Applications and Software Fort GNU/Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2025

• Applications

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Stop Using Docker and Try One of These 4 Alternatives Instead

    Are you looking for an alternative to Docker that’s fully open source and doesn’t have any vendor-lock in? Well, there are four tools that you can use which are completely free of Docker’s influence.

    Each tool has its own pros and cons, but thanks to the open source community and the Open Container Initiative (OCI), you’ll still have a large pool of containers to use, even without direct Docker integration.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ I Wish I'd Discovered This Ultra-Simple File Server a Long Time Ago

    Are you looking for the easiest way to launch a file server for either internal or external access? Copyparty is what you’ve been looking for. With the ability to launch with zero configuration, Copyparty gets you a file server up and running in seconds.

    What Is Copyparty?

    I love living in the modern open source age. There seems to be easy-to-configure software for just about everything these days. Copyparty is one such piece of open source software I wish existed many years ago.

    With Copyparty, you can easily set up a file server on any computer at your house. I used it on both my high-end Docker server and my old Raspberry Pi 3b, and it worked great on both systems. At its core, Copyparty is designed to deploy an ultra-lightweight file server with little-to-no configuration required.

• Productivity Software

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Tired of LibreOffice? The Open Source ONLYOFFICE Just Got a Big Update

    The open source office application ONLYOFFICE had its first point release since June on Wednesday, and it comes with a bevy of new features for its "Desktop Editors" suite of apps. They include a document recovery function, faster spreadsheet functions, and PDF annotation tools.

    In its release announcement blog post, ONLYOFFICE showed off the new document recovery functionality debuting in version 9.1. From now on, when the app crashes or if you have an unexpected shutdown, you can recover—presumably—most if not all of your unsaved changes simply by restarting the application. I know I've had my share of unsaved document disasters, so this seems like a much-needed improvement.

    ONLYOFFICE'S PDF editor is seeing several improvements with this release too, namely a redaction tool for documents containing confidential and sensitive info. There are other new annotation tools too, for drawing circles, rectangles, arrows, and connected lines in your PDFs. There's added support for inserting charts, too.

• Web Browsers

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Experimental Browser Engine Servo Just Got Its First Release

    Servo started as a project under Mozilla to create a next-generation browser engine, but now it's an independent project. Today marks the release of Servo 0.0.1, and you can try it out on your computer.

    Servo is an experimental browser engine written in the Rust programming language, intended as an alternative to Chrome's Blink, Apple's WebKit, and Mozilla's Gecko. There was already a basic web browser shell you could download to try out the engine, but only with nightly builds that were fully automated and not tested at all.

    The first versioned release, Sero v0.0.1, is now available on the GitHub releases page. The Servo team hopes to publish a new release each month, which should be (somewhat) more stable than the previous experience with nightly builds. The Servo website downloads page still only links to the nightly builds.

    A blog post explained, "We plan to publish such a tagged release every month. For now, we are adopting a simple release process where we will use a recent nightly build and perform additional manual testing to identify issues and regressions before tagging and publishing the binaries."