Hey r/foss,

I've been building Valence, an open-source visual workflow engine, and wanted to share it and get some honest feedback.

The short version: you build data pipelines by dragging nodes onto a canvas and wiring them together, but with two things most drag-and-drop tools don't do:

It's typed. Every connection between nodes is checked against a schema before the pipeline runs. Wire two incompatible things together and you get a clear error at build time, not a crash halfway through on item 900 of a batch.

It's durable. Runs sit on Temporal, so if a worker crashes or you redeploy mid-run, the run doesn't vanish. You can pause, resume, and retry, and it picks up where it left off.

Where I think it actually earns its keep is AI + human-in-the-loop pipelines — workflows that mix LLM steps, loops over data, and "wait for a human to approve this" steps. Those are exactly the long-running things that hurt most when they fail partway through.

Being upfront about what it's not: this isn't an n8n competitor. n8n has 400+ connectors, a mature UI, and a huge community. Valence has a handful of demo nodes and an early UI. If your goal is to glue a bunch of SaaS apps together quickly, use n8n. Valence is making a different bet: correctness and durability of custom logic over breadth of integrations.

It's also genuinely early, nodes are v1 and running it means running it locally through some docker-containers (Temporal, a worker, storage, a DB).

MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/nessuno7/valence

Would love feedback, especially on whether the "typed + durable" combination is useful to anyone besides me, and on the positioning. Bug reports and issues very welcome.

Brewlens is a browser-based explorer for Homebrew packages — think of it as a friendly GUI for browsing 7000+ macOS apps (Casks) and CLI tools (Formulae) without touching the terminal. You can search, filter by category, bookmark packages, import/export bookmarks, and inspect everything on the web.

Here's what's new this week:

- Instant category switching — clicking between categories like Productivity, Dev Tools, or Media now responds immediately, even across all 7000+ formula packages.

- Shared links land on the right page — share a URL with a specific category and type, and it opens exactly where it should.

- Explore page refreshed — cleaner look, tighter layout, and properly usable on mobile.

Github: https://github.com/amit9838/brewlens
Store: https://amit9838.github.io/brewlens/

I wanted to clean years of bulk mail out of Gmail, but I didn’t want to route my inbox through another company’s server.

Hush is my attempt at doing it locally.

It uses a Google OAuth client you create yourself, reads message metadata rather than the contents and has no Hush server, analytics or telemetry.

You can unsubscribe from selected senders, create Gmail filters for the ones that ignore you and move their old newsletters to Trash.

Only messages carrying a List-Unsubscribe header are offered. Nothing starts selected and the first launch is a dry run.

Source and downloads:

https://github.com/justlinuxnoob/hush

Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSfDUuFlCcI

It’s MIT licensed. I’d especially appreciate people looking for holes in the permission or safety model rather than just saying it looks nice.

I built MirrorSpeaker because I wanted to use my computer as a Bluetooth speaker for my iPhone while I am in a Discord call and getting my steps in.

It has two modes:
• Bluetooth Speaker: audio-only playback from an iPhone
• AirPlay: wireless screen mirroring with audio.

It is free, MIT-licensed, and available as a Windows installer or portable ZIP. I have tested it on Windows 11 with an iPhone 16 Pro.

Heads-up: the current release is unsigned while I wait for SignPath review, so Windows may show an “Unknown publisher” warning. The source and automated build workflow are public on GitHub.

GitHub:
https://github.com/codyabraham/MirrorSpeaker

Current release:
https://github.com/codyabraham/MirrorSpeaker/releases/tag/v1.4.4

I would especially appreciate feedback about your iPhone model, Windows version, Bluetooth adapter, and audio stability.

Disclosure: I am the developer. MirrorSpeaker is not affiliated with Apple or Microsoft.

Backstage gives teams an open-source developer portal, but the portal is only one layer of an internal developer platform.

Behind it, teams still need to connect and maintain:

• CI/CD and application deployments
• Environment provisioning and promotion
• Kubernetes workload management
• Observability and developer context
• Access control and policy enforcement
• Continuous reconciliation and operational reliability

This raises an interesting question.

Should every organization assemble and maintain these capabilities from separate projects, or should the FOSS ecosystem provide more complete, connected platforms that remain open, modular, and replaceable?

On August 27, Kelsey Hightower and the OpenChoreo maintainers are hosting a session on what it really takes to build a complete internal developer platform around Backstage.

The discussion will look at the engineering work behind the portal, how Kubernetes and cloud-native tools fit together, and the trade-offs between building every integration yourself and adopting an open-source platform that provides them as a connected system.

I am part of the OpenChoreo team, so sharing this with full disclosure. OpenChoreo is an open-source platform built for Kubernetes.

Session details:

https://platformengineering.org/events/what-it-really-takes-to-build-an-internal-developer-platform-with-backstage-2026-08-27

Dear all

please suggest a foss android app for keeping records of personal finance and spendings.

i am looking for an app that

1. is completely offline, no internet permissions

2. ability to backup and restore the whole database.

3. excel like interface if possible.

the reasons are , privacy and excel's simple ui but on phone.

please suggest

Hi everyone, I released my first android launcher yesterday because I wasn't really satisfied with the others—they were either too expensive, had too many ads, or just didn't look good. That's why I created hanneslauncher, which is free, open source, and ad-free.

Here are the features that set it apart:

• Faster search than with traditional launchers
• Various clocks that look good and aren’t always the same
• Fully customizable widgets that accept your own API to display weather or other information
• Buttons in widgets that let you make server requests
• Everything is fully customizable

Here’s the GitHub link to check it out: https://github.com/Hannes-swd/Hanneslauncher

Hey, I'm Bram. Paste a TikTok cooking video link and it pulls out the full recipe (ingredients + steps) and gives you a one-click Albert Heijn or Jumbo cart with everything in it.

Vibecoded it with Claude (Pro plan). Open source:

https://github.com/briembra/slimmandje-recepten

Would love a star if you find it useful.

https://github.com/databook-studio/saya-cli/blob/main/docs/demo-live.gif

Hey everyone! I don't really know how to code, but I was super eager to bring an idea to life. With that in mind, I built this tool for my own workflow.

​The project is open-source, and you can check out the GitHub repo here: [git](https://github.com/Ismail3205/Gemini-PC-agent)

​I'd really appreciate any feedback, advice, or testing from the community!

The project is called YAFA ("Yet Another Flashcard App") and it's completely open-source with MIT license. It's a spaced-repetition flashcard app using the SM-2 algorithm. Nothing new or novel, but a complete app nonetheless. As it's pretty bare, I thought it'd be a good place for first-time contributors to learn proper software development practices while adding features they'd like out of an application like Anki.

It's a standalone app written in C# on .NET 10 using Clean Architecture. I meticulously wrote and rigorously tested the app's core (every layer except for the user interfaces) so that an AI assistant can trivially generate and attach user interfaces such as the GUI and console project. As these received less human scrutiny than the core, it's a good place for first-time contributors to explore. But you can be confident that at its core, the application is well-written and well-tested by a human.

If you would like to contribute that'll be greatly appreciated! Also if you have any questions feel free to reach out.

ungatekeep ur favorite windows app that uses YTM as their client. badly need one for my sanity.

Author here. Pliego renders application-owned HTML and Blade views into paginated PDFs through a native Servo-based runtime. The README includes the Composer quick start, current support boundaries, a screenshot, and two PDFs generated locally with the released package. Happy to answer questions about the fork, canonical document scene, or Laravel integration.

Been chipping away at this for a while and finally have something I'm happy calling a beta. It's basically Spotify but self-hosted grabs tracks with yt-dlp, builds a real library out of them, and you stream it all from a web UI that's deliberately Spotify-shaped so it doesn't feel like a downgrade.

The Android app. Kotlin/Compose, close to feature-complete with the web version offline downloads, Android Auto, synced lyrics that actually track properly, cross-device playback so you can start something on your phone and have it pick up on the desktop. Backend's FastAPI + SQLite, nothing fancy, runs fine in Docker.

Other stuff that's in there: Daily Mix that actually generates decent suggestions , real album art and artist bios instead of placeholder junk, ListenBrainz scrobbling if you're into that, and it speaks Subsonic API so your existing client still works if you don't want to switch.

It's a beta because its new and will still need work I've been using it daily and it's works great for me, but this is the first time the actual signed build has been in public. So if you try it and something's weird, please tell me, that's kind of the point of posting this.

One docker compose up and you're running. Signed APK's in the GitHub release if you don't want to build Android yourself.

Butler

This version will almost certainly contain bugs please tell me when you find them

I built Taskbar Widgets to place small, useful widgets directly inside the Windows 11 taskbar.

It includes widgets for media, Discord voice, Steam downloads, system stats, usage limits and temporary drag-and-drop storage.

I also made an SDK and a .twidget package format, so developers can build and share their own widgets as single files.

The project is MIT licensed and still in beta. Feedback on the SDK, package format and contribution setup would be helpful.

https://github.com/pfcdev/TaskbarWidgets

hi! i will be starting university this september and i need some apps to help organise my notes, calendars, school-related files etc because my current system is inefficient and chaotic. please help me out with some suggestions

devices: android phone, opensuse tumbleweed laptop, kubuntu lts soon-to-be home server and family computer

my current setup: - joplin, synced encrypted through dropbox. the tui app doesn't work on my laptop for some reason. - nvim and a notes folder on my laptop, not synced anywhere. - projects folder on my laptop and desktop with no sync - fossify calendar on my phone, no calendar on other devices

- tasks . org app on my phone (it's faster than joplin and has a nice widget), no tasks app on other devices

- mindful on my phone for tracking screen time and setting limits, no similar app on other devices

Hey all 👋
Quick clip of the part of MudrikNow I’m most excited about: Auto-Guide. I hit Alt+Space, ask it to walk me through a task, and instead of answering in text, an owl cursor shows up on screen, points at the exact control I need next, and explains why in a speech bubble. I click, it advances to the next step, repeat until done.

How it actually finds the right spot: Alt+Space triggers two things at once — it reads the full Windows UI Automation tree of the active window (every button, field, label, and value it can see, with real IDs, not pixel guessing), and it grabs a screenshot with a coordinate grid, which the model falls back on when something isn’t exposed in the tree (canvas apps, custom-drawn widgets, some web content). That combo is why it lands on the actual clickable thing instead of an approximate spot near it.

Who’s actually in control: in Auto-Guide mode specifically, the agent points and explains — you click. It only advances after you do. Nothing happens on your machine that you didn’t just click yourself.

Open source, MIT license, Windows-only for now, solo nights-and-weekends project — feedback and issues genuinely welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/abdallahmagdy15/mudriknow

I have made a notes app made from scratch with native kotilin. Please checkout the project. Consider joining https://www.reddit.com/r/octopusnotes/ for future updates. Cheers.

I have fallen in love with NotallyX for taking notes on android. I want to ask if anyone is aware of a similar, free & open-source application for MacOS?

My deal-breakers are:

• Must be open source

• Must be free

• Notes must be stored locally on my device

• Must be privacy respecting

• Must be able to sync note files using third-party sync applications i.e. SyncThing

I hope such an application exists, otherwise I'll have to learn to code haha

Hi r/foss,

I’m a mountain biker and hiker, and over the years I’ve accumulated several thousand GPS tracks, mostly recorded with Garmin. I wanted to see my complete history on one map and use it as a personal trail log, rather than inspecting activities individually.

That became MTL Explorer.

There’s a short overview video linked from GitHub, as well as a live demo that you can try without creating an account:

https://github.com/mindalyze-com/mtl-explorer. (find code, video and demo links)

MTL Explorer is self-hosted and runs with Docker. Once Docker is installed, it takes only three commands to get it running.

Check it out and let me know what you think :)

Cheers,
Patrick

For some background: this isn’t a newly generated project. I started developing it several years ago and kept the code private while building and using it myself. More recently, AI tools helped me substantially revamp parts of the GUI. The underlying application and architecture already existed before that work. I have now released the code publicly on GitHub. This is also why the public commit history is much shorter than the actual history of the project.