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.

OptiScaler

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OptiScaler

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

OptiScaler bridges upscaling and frame generation across GPUs, enabling DLSS2+/XeSS/FSR2+ inputs, replacing native upscalers, and adding DX12 frame generation via OptiFG. It includes Nukem’s FSR3-FG mod and extensive customization for a better in-game upscale experience.

Malt

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Malt

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Malt is a fully customizable real-time rendering framework for animation and illustration, with strong support for stylized NPR workflows and complete Blender integration. It offers automatic UI, Python pipelines, GLSL autocompletion, and live reloading for a flexible, shader-driven rendering pipeline.

renderer (TTSIOD renderer)

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renderer (TTSIOD renderer)

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0, GPL-2.0

Description:

A software-only 3D renderer and raytracer demonstrating core graphics techniques including 3D transformations, Phong shading, Z-buffering, shadow maps, and ray tracing with multi-core support via OpenMP/TBB. Supports .3ds, .tri, and .ply formats and uses SDL for portability.

EmDash

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EmDash

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

EmDash is a full-stack, TypeScript CMS built on Astro and Cloudflare. It features sandboxed plugins, a portable content model (Portable Text/JSON), a visual admin UI, REST API, and AI-assisted tooling. It runs on Cloudflare Workers or Node.js, and aims to be a modern WordPress alternative with a plugin ecosystem.