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.

Schist

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Schist

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Schist is a free, open-source image editor for modern Linux systems. It includes Photoshop-like filters, brushes and plugins, supports Affinity and Photoshop files, and runs with GPU acceleration. It also offers agent-assisted editing via Codex/Claude Code installations.

Cubyz

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Cubyz

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Cubyz is a 3D voxel sandbox game with no height or depth limits, vast render distances, and procedural crafting. It is open-source, addon-friendly, and mod-friendly. Source code available under GPL-3.0.

WAFW00F

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WAFW00F

Website

Source Code

License: BSD-3-Clause

Description:

WAFW00F is a fingerprinting tool that identifies Web Application Firewall (WAF) products protecting a website. It analyzes standard and crafted HTTP responses to determine the presence and type of WAFs, providing insights for security assessments.

osu-cpp

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osu-cpp

Website

Source Code

License: AGPL-3.0-only

Description:

osu-cpp is a C++23-based osu! client drawn with Skia; plays osu!standard beatmaps, records replays, and can export them as video. It includes the osu-cpp library and can run in the browser via WebAssembly.

BRUTAL Framework

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BRUTAL Framework

Website

Source Code

License: MIT-based license with attribution requirement

Description:

BRUTAL is a free, open-source C# framework for building games or game engines. It provides direct native interop and Vulkan bindings, plus low-level libraries for maths, memory, concurrency, strings, and UI bindings. It’s a foundation rather than an engine, MIT-based with attribution requirements.