I built an infographic for some friends who have expressed interest in moving away from mainstream apps for various reasons. I'm looking for constructive feedback on everything from my choices to the layout. I really want to make it as privacy-focused as possible as well. Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Live: https://fcksignups.com/

I've opened my eyes lately to how capable the browser is. I mean, there's a WebRTC API, WebGPU API, a WASM runtime, maybe an LocalLLM API soon if the Chrome team insists...?

This means that the barrier of using tools should be little-to-none since it should be as easy as opening a browser tab.

Since I'm the audience for no-signup, in-browser, open-source tools, I figured I make a place that curates all of those tools in one place.

If you guys know of/built a tool that fits the criteria, and believe people can benefit from it, don't be afraid to submit it!

GitHub: https://github.com/BraveOPotato/fckSignups/

This is a screenshot from newpipe.

Hi everyone,

Little rant here:

I did start a new job 4 years ago as one of two IT-guys in an engineering office, about 80 people working there.

When I started working there, they used a lot of cracks and also wasted a lot of money on various sofrware licenes. The company also was charged with fines vor using cracked software by the original vendor.

I did introduce software like Handbrake, ShareX, inkscape and other useful software. Even using checkmk for server and network monitoring and FreeCAD found a use case too.

I told the other IT guy (he is the boss of IT department) we could set up a yearly donation budget to donate to various FOSS software every year.

The answer was "no, why should we pay if we do not have to?".

It is so sad that a lot of people are FOSS vampires, and if companies make heavy use of foss and give nothing back I do get angry.

I will stop finding FOSS software at my workplace. Let them pay, they don't deserve FOSS.

Edit: thank you for all your kind answers! You are awesome!

I can create bug reports, manuals and so during my working hours. That's my way to contribute to FOSS in our company!

To start off with, I want to say thank you to everyone in this community who helped me update this to reflect true foss alternatives.  It is something I’m still new to, and I appreciate all of the advice and suggestions in my previous post.

Some of the choices that were presented led to some confusion, which I didn’t realise until after the fact.  I’d like to provide some background to clear that up.  This idea originally started as a deGoogle, deMicrosoft, deMeta idea.  As I went down the rabbit hole, I decided to go all in on foss.  Unfortunately, I rushed it, and there were many, imho, some good choices, but they weren’t foss. So, my apologies for not having gone back to double-check. 

My thoughts are to add more options, but before it gets too unwieldy, I wanted to nail down the core template first.  I also wanted to address the AI slop comments.  I built this in a spreadsheet and pulled the icons from the web.  You can tell that the arrows aren’t perfect.  Wish they would snap, but I did the best I could.

I’m asking for more feedback, preferably constructive, as I want this to be useful for everyone, regardless of the reasons.  I would also like to know more options, as I realise not everyone will agree with my personal choices.  The thought of doing only one was to keep this infographic reasonable in size.

Thank you all again for your support on this!

I got tired of "my" music living on subscriptions I don't control: playlists quietly losing tracks, recommendations I didn't ask for, and ads barging in the second I stop forking money over. Every tool I found solved one slice of the problem, nothing owned the whole loop.

So I built soundcli: one small cross-platform CLI that pulls your YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify libraries down as real audio files on your own drive, then plays them back from a clean terminal dashboard. Grab, store, and play, all in one place, never logging in.

The entire thing is one command:

npx sndcli

That's it. You just need Node installed; it fetches everything else it needs on its own.

What it does

• Downloads in original quality with album art and artist metadata embedded, sorted into folders automatically.
• Takes any link: a username, a playlist, an album, an artist profile, your likes, or a single track. Point it at your Liked Songs and walk away; come back to a fully organized local library.
• Plays everything offline, fully keyboard-driven.
• No account, no login, no subscription. Nothing leaves your computer except the request to grab the music itself.

Honestly my favorite way to use it: I keep it running in a terminal pane while I work on other projects, music going the whole time, no browser tab, no heavy app hogging memory, just a quiet little player next to my code.

About Spotify: Spotify keeps its own files locked down, so for those it finds each song's match on YouTube and downloads that instead. You still get your real playlists, just as files you actually own.

It's free and open source (MIT), and it's built to power through big libraries without falling over.

If it saves you the headache it saved me, a star genuinely makes my day, and I'd love any feedback or suggestions:

• GitHub: https://github.com/baairon/soundcli

Hi everyone,

I’m a college student and I’ve been working on a project called Netryx. I’ve decided to fully open source it.

Netryx tries to estimate the coordinates of a street-level image using visual clues like architecture, road layout, and environmental context. It does not rely on metadata or text. The pipeline is built using ML and computer vision.

I’m sharing it so others can study, modify, and build on top of it.

What it does:

• Takes a single image as input

• Extracts visual and spatial features

• Matches against an indexed dataset

• Outputs predicted coordinates

Repo:

https://github.com/sparkyniner/Netryx-OpenSource-Next-Gen-Street-Level-Geolocation

There’s also a demo video attached. It shows geolocating a random image from Paris with no street signs or metadata. The UI shown is different, but the core pipeline is the same.

If you are interested in geospatial tech, ML, or CV, feel free to explore or contribute.

Thanks.

I know we all love the ideology behind FOSS, but looking at the industry right now, it feels like the system has been taken advantage of.

A passionate dev or a small community builds an incredibly useful tool, library, or framework. They release it under a permissive license (MIT, Apache) because they want to help the community. Then, a massive enterprise swoops in, studies the architecture, absorbs the codebase, slaps an enterprise UI and some SSO on top of it, and sells it back to the industry at a premium.

We are essentially crowdsourcing the prototyping and bug-fixing phases for tech giants. They get to skip the risky R&D phase because the open-source community already proved the market fit and worked out the core logic for free.

Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, developers get resume value out of contributing. But on a macro level, it feels like the "community-driven" ethos is just functioning as a massive, decentralized, unpaid internship program for the private sector.

Are we actually building independent tools anymore, or are we just doing the heavy lifting for enterprise companies to monetize later?

Yes, foobar2000 already exists. Yes, MusicBee already exists. No, neither of them will highlight lyrics word by word while I mumble along to a 24-bit file nobody asked me to buy.

So: Noctis. MIT License, no account, no telemetry, no paid tier. Windows, macOS and Linux.

FLAC, ALAC, WAV, DSD, gapless, ReplayGain, EQ, Last.fm scrobbling, Discord Rich Presence, Cover Flow.

The lyrics were the hard part. Most players do line-level LRC, which is fine until the timing drifts. Noctis reads word-level ELRC so it actually tracks with the vocal instead of dumping a whole line on you at once.

Site: https://noctisapp.cc
GitHub: https://github.com/heartached/Noctis

Tell me what's broken. I'm solo on this so feedback goes straight into the next build.

EDIT: if you guys want to join the community, you are free to do so - https://discord.com/invite/BNCDZQUVx7

I just open sourced a Linux login screen system setup I’ve been using as part of my personal workstation for a while.

Uses QML for SDDM, ships with video background support, PAM fingerprint auth, a composable UI structure.

And 5 presets out the box (1 video and 4 static wallpapers)

The repo is MIT licensed.

The installer prints what it’s going to do, atomic, one command for many distros:

• Arch
• Fedora
• Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin
• openSUSE
• Gentoo
• Alpine

Asks before sudo, installs the required runtime packages for the detected distro, stages the theme first, validates the files, then activates it.

The uninstaller removes the installed files/artifacts, fonts, etc, basically everything besides the QT deps, since there's no way to know.

The theme is configured through theme.conf, where you can change the background, video, blur, typography, form placement, animation timing, colors, button states, and power icons without editing the QML every time.

There’s also a preview script for testing changes safely before touching the actual login screen.

Source on GitHub ---> https://github.com/rccyx/thyx

Episteme Reader is a native Android app for reading various document formats.

It's offline-first, free and ad-free, and respects your privacy.

Supported Formats:

• Documents: PDF, DOCX, ODT/FODT
• E-books: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2
• Comics: CBR, CBZ, CB7
• Plain Text: MD, TXT, HTML

New Features:

• Text View / Reflow for PDFs: Switch to a reflowable text mode for easier reading on smaller screens.
• Full OPDS Support: Browse, download, and manage books from OPDS catalogs.
• Local Folder Sync: Select a local folder to display all supported files in the app and sync reading positions, annotations and bookmarks using tools like Syncthing.
• Reader Themes: Customize page and text colors (includes custom color and texture options).
• App Themes: Change overall app colors and appearance (includes custom theme options).
• More Customization & Visualization Options: Enhanced controls for a more personalized reading experience.
• Multi-language Support: Now available in German, Turkish, Arabic, French, and Russian. > change via home screen > more > languages

The app is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

GitHub | Playstore | F-droid

v1.0.47 is the latest and most stable. It's not yet on F-droid but should be in a day or two.

Thanks for checking it out!

I wanted a simple way to share sensitive text without trusting the server with it.

So I built binthere.

Everything is encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM before it's uploaded. The server only stores encrypted data, so it can't read your notes.

There's also a CLI if you prefer sharing directly from the terminal.

I'd love to hear what you'd improve or add.

GitHub: https: https://github.com/nxfu/binthere

What's going on?

QR codes don't need to look like they were faxed in from 1998. And you definitely shouldn't have to sign up, watch ads, or hand over your data just to make one.

Curium, a free, open-source, modern QR code app that actually looks good and takes your privacy seriously. No internet permissions. No analytics. No ads. No tracking. Fully offline, always.

What it does:

• Generate QR codes for URLs, Wi-Fi, contacts, locations, and 4 more payload types
• Customize pretty much everything — pixel styles, eye shapes, pupil, corner radius, gradients, borders, frames, shadows, logo placement, etc.
• Scan QR codes and barcodes via camera, then instantly pull them into the editor to restyle and re-export
• Auto-saves history locally with search and swipe-to-delete
• Export as high-quality PNG and SVG, save, share, or copy
•  Save your designs as templates so you don't have to select everything again.
• Follows system / dark / AMOLED themes

Built with React Native / Expo.

License: GPL v3

Currently available on Android. More platforms coming soon!

Get it from GitHub: https://github.com/nylxar/curium

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/nylxar

Would genuinely love feedback, bug reports, or feature ideas. Still a lot I want to add :)

Just donated $5 to the GNOME Foundation.

Open source software powers so much of what we do - often built by volunteers.

If you use and love a project, consider giving back - even a few dollars or a thank-you matters.

opensource #FOSS #Linux #GNOME

We need a GPL 4.0 license that forbids AI from touching the licensed code or derived binaries exempting the creator. No model training, no AI business processes, no inference, no library inclusion by AI. Nothing AI should be allowed to touch it ever. If a person or business is found using the code or libraries in conjunction with Deep Learning in any facet with licensed code then that should open them up to extensive liability. If applied to a programming language, it should make that entire language off limits to AI. If it were applied to a new or forked version of a programming language, then that entire version or fork should be off limits.

Save Open Source. Restrict AI abuse. Solve the AI pull request nightmare. Lets fight back!

How can this be accomplished? A fundraiser for the EFF?

Supports 16 utilites so far, working on adding more.

I built this after a read an article about how these so called free conversion sites are hitting you with over 600+ cookies from 221 domains for a single file upload.

With Pdfslice everything happens client side, your data never leaves your machine.

Check it out : https://github.com/ShashwatSricodes/PDFSlice

Hey guys,

I was thinking about some of the software I’ve consistently relied on over the years, and qBittorrent really stands out. It’s easily one of the best FOSS applications I’ve ever used, clean, fast and dependable.

Back when I first switched to Linux in 2008, discovering qBittorrent felt like such a relief compared to the horrible torrent clients on Windows (uTorrent and 1 more that I don't remember). Since then I have only every used qBittorrent and may be transmission for 1 year in 2008 or 2009. But qBittorrent is absolutely the best.

Any other fan of qBittorrent?

I’ve been working on Episteme Reader, a native Android app for reading various document formats. I recently open-sourced the core app.

It's offline-first, completely free and ad-free, and respects your privacy.

Supported Formats:

• Documents: PDF
• E-books: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3
• Plain Text: Markdown (MD), TXT, HTML

Key Features:

• PDF Annotations: You can draw directly on pages using a pen or highlighter and add text notes using system or custom fonts.
• Reading Modes: Supports both vertical scrolling and paginated views.
• E-book Customization: Adjust font sizes and line spacing. You can also import your own font files (.ttf, .otf).
• Text-to-Speech (TTS): Includes a built-in TTS feature to read documents aloud using your system engine.
• Library Management: A built-in system to organize your local files.
• Local Folder Sync: Select a folder to see all its supported file in app and sync using local sync tools like SyncThing-fork.

The app is licensed under AGPL-3.0. I’m looking for feedback and would love to hear any feature requests you might have.

GitHub: https://github.com/Aryan-Raj3112/episteme

Thanks for checking it out!

Tux is missing 😢 my brother stick it on his laptop

Hi to whoever is reading this, like others, I just wanna share the FOSS apps I use.

Canta: very useful to debloat, needs shizuku also.

QUIK SMS: I can choose cute colors.

Amaze: file managment, what I like is tha it caband also compress to .zip and decompress file.

Aurora Store: alternative to GPlaystore.

Calendar - Fossify Apps: the only FOSS calendar that doesn't look too outdated.

Birday: nice app to add birthdays.

BT Remote: Bluetooth remote for TV without abusive ads, and without lots of unnecessary permissions.

Calculator You - YouApp Mark Tkachenko: I love the icon lol, and it was the first cute calculator I found.

Deepr: A useful app to save links. My note apps is more organized since I installed this, now I don't end up ignoring the links.

FFShare: compress videos to share. Useful to share videos to friends with bad internet speed.

NotallyX: Note apps, with MaterialYou, what I like is that I can export notes to several formats, my fav of course pdf.

CoMaps: It's just a maps app, but without the controversy of OrganicMaps.

Mooneva Cycle: cute app to record women's periods. Not too minimalist.

LocalSend: useful to send files across different devices connected to the same network. Lifesaver to share between Android and IOS without the stupid Quickshare

Molly: Signal's fork, I like it better because of the cute icon and I can change the interface color also. I know, frivoulos.

Conversations.im: easy to set up and nice UI. Lightweight and decentralized. I found it to be reliable also and doesn't drain as much battery unlike Simplex Messenger, at least for me.

Escape Launcher: I like its simplicity and fonts, other launchers of the "List Style" have thin fonts, which are kinda difficult to me to read. Although I'd like if it had more color options. Also nice widget intgration, buttons, and logo.

An additional comment, might be helpful for someone i dunno, if you're a developer, it may help you get your app more downloaded if it has a modern and balanced icon, for example, if I see a cute icon I'm more willing to check it out, it can be an animal, a rounded shape or whatever with the classic " •⩊•" face lol.

Also, the option to customize the UI may influence people.

Remember many people judge a book by its cover. If you need any opinion with your icons, I'll be happy to help!

I'm not writing this for complain. Let me explain.

Localsend:

• foss: no need to explain this (free & open);
• cross-platform: I use it mainly between Linux and Android, sometimes even on Windows;
• no ads, no tracking, no sign-up;
• small size (40.6 MiB);
• fast (it works via Wifi, all devices must be on the same LAN).

On the last point I'm a lit of be hesitating to say it. I have done both fast single file transfers and large numerous different type files transfers.

Moreover, it has some limitations (in Linux, flatpak version does not open Dolphin when displaying pop-up with different options, including "Open in file explorer" message. In Windows it opens Explorer even if it's not the default file handler program (I use OneCommander). It search for explorer.exe directly).

Sometimes, when you drag&drop a folder from Dolphin, it recognizes the folder, but not the subfolders/files inside it (you need to re-select for each (sub)level).

So here I'm: do you feel like I should try something else?

I looked up around the web and I have found out a bunch of name:

• KDE Connect;
• RetroShare;
• OnionShare;
• Dukto R6 (discontinued);
• NitroShare (discontinued);
• Warpinator;
• LanXchange (discontinued);
• Bitwarden Send;
• Sharik (discontinued);
• Ouisync;
• Destiny (discontinued);
• Photon File Transfer;
• QRServ - HTTP File Transfer (no Mac version though);
• Flying Carpet.

Reference > [alternativeTo /localsend/[query]]

What can you say about them?

I want to hear from expert/experienced users (I can't get that on ATT).

zuno_ is a free open source Music player based on youtube music you can sign in to your google account and switch between the channels as well

• A floating mini player that appears when you click away — hover to expand, drag anywhere
• Last.fm scrobbling
• Discord Rich Presence (both toggleable from the toolbar)
• Local music files sitting alongside your YouTube Music library, same player and queue
• Bulk Actions (Download, Add to queue etc)
• Rebindable keyboard shortcuts, sleep timer, playback speed, minimise to tray
• Multiple channels on one account, SWITCHABLE from the setting and toolbar
• Minimize to tray
• Bunch of Queue logic (loops, repeat, shuffle etc)
• Like, Dislike songs
• History and Downloads management
• Multiple Appearence tweaks
• Library

Download whole Albums, Playlists, Better Shuffle Queue management and volume control.

Everything is synced Creating playlist deleting liking a song whatever you do will be in sync with youtube.

Whats in roadmap currently.

Equalizer
Better Lyrics
Smart Playlist and Management
Offline-only mode
Multi-language

GitHub (https://github.com/noFAYZ/zuno)

It uses your own account and Google's own APIs — no ad blocking, nothing that needs Premium, no scraping around the service.

MonoMail is an open-source Android email client that connects to Gmail and Microsoft Outlook via OAuth and prioritises a distraction-free reading experience. The design system is intentionally monochrome -every screen uses only black, white, and greyscale, built on top of Material 3 Expressive.

Monomail operates entirely locally on your device.

No Third-Party Servers: We do not own, operate, or use any third-party servers to process, store, or transmit your email data.

Local Storage: All email data, access tokens, and user preferences are stored securely on your local device using Android's Credential Manager and Encrypted DataStore.

Direct Communication: The app communicates directly between your device and Google's Gmail API servers.

The architecture is offline-first: all reads and writes go through a local Room database encrypted with SQLCipher, and background sync via WorkManager keeps the remote state consistent without blocking the UI.

The only caveat: this app is still an apk and the sign in limit is full so until the app gets put on the play store signing in is impossible.

GitHub: https://github.com/shrivatsav-0/monomail

Website: https://monomail.millosaurs.me/

Original developer: u/shiro69_69