Welcome Friend!

Hello Friend and welcome to The Friendly Manual. You know, as in RTFM – ‘Read The Friendly Manual.’ (That’s right, the ‘F’ stands for ‘Friendly.’ Trust me on this, I would never lie to you about something so important.)

This project aims to showcase and promote Free/Libre and Open Source Software. It began life as a forum thread on South Africa’s number one IT website, mybroadband.co.za with community members contributing hundreds of their favourite Free or Open Source applications to a ‘Useful List of Free/Libre/Open Source Software Projects.’

The list has been hosted as a Github Gist but now we have upgraded to a website so we can make the list even more useful and publish richer content such as tutorials and blog articles.

Please check out our Friendly Free Software Directory for a list of Free software that we hope you will find interesting and useful. You can find the original forum thread HERE and the original list HERE.

Thanks for stopping by. Please check back soon for more Free and Open Source software related content.

Hullcaster

License: GPLv3


Description:

Hullcaster is a terminal-based podcast manager, built in Rust. It provides a terminal UI (i.e., an ncurses-like interface) to allow users to subscribe to podcast feeds, and sync feeds to check for new episodes. Episodes may be downloaded locally, played with an external media player, and marked as played/unplayed. Key bindings and other options are configurable via a config file.

Aranya

License: AGPLv3


Description:

Aranya is a software development tool for governing access to data and services over a decentralized, zero-trust framework with secure end-to-end encrypted data exchange built-in. Aranya has been designed with an emphasis on security, efficiency, and portability.

Gates of Skeldal

License: GPLv3


Description:

Classic Czech dungeon crawler. Commercially released in 1998, open-sourced by the original authors in 2008. The island of Rovenland is being consumed by darkness. Powerful wizard named Freghar searched for the source of this menace and found it. But he was unable to stop it himself. Instead, he has sacrificed his life to summon three heroes – you. Can you save the world from evil magic?

Cage

License: MIT


Description:

Cage is a kiosk compositor for Wayland. A kiosk is a window manager (in the X11 world) or compositor (in the Wayland world) that is designed for a user experience wherein user interaction and activities outside the scope of the running application are prevented. That is, a kiosk compositor displays a single maximized application at a time and prevents the user from interacting with anything but this application.

FlexGet

License: MIT


Description:

FlexGet is a multipurpose automation tool for content like torrents, nzbs, podcasts, comics, series, movies, etc. It can use different kinds of sources like RSS-feeds, html pages, csv files, search engines and there are even plugins for sites that do not provide any kind of useful feeds.

XNU

License: APSLv2


Description:

XNU kernel is part of the Darwin operating system for use in macOS and iOS operating systems. XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix. XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD and a C++ API for writing drivers called IOKit. XNU runs on x86_64 and ARM64 for both single processor and multi-processor configurations.

BUTT

License: GPLv2


Description:

BUTT (Broadcast Using This Tool) is an easy to use, multi OS streaming tool. It supports Icecast, Shoutcast and WebRTC and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The main purpose of BUTT is to stream live audio from your computers microphone or line input to an Icecast, Shoutcast or WebRTC (WHIP) server. If you want you can also record your broadcast locally on your computer. With BUTT you can not directly stream audio files. However, with the help of tools like Voicemeeter (Windows), Blackhole (macOS) and PulseAudio (Linux) you can also stream audio files directly from your favorite music player.