Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Nov 22, 2025

• Aeryth - AppImage to Package Converter - LinuxLinks

  Aeryth is a powerful shell script designed to convert .AppImage files into native distribution packages (.deb for Debian/Ubuntu, and .pkg.tar.zst for Arch Linux). It can run in a fully interactive mode using dialog menus, or non-interactively via command-line arguments for automation and scripting.

  The script is designed to be cross-distribution compatible. When run on a non-target distribution (e.g., creating an Arch package on a Debian system), it will automatically set up a chroot environment to perform the build, ensuring maximum compatibility.

  This is free and open source software.

• Feather - YouTube Music TUI - LinuxLinks

  Feather is a lightweight, efficient, and locally hosted YouTube Music TUI built with Rust.

  It is designed to provide a minimalistic yet powerful music streaming experience directly from YouTube, using yt-dlp and mpv.

  This is free and open source software.

• 11 Best Free and Open Source Graphical Volume Mixers - LinuxLinks

  Instead of changing the overall system volume, this type of software lets you control the sound for specific programs, like turning down the volume for a game while keeping a internet radio streamer playing at its current level, or muting a browser tab without silencing everything.

  Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion here. We only include graphical-based tools in this roundup. We will be shortly publishing a separate roundup for terminal-based volume mixers.

• netcheck - checks network connectivity - LinuxLinks

  netcheck is a CLI tool to check network connectivity.

  netcheck is designed to be run periodically, saving results to files from which netcheck-plot can be used to create plots showing packet loss over time.

  By default netcheck is silent unless there is packet loss. This is convenient when run from cron.

• Prefixer - Proton prefix management tool - LinuxLinks

  Prefixer is a tool for managing Steam Proton prefixes, seeking to replace protontricks with a friendlier interface, faster responses and modular approach.

  Prefixer was designed to be as user-friendly as possible, so it should be easy to get started.

  This is free and open source software.

• Imagot - image viewer - LinuxLinks

  Imagot is a basic graphical image viewer. It’s sort of an alternative to xnview/irfanview.

  This is free and open source software.

• boxunbox - simple symlinker inspired by stow - LinuxLinks

  boxunbox is a simple symlinker inspired by stow.

  The developer write this software because he wanted to be able to control where each individual folder got linked and the way stow handles the .stowrc files isn’t very intuitive in his opinion.

  This is free and open source software.