Welcome Friend!

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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.

PriceGhost

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PriceGhost

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

PriceGhost is a self-hosted price-tracking app that monitors product prices from any website. It uses multi-method extraction (JSON-LD, site scrapers, CSS, AI) with a Price Voting Modal to choose the correct price, and provides alerts for price drops, target prices, and back-in-stock events.

Skip

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Skip

Website

Source Code

License: LGPLv3

Description:

Skip enables the creation of native SwiftUI apps for iOS and Android from a single Swift/SwiftUI codebase. It compiles native code at build-time, uses a first-party Xcode plugin, and bridges SwiftUI to Android’s Jetpack Compose for a true native experience across platforms.

MaSzyna Train Simulator

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MaSzyna Train Simulator

Website

Source Code

License: MPL 2.0

Description:

MaSzyna Train Simulator is a free, community-developed railroading simulator for Windows and Linux. It offers dozens of routes, trains, and scenarios, letting players drive locomotives and operate passenger and freight cars. The project includes OpenGL-based rendering, OpenAL audio, and assets under a custom license, with source under MPL 2.0.

whisper.cpp

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whisper.cpp

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

whisper.cpp is a high-performance C/C++ port of OpenAI’s Whisper for offline transcription. It runs on Apple Silicon with NEON/Metal and on x86 with AVX, supports quantization, Vulkan and multiple backends, and includes a lightweight ggml-based engine for cross-platform use (macOS, iOS, Linux, Windows, WASM).

Burn

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Burn

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0 and MIT

Description:

Burn is a next-generation tensor library and Deep Learning Framework, designed for flexibility, efficiency, and portability. Built in Rust, it offers dynamic graphs with static-graph performance via JIT, multiple backends (CPU, GPU, WebAssembly), ONNX import, and training to deployment across devices.

Wild linker

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Wild linker

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0, MIT

Description:

Wild is a very fast linker for Linux, written in Rust. It aims for high-speed linking during iterative development and supports producing various output types; incremental linking is the goal but not yet implemented.

Singularity

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Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Singularity is a stealth Linux kernel rootkit for modern 6.x kernels. It provides extensive process, file, and network hiding, SELinux bypass, and an ICMP reverse shell. Built as a kernel module with ftrace-based syscall hooks, it aims to evade common defenders such as LKRG, Falco, and eBPF tools. For research and educational purposes only.

WinAppCli

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WinAppCli

Website

Source Code

License: MIT license

Description:

WinAppCli is a Windows App Development CLI that manages Windows SDKs, packaging, and app identity. It can generate manifests and certificates, supports MSIX packaging, and integrates with build tools for multiple app frameworks, including .NET/Win32, CMake, Electron, and Rust.

Tonearm

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Tonearm

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Tonearm is an unofficial native GTK4/Adwaita client for TIDAL. It streams up to 24-bit/48kHz, supports MPRIS control, ListenBrainz scrobbling, and synchronized lyrics. Built for Linux desktops, it’s distributed via Flathub and hosted on Codeberg.