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Proprietary Software Depends on Free Software and "TuxMate is Like Ninite but for Linux"
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HowTo Geek ☛ Why your favorite paid software wouldn't exist without open source
Software makes the world go round, and more often than not you have to pay a pretty penny for the biggest and most popular software packages. Which is more than a little ironic when you consider that just about any software you pay for today is built at least partly on the work of free and open source developers.
Most commercial software is assembled, not invented
In the early days of computing, even the early days of the modern PC, software was usually written from scratch, but as the complexity of operating systems and software began to grow, it just didn't make sense to keep reinventing the wheel. So software became modular. Instead of writing a function by hand, you'd call that function from a shared library.
Just like any software, some libraries are proprietary and have to be licensed from the owner, but many others are open-source. Wikipedia maintains a comprehensive list of open source software libraries if you want to see just how many different ones there are. I'd feel pretty confident in saying that nearly all software you use today does rely on at least one of these libraries.
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XDA ☛ TuxMate is like Ninite but for Linux, and it supports every major distro
Fresh-install day is always the same kind of chaos. You know what you want, but you still end up juggling package names, repos, and whichever “right” installer your distro prefers this week. Even if you keep a notes file, the process turns into a scavenger hunt once you mix in proprietary apps, codecs, and the occasional “wait, what was that package called again?” TuxMate exists to compress that first-hour busywork into something you can repeat without thinking.
Ninite earned its reputation on Windows by bundling common apps into a quick, low-drama setup flow. Linux has always had the pieces to do the same thing, but they’re scattered across package managers and formats that don’t agree on names or sources. TuxMate takes that mess seriously, and it tries to make the “new machine” routine feel predictable again. It’s not a package manager replacement, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a practical layer on top of what you already use.