracking, hidden history, obsolete records, usage analytics or homing.

  buku can import bookmarks from browser(s) or fetch the title, tags and description of a URL from the web. Use your favourite editor to add, compose and update bookmarks. Search bookmarks instantly with multiple search options, including regex and a deep scan mode (handy with URLs).

  This is free and open source software.

• Cauldron reads articles stored in Pocket - LinuxLinks

  Cauldron is a GNOME desktop application written in Rust that allows you to read articles stored in your Pocket account. It is built using the GTK toolkit as the graphical library.

  This is free and open source software.

• xdaliclock is an advanced xclock substitute - LinuxLinks

  xdaliclock (Dali Clock) is a digital clock. When a digit changes, it “melts” into its new shape. The date is displayed when the mouse is pressed. The window can be made transparent, and foreground and background colors change smoothly, and it works as a countdown timer.

  It is available for Linux (X11), macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android, Palm WebOS, PalmOS Classic, Monochron, Pebble and TRS-80 CoCo.

  This is free and open source software.