Welcome Friend!

by

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.

Nourish OS

by
Nourish OS

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0 or MIT

Description:

Nourish is a Linux desktop OS built around a Wayland compositor with Vulkan rendering. It features an infinite-panning viewport, fractional scaling, and a focus on stability and privacy. It supports NVIDIA and Mesa GPUs, with optional GLES fallback.

WolfScale

by
WolfScale

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

WolfScale is a Rust-based suite of server clustering tools for high-availability databases and infrastructure, including WolfScale for MariaDB/MySQL replication and load balancing, WolfDisk distributed filesystem, WolfNet private networking, and WolfStack dashboard.

Armada

by


Armada

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

Description:

Armada is a SteamOS-like ARM handheld Linux distro built on Fedora, featuring ARM64 Steam, CachyOS Proton 11, KDE desktop mode, OTA updates, and Armada Control (Decky plugin) for per-game tuning.

Precizer

by
Precizer

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Precizer is a high-performance CLI tool for verifying data integrity across large file trees. It traverses directories, computes SHA-512 checksums, and stores results in a SQLite database to enable fast byte-for-byte comparisons and resumable runs.