Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Apr 01, 2026

• ddcui - graphical user interface for ddcutil - LinuxLinks

  ddcui is a graphical user interface for ddcutil, a Linux utility used to control and query monitor settings via the DDC/CI protocol. It provides a Qt-based desktop application that allows users to adjust display parameters such as brightness, contrast, and colour levels without relying on command-line tools.

  The application communicates directly with a monitor’s virtual control panel, enabling access to settings typically managed through on-screen display menus. It supports both I2C-based DDC/CI communication and, in some cases, USB-connected displays, offering a more convenient way to manage external monitors from within a graphical environment. This is free and open source software.

• Nautobot - flexible source of truth for networking - LinuxLinks

  Nautobot is a network automation platform and source-of-truth system designed to model, manage, and automate network infrastructure.

  It’s built on Django and provides a flexible data model, APIs, and an extensible plugin ecosystem for integrating with automation workflows and external systems.

  This is free and open source software.

• Parler-TTS - lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) model - LinuxLinks

  Parler-TTS is a lightweight text-to-speech model and library for generating high-quality natural-sounding speech from text with controllable voice characteristics.

  It supports prompting for attributes such as gender, pitch, speaking style, recording quality, and background conditions, and the repository includes both inference code and training tooling so users can run the model or train and fine-tune their own variants.

  This is free and open source software.

• Moshi - speech-text foundation model and full-duplex spoken dialogue framework - LinuxLinks

  Moshi is a speech-text foundation model and full-duplex spoken dialogue framework.

  It’s designed for real-time spoken interaction and uses Mimi, a streaming neural audio codec, to handle low-latency audio processing. The project includes multiple inference stacks for different use cases, covering PyTorch for research, MLX for on-device inference on Apple hardware, Rust for production deployments, and a web client used for the live demo.

  Mimi is a neural audio codec that processes 24 kHz audio, down to a 12.5 Hz representation with a bandwidth of 1.1 kbps, in a fully streaming manner (latency of 80ms, the frame size), yet performs better than existing, non-streaming, codecs like SpeechTokenizer (50 Hz, 4kbps), or SemantiCodec (50 Hz, 1.3kbps).

  This is free and open source software.

• Nextcloud Bookmarks - collect and organise bookmarks - LinuxLinks

  Nextcloud Bookmarks is a bookmark management app for Nextcloud.

  It gives users a web interface for collecting and organising bookmarks while keeping them inside their own Nextcloud environment and synchronised across devices.

  This is free and open source software.

• Orpheus-FastAPI - high-performance self-hosted text-to-speech server - LinuxLinks

  Orpheus-FastAPI is a high-performance self-hosted text-to-speech server built with FastAPI.

  It provides an OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/speech endpoint together with a modern web interface for generating speech locally. The project is designed to work with external inference servers such as llama.cpp, LM Studio, and GPUStack, and focuses on fast GPU-accelerated synthesis with support for expressive tags, long-form generation, and multilingual voice models.

  This is free and open source software.

• unFTP - modern FTP(S) server - LinuxLinks

  unFTP is a modern FTP(S) server designed with cloud-native environments in mind. Built on top of the libunftp library and the Tokio asynchronous runtime, it offers a flexible and extensible approach to running FTP services while integrating with modern infrastructure such as cloud storage, monitoring systems, and container platforms.

  Unlike traditional FTP servers, unFTP allows developers to customise authentication methods, storage back-ends, and integrations, making it well suited for use in Kubernetes deployments, microservices architectures, and cloud-based workflows.

  This is free and open source software.

• gscreenshot - screenshot utility for Linux - LinuxLinks

  gscreenshot is a screenshot utility for Linux that provides both a graphical interface and command line frontend for multiple screenshot backends. It supports X11 and Wayland environments, automatically detects the available backend tools on the system, and can adapt its functionality based on the installed dependencies.

  Along with taking full-screen, window, and region screenshots, it can copy captures to the clipboard, open them in the default image viewer, save them in a range of formats, and show notifications after capture.

  This is free and open source software.

• Best Free and Open Source Software: March 2026 Updates - LinuxLinks

  Here’s the newest scoop on our handpicked software recommendations! This month marks another record for us — we’ve published 163 new and updated roundups in the month. But our focus doesn’t end with software; our website is also brimming with informative hardware content.

  We’re dedicated to showcasing only free and open-source software, highlighting the best offerings from the open-source community.

• Raspberry Pi Imager - create bootable media - LinuxLinks

  It offers an intuitive graphical interface alongside a command-line mode, enabling users to download, select, and write operating system images in just a few steps. The tool also supports advanced pre-configuration options such as setting up WiFi, enabling SSH, and defining system parameters before first boot, making it especially useful for headless deployments and automated setups.

  The Raspberry Pi Imager is a capable cross-platform image writing tool. Pi Imager isn’t just for the Pi, as it offers the ability to choose a custom image file. This can be missed as it’s right at the bottom in the Operating system list.

  This is free and open source software.