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.

ChaosEsqueAnthology

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ChaosEsqueAnthology

Website

Source Code

License: Creative Commons Attribution License, GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2), GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3)

Description:

ChaosEsqueAnthology is a free 3D game for PC offering open-ended play with buildable interiors, exploration, and combat. It features a large weapon set and an extensible engine with community-driven content, all under open-source licenses.

Simba

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Simba

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Simba is an open-source, portable Knowledge Management System designed for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It helps manage, process, and retrieve knowledge from documents to enhance AI applications, featuring a Python SDK, modular architecture, a modern UI, and an embeddable Simba chat widget; a self-hosted, customizable solution.

XAML Studio

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XAML Studio

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

XAML Studio is a rapid prototyping tool for WinUI-based XAML that lets you live-edit UIs, debug bindings, and edit data contexts, then copy the results into Visual Studio for further development.

Pico GPU

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Pico GPU

Website

Source Code

License:

Description:

Pico GPU is a 300KB memory GPU designed to learn, experiment and have fun with shaders. It supports small demos or games with 3D rendering and GPU-based sound synthesis, making it ideal for quick experiments.

Lustre

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Lustre

Website

Source Code

License: GPLv2

Description:

Lustre is an open-source, parallel file system for leadership-class HPC workloads, with documentation, downloads, roadmap, development resources, and community support.

astroterm

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astroterm

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

A terminal-based planetarium written in C that renders real-time stars, planets, and constellations in ASCII within the command line, with configurable date, time, and location.