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.

Papermerge DMS core backend, REST API server, and frontend UI

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Papermerge DMS core backend, REST API server, and frontend UI

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Papermerge DMS is an open-source document management system that OCRs scanned documents, indexes them, and provides a web UI with a folder-based browser, tagging, versioning, and full-text search. It includes a REST API and Docker-ready setup.

Jcorp Nomad

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Jcorp Nomad

Website

Source Code

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Description:

Jcorp Nomad is an open-source offline media server for ESP32-S3 that streams movies, music, books, and more via a local browser. It creates a captive Wi‑Fi hotspot, supports multiple users, and runs entirely offline. Includes optional 3D-printed hardware and a full web interface.

BudgetBee

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BudgetBee

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

BudgetBee is an open-source, self-hosted personal finance manager. Run via Docker to track expenses, manage budgets, accounts, and reports, with multi-user and multi-currency support. It provides a REST API and a customizable, private finance dashboard.

Kyoo

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Kyoo

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Kyoo is a self-hosted media server for movies, TV shows, and anime. It emphasizes low maintenance with built-in features such as dynamic transcoding, video thumbnails, intro/credit detection, and advanced subtitle support, plus optional offline access and Kubernetes/OIDC deployment.

Bindery

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Bindery

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Bindery is an automated book download manager for Usenet and Torrents. It tracks authors, queries indexers, downloads via SABnzbd/NZBGet or torrent clients, and organizes your library using OpenLibrary and enrichment sources. A modern replacement for Readarr.

Tandoor Recipes

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Tandoor Recipes

Website

Source Code

License: GNU AGPL v3 with Commons Clause (selling exception)

Description:

Self-hosted recipe manager to organize recipes, plan meals, build shopping lists, and share or collaborate on cookbooks. Includes AI-assisted features, import capabilities, and Docker/Kubernetes deployment.

Playnite

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Playnite

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Playnite is an open source video game library manager that unifies games from multiple sources (Steam, Epic, GOG, Origin, Battle.net, and more) with emulation support, extensibility, themes, and offline local library data.