Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sep 21, 2025

• Essentialist - simple, private, and cross-platform flashcard app - LinuxLinks

  Essentialist is a minimalist flashcard app for seamless studying and note-taking in Markdown.

  Your flashcard decks are just simple Markdown files, which means you can create cards directly while taking notes. This is a perfect workflow for students and anyone who takes notes and wants to quickly turn them into study material. Each card is defined by a simple H2 header (## Your Card Title).

• 4 Best Free and Open Source Ruby Linter Tools - LinuxLinks

  Linters are useful tools for maintaining code quality and consistency in your Ruby applications. They analyze code for potential issues, enforce coding standards, and help catch errors before they are pushed into production. Linters are not necessarily a quick fix, can be a distraction, and it’s not inconceivable that they may not be helpful with old, large code bases.

  This article picks some useful tools to help you fix Ruby code.

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

• buildaur - AUR helper with asp support - LinuxLinks

  The AUR is an software repository for Arch Linux users and their self created or packaged software which is not in an official repository. Packages are not stored traditionally as packages, like in a normal software repository. They are stored as ‘PKGBUILD’s which are used in a makeprocess to create and install the package itself. An AUR helper is an program which does this job for you, just like a normal package manager like pacman. Buildaur is an AUR helper.

  -asp: The ‘-asp’ option has in the first case nothing to do with the AUR itself, it’s rather a function which is very important for Arch Linux ARM. It builds a specified package, which may or may not be in the official Arch Linux ARM repository, but is in the one for x86_64, completely from the source and installs it. This is useful because some packages are not yet ported to ARM but may work.

  This is free and open source software.

• 9 Useful Free and Open Source Scrobbler Tools - LinuxLinks

  This information creates a personal listening history on a profile, which can be used to generate statistics, get personalized music recommendations, and connect with other users’ musical tastes. The term “scrobble” can also refer to the individual data point or “play” of a song that is logged

  This article picks some useful tools to help you scrobble.

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

• Peroxide - terminal-based SSH connection manager - LinuxLinks

  Peroxide is a terminal-based SSH connection manager, featuring an intuitive TUI interface for managing and connecting to your SSH servers.

  This is free and open source software.

• Mixer - change the volume of apps - LinuxLinks

  Mixer is a no-frills volume mixer, with simplicity and usability at its core.

  This is free and open source software.

• pyvim - implementation of Vim in Python - LinuxLinks

  pyvim is an implementation of Vim in Python. There are no C extensions. This makes development a lot faster. It’s easy to prototype and integrate new features.

  This is free and open source software.