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.

bcachefs

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bcachefs

Website

Source Code

License:

Description:

bcachefs is a copy-on-write Linux filesystem focused on reliability and data integrity, offering full checksumming, multi-device caching, replication, erasure coding, compression, encryption, snapshots, and online fsck.

Exile

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Exile

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0-only (code); CC-BY-SA-3.0 (media)

Description:

Exile is an open-source Minetest survival game featuring harsh seasons, realistic survival mechanics, crafting, and exploration, with active development and mod support.

Binaryen

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Binaryen

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Binaryen is a C++ library and compiler/toolchain for WebAssembly, featuring wasm-opt, wasm-as, wasm-dis, wasm2js, and more. It provides a compact IR, parallel optimization passes, and integration with Emscripten, enabling fast, efficient WebAssembly generation and optimization.

Box3D

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Box3D

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Box3D is a cross-platform 3D physics engine for games. Written in portable C17 with SIMD support, it provides robust rigid-body dynamics, collision detection, and joints, with multiple samples and cross-platform build options via CMake.

Emscripten

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Emscripten

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License; University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License

Description:

Emscripten is a compiler toolchain that converts C/C++ into WebAssembly, enabling running native code in web browsers and other wasm runtimes.

TinyRetroPad

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TinyRetroPad

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

TinyRetroPad is a compact Notepad-style Windows text editor (~2.5 KB) built on the RichEdit control. It adds full menus (File/Edit/Format/View/Help), Open/Save/Find/Font/Wrap, and Crinkler-based compression. A size-obsessed fork of Dave’s Tiny Editor, licensed under Apache-2.0.

CARBON Engine

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CARBON Engine

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

CARBON Engine is an open-source platform for persistent sandbox worlds, powering EVE Online and EVE Frontier. It provides a collection of C++ engines and tools (rendering, simulation, IO, assets) designed for game development and large-scale virtual worlds.