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.

Blockstor

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Blockstor

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Blockstor is a Kubernetes-native, free software-defined storage system providing block storage with DRBD replication for LVM, ZFS, and file backends, with a LINSTOR-compatible REST API.

Installer-SH

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Installer-SH

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Installer-SH is a standalone installation package for Linux and FreeBSD applications, enabling distribution and installation of programs across architectures, even offline. It supports multi-architecture packages, silent mode, isolation by default, and does not require root rights for installation.

Asterinas

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Asterinas

Website

Source Code

License: MPL-2.0

Description:

Asterinas is a production-grade, memory-safe Linux alternative kernel written in Rust, combining monolithic performance with microkernel-like separation. It ships a bespoke toolkit (OSDK) and a NixOS-based distribution, aiming for safe, high-performance OS development. Targets x86-64/ARM64, supports 230+ syscalls, and hosts an experimental Asterinas NixOS.

LÖVE

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LÖVE

Website

Source Code

License: zlib/libpng License

Description:

LÖVE is a free, open-source framework for creating 2D games in Lua. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, and provides a simple API for graphics, audio and input under the permissive zlib/libpng license.

Pragtical

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Pragtical

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Pragtical is a lightweight, cross‑platform code editor with LSP-powered completion, syntax highlighting, multiple cursors and a plugin framework. It emphasizes easy configuration via a graphical settings manager and Lua/C API extensibility. Built for Windows, Linux and macOS, it is free and open source under the MIT license.

cuda-oxide

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cuda-oxide

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0 (most crates); NVIDIA Software License (cuda-bindings)

Description:

Experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler backend enabling GPU kernels in pure Rust; single-source host/device pipeline, device abstractions, and a Rust-based codegen backend producing CUDA PTX.

Headroom

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Headroom

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Headroom is a library and proxy system that compresses texts, tool outputs, logs, and RAG chunks before they reach LLMs, achieving 60–95% reduction in tokens while preserving content. It includes a Python/TypeScript library, a drop-in proxy, and an MCP-based memory backend with reversible CCR compression.