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.

Caldera

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Caldera

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Caldera is an automated adversary emulation platform for cyber security. It enables red-teaming and incident response automation via MITRE ATT&CK, featuring a core asynchronous C2 server, REST API, and extensible plugins.

Starling

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Starling

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Starling is a Linux desktop environment with a Swift-based shell, its own compositor, and a Flutter-to-Swift framework port, plus first-party apps. It includes a Wayland compositor, a Flutter engine fork, and packaging for Ubuntu; builds from source as a Debian package.

MasterSelects

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MasterSelects

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

MasterSelects is a realtime, browser-based local-first media editor for video, audio, vector animation, and 3D. It uses GPU-first WebGPU rendering, supports AI-assisted editing, and runs largely offline with a Rust Native Helper for storage and downloads.

GeoLibre

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GeoLibre

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

GeoLibre is a free, open-source cloud-native GIS platform that runs in the browser, on the desktop, mobile, and Jupyter. Built with React, MapLibre GL, DuckDB-WASM Spatial, and deck.gl, it enables interactive geospatial visualization, analysis, and integration across environments while keeping data local and private.