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Best Free and Open Source Software
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6 Best Free and Open Source Linux Screen Capture Tools for Hyprland - LinuxLinks
Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that’s become popular with Linux users who want a modern desktop focused on speed, flexibility, and visual polish. Its combination of animated window management, extensive configuration, and fast keyboard-driven workflow has helped create a growing ecosystem of companion software built specifically for Hyprland or commonly used alongside it.
A bare Hyprland installation is only the starting point. Most users add extra tools to handle tasks such as launching applications, managing wallpapers, displaying status information, handling notifications, locking the screen, controlling idle behaviour, taking screenshots, and selecting clipboard entries. These utilities play an important role in turning Hyprland from a compositor into a practical daily desktop environment.
Linux has no shortage of Wayland software, but Hyprland users often want tools that integrate neatly with its workflow, configuration style, and surrounding ecosystem. Some applications are developed with Hyprland in mind, while others have become widely adopted because they work especially well in Hyprland sessions.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that’s available, we’ve compiled a list of the best free and open source Hyprland tools for screen capturing. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wants to build a cleaner, more productive, and more comfortable Hyprland setup.
GNOME Cam Overlay - webcam preview as a borderless overlay - LinuxLinks
Cam Overlay is a lightweight utility designed to add graphical overlays to video streams, particularly for use with camera feeds and live video processing.
It enables users to superimpose images, text, and other visual elements onto video output, making it useful for monitoring systems, streaming setups, or enhancing recorded footage. Overlay systems like this are commonly used to display dynamic information such as timestamps, labels, or branding directly within the video stream.
This is free and open source software.
Hideout - file encryption and decryption - LinuxLinks
Hideout is a minimal desktop application designed to simplify file encryption and decryption using GnuPG.
It focuses on usability, offering a straightforward drag-and-drop interface so users can quickly protect sensitive data without needing to interact directly with command-line tools. The application targets Linux users and is distributed via Flatpak and Snap packages, making it easy to install across distributions.
This is free and open source software.
bpftop - dynamic real-time view of running eBPF programs - LinuxLinks
bpftop is a command-line monitoring tool developed by Netflix that provides a real-time, top-like interface for observing running eBPF programs on Linux systems. It surfaces key performance metrics such as average runtime, events per second, and estimated CPU usage, helping developers and system engineers understand the behaviour and impact of eBPF workloads directly from the terminal.
The tool is designed to make low-level kernel telemetry more accessible by presenting eBPF statistics in a clear, continuously updating view, along with optional graphical trends over time. It enables performance data collection only while running, minimising overhead and avoiding unnecessary system impact.
This is free and open source software.
S3ry - AWS S3 interactive terminal client - LinuxLinks
S3ry is an interactive terminal application for managing Amazon S3 buckets and objects.
Written in Go, it provides a modern terminal interface for working with S3 resources while also offering a traditional prompt-based mode for users who prefer a simpler workflow. The software is designed for day-to-day S3 administration, covering tasks such as browsing buckets, transferring files, deleting objects, and exporting object lists, with support for AWS profiles, regions, configuration files, and English or Japanese interface text.
This is free and open source software.
Noisedash - self-hostable web tool to generate ambient noises - LinuxLinks
Noisedash is a self-hostable web application for building ambient soundscapes in the browser.
It lets you mix generated noises with uploaded samples, includes multi-user administration, and can be deployed with Docker, Kubernetes, or from source.
This is free and open source software.
Domenico - create looping animated GIFs - LinuxLinks
Domenico is a Linux-focused desktop application that provides a graphical front end for FFmpeg, making it easier to turn MP4 and MOV clips into looping animated GIFs without using terminal commands.
It’s designed for short clips and is available as an AppImage for Linux, with an optional JAR build for cross-platform use on systems with Java installed.
Domenico does not bundle FFmpeg — it uses your system installation.
This is free and open source software.
Developer of the Week: Lennart Poettering - LinuxLinks
Lennart Poettering is one of the most consequential, polarizing, and prolific open source developers of the Linux era, and the reason is simple: he works on parts of the system that the majority use and many people have strong opinions about. His public profile and long-running project pages are tied above all to systemd and, earlier, PulseAudio and Avahi. Whether people admire or criticise his work, they’re responding to projects that materially changed how Linux systems boot, manage services, handle devices, and process desktop audio. That scale of influence is impossible to ignore.
systemd is the obvious focal point. Poettering’s writing around it framed a rethinking of PID 1 and service management, and the result became far more than an init replacement. systemd grew into a broad systems framework including service supervision, logging, networking, timers, user sessions, storage features, and container-adjacent capabilities. Critics have long argued that it’s too expansive; supporters argue that the expansion reflects the actual needs of modern Linux systems. My own view is that, whatever one thinks of every design choice, Poettering clearly identified a real problem: Linux system management had become fragmented, inconsistent, and harder to reason about than many people wanted to admit.
flowR - sophisticated, static dataflow analyzer - LinuxLinks
flowR is a sophisticated static analysis framework for the R programming language.
It helps developers and researchers understand existing R code by analysing how values, calls, and control move through a script, making it useful for program comprehension, debugging, and inspection of real-world R sources.
This is free and open source software.
arp-scan - minimalistic ARP scan tool - LinuxLinks
arp-scan-rs is a command-line network discovery tool written in Rust.
It performs ARP-based scans of local IPv4 networks to identify live hosts and report details such as IP addresses, MAC addresses, hostnames, and hardware vendor information.
This is free and open source software.
TexLab - cross-platform implementation of the Language Server Protocol for LaTeX - LinuxLinks
TexLab is a cross-platform implementation of the Language Server Protocol for LaTeX.
It provides rich editing support for LaTeX documents and can be used with any editor that implements the Language Server Protocol.
This is free and open source software.