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.

Aspire

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Aspire

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Aspire is a multi-language, code-first toolchain for building, running, and deploying distributed applications. Its CLI orchestrates services, frontends, containers and data stores locally, exposes OpenTelemetry-based observability, and carries the same application definition from development to deployment.

Strider

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Strider

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Strider is a privacy-first iOS app that tracks walking, hiking, and running distances from Apple HealthKit. It provides year-to-date totals, a year selector, and iCloud-based settings sync, with HealthKit data accessed read-only.

Lore

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Lore

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Lore is a next-generation, open source version control system designed for unprecedented scalability of code and large binary assets, optimized for collaboration at scale. It uses content-addressed storage, an immutable revision chain, and on-demand data hydration.

Magisk

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Magisk

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Magisk is an open-source Android customization framework that provides root access, systemless root, and modular enhancements. It supports Magisk Modules and Zygisk for running code in every Android app’s process, enabling flexible, safe device customization.

PatchMon

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PatchMon

Website

Source Code

License: AGPL-3.0

Description:

PatchMon is an enterprise-grade Linux patch management and server management platform with outbound-only agents for Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. It enables patch orchestration, compliance, and live streaming of patch events via a Go/React stack, with self-hosted Docker/Proxmox and cloud options.