Free and Open Source Software, howtos and Installations

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Feb 05, 2026

• Ampere - lightweight music player - LinuxLinks

  Every music library is unique, and selecting the right open-source music player can truly elevate your listening experience, especially if you have a large collection.

  Ampere is a native GUI-based playlist-based audio player written in Python and Qt. It’s free and open source software that runs on Linux and Windows.

• Whosthere - Local Area Network discovery tool - LinuxLinks

  Whosthere performs unprivileged, concurrent scans using mDNS and SSDP scanners. Additionally, it sweeps the local subnet by attempting TCP/UDP connections to trigger ARP resolution, then reads the ARP cache to identify devices on your Local Area Network. This technique populates the ARP cache without requiring elevated privileges. All discovered devices are enhanced with OUI lookups to display manufacturers when available.

  Whosthere provides a friendly, intuitive way to answer the question every network administrator asks: “Who’s there on my network?”

  This is free and open source software.

• qui - qBittorrent web UI - LinuxLinks

  qui is a fast, modern web interface for qBittorrent. It supports managing multiple qBittorrent instances from a single, lightweight application.

  This is free and open source software.

• pproftui - terminal-based diagnostic tool - LinuxLinks

  pproftui is a terminal-based UI for Go’s pprof that makes profiling interactive, intuitive, and fast.

  It’s designed to help you pinpoint performance issues without the context-switching of a web browser and to provide built-in explanations for profiling concepts.

  This is free and open source software.

• FTB - terminal-based file browser - LinuxLinks

  Built with high-performance optimizations including smart memory management, asynchronous file operations, and object pooling for smooth user experience.

  Some parts of the UI are not translated to English.

  This is free and open source software.

• Hamr - desktop launcher - LinuxLinks

  Hamr is an extensible launcher for Hyprland and Niri built with Quickshell.

  Hamr learns from your usage patterns to surface what you need, when you need it. Type a few characters to launch apps, calculate math, search files, access clipboard history, and more.

  Hamr consists of several components that work together:

  hamr-daemon: Core service that manages plugins and search. hamr-gtk: GTK4 launcher UI (what you see when you press the hotkey). hamr-cli: Command-line interface for testing and control. hamr-tui: Terminal UI for headless environments.

  This is free and open source software.

• pnana - modern terminal text editor - LinuxLinks

  pnana is a modern terminal text editor built with FTXUI, inspired by Nano, Micro, and Sublime Text. It provides a friendly user interface, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and powerful editing features.

  This is free and open source software.

• SnipText - screen capture OCR tool - LinuxLinks

  SnipText is a screen capture OCR tool. Select a screen area, get text in the clipboard.

  Useful for extracting text from images, PDFs, videos, or any non-selectable content without manual retyping.

  This is free and open source software.

• ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: BIOS - LinuxLinks

  This is a series of articles looking at the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H running Linux. In this series, I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail from a Linux perspective.

  The barebone machine was supplied by ASRock Industrial, a respected Taiwanese manufacturer of computer hardware including AI Box computers and embedded motherboards.

  For this article in the series, I’m going to take you through the options available in the BIOS using a standard USB video capture card. So what’s the BIOS?

• Kickoff - Minimalistic program launcher - LinuxLinks

  Kickoff is heavily inspired by rofi, but not without changes made. Like many programs, kickoff was born from an itch that no existing program seemed to offer, and as an opportunity to learn Rust.

  This is free and open source software.

• Garden Party - manage your garden - LinuxLinks

  Garden Party is an application designed to help novice gardeners manage their gardens.

  This is a web application developed with Ruby on Rails that assists gardeners with gardening planning and tasks management with own self or through collaboration with other community gardeners.

  This is free and open source software.