Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Mar 10, 2026,
updated Mar 10, 2026

• doot - simple dotfiles manager - LinuxLinks

  doot is billed as a fast, simple and intuitive dotfiles manager that just gets the job done.

  Simply run doot (or doot install) from anywhere in your system. It will symlink all files in your dotfiles directory to your home directory, creating directories as needed. The subsequent runs will incrementally update the symlinks, adding the new files and directories, and removing references to files that are no longer in the dotfiles directory.

  This is free and open source software.

• PixelBatch - batch image optimization tool - LinuxLinks

  PixelBatch is a powerful, user-friendly desktop application for batch image optimization on Linux.

  Optimize hundreds of images at once while preserving quality, reducing file sizes, and saving disk space.

  This is free and open source software.

• Bobby - browse SQLite files - LinuxLinks

  Bobby lets you open SQLite database files (.db, .sqlite) and browse the tables inside. It’s useful for app development or inspecting downloaded databases.

  This is free and open source software.

• Chuwi CoreBook Air Plus running Linux: Battery Life - LinuxLinks

  When looking at battery life, it doesn’t really matter what a laptop idles at or what usage is under full load.

  As indicated in my power consumption article, the screen brightness plays a big part in how many hours you’ll get from a full charge. There are many other factors that play a part including CPU, iGPU, backlight, draw from USB devices etc.

  To give an idea of battery life, I have maintained LinuxLinks with the laptop over many days. Maintaining the website involves a wide range of software including web browsers, RStudio, building and evaluating software, manipulating images, etc.

  Here’s the Info Centre output showing the energy consumption for an hour.

• ytdl-gui - graphical interface for yt-dlp - LinuxLinks

  ytdl-gui is a simple-to-use, cross-platform graphical interface for yt-dlp. This is a fork of the original youtubedl-gui by JaGoLi.

  This is a simple-to-use tool to download videos or audios from various sources including Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo… It support more than 1000 websites and 8 different formats including mp3, mp4 and webm. You can chose between different resolutions and audio quality. It also support downloading whole playlists.

  This is free and open source software.

• voxcii - terminal-based ASCII 3D model viewer - LinuxLinks

  voxcii is a terminal-based ASCII 3D model viewer written in C++.

  This is free and open source software.

• FreeShow - Linux presentation application - LinuxLinks

  FreeShow is a presentation application designed for displaying lyrics, scriptures, announcements, and multimedia content on large screens. It is commonly used in churches and live events to present song lyrics, sermon notes, and other information to audiences. The software provides tools for creating, organising, and presenting slides while supporting multiple display outputs and flexible presentation workflows.

  The application offers a modern interface for building presentations and managing media such as images and videos. FreeShow supports features useful in live environments including stage displays for presenters, remote control from mobile devices, and automation tools such as timers and slide transitions. It aims to provide a powerful open source alternative to commercial worship presentation software while remaining easy to use.

  This is free and open source software.

• gohan - static site generator written in Go - LinuxLinks

  gohan is a simple, fast static site generator written in Go featuring incremental builds, syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, and a live-reload dev server.

  This is free and open source software.

• 39 Best Free and Open Source Linux Backup Tools - LinuxLinks

  Linux offers a wide range of backup solutions. Traditional command line tools such as rsync, tar, and dump provide powerful and flexible methods for creating backups, but they may be intimidating for beginners. To address this, many projects provide graphical interfaces that simplify scheduling, managing backup locations, and restoring files. Other tools focus on advanced techniques such as incremental backups, deduplication, encryption, and filesystem snapshots.

  In this article we explore a diverse range of Linux backup utilities, including user-friendly graphical applications, snapshot-based backup systems, and robust command line tools designed for automation and scripting.

  To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, we have compiled a list of 39 high quality free backup tools. These programs help individuals and organisations protect their data and ensure that important files can be recovered quickly when problems occur.

• Walt - wallpaper manager for Hyprland - LinuxLinks

  Walt is a wallpaper manager for Hyprland with both a terminal UI and a native desktop GUI.

  It lets you browse, preview, apply, randomize, and rotate wallpapers using hyprpaper, while keeping the TUI fast for keyboard-heavy workflows and the GUI focused on preview-driven browsing.

  This is free and open source software.

• conceal - operate the recycle bin - LinuxLinks

  conceal is a command line recycle bin utility that follows the FreeDesktop.org Trash specification and offers a safer alternative to permanent deletion by moving files into a trash location. Users can send files to the trash, inspect discarded items, restore entries to their original location, remove selected items permanently, and clean the trash when needed.

  The project also supports integration with fuzzy finders such as fzf and skim for interactive selection when restoring or deleting files.

  This is free and open source software.

• Nibble - local network scanning tool - LinuxLinks

  Nibble is a CLI tool for local network scanning that focuses on speed and ease of use.

  Select a network interface, and Nibble scans your local subnet. Lists hosts, hardware manufacturer, open ports and their services.

  This is free and open source software.

• Color My Desktop - personalize your Linux desktop with custom generated themes - LinuxLinks

  Color My Desktop is an easy to use tool for creating, managing, and applying custom color palettes to custom generated themes for the gnome-shell/ KDE-Plasma / GTK4 apps.

  It also includes options for creating Vesktop, Zen-browser, and YouTube themes with your colors, allowing for easy and uniform customization of your desktop environment.

  This is free and open source software.

• Backup with these Linux DeDuplicating Encryption Tools - LinuxLinks

  With data growing in volume, improving storage utilization is pretty important. In computing, data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data. This technique therefore improves storage utilization.

  Data is not only of interest to its creator. Governments, competitors, criminals, snoopers may be very keen to access your data. They might want to steal your data, extort money from you, or see what you are up to. Encryption is essential to protect your data.

  So the solution is a deduplicating encrypting backup software.

  Making file backups is an essential activity for all users, yet many users do not take adequate steps to protect their data. Whether a computer is being used in a corporate environment, or for private use, the machine’s hard disk may fail without any warning signs. Alternatively, some data loss occurs as a result of human error. Without regular backups being made, data will inevitably be lost even if the services of a specialist recovery organisation are used.