October 2025 updates to the largest compilation of recommended free and open source software available for Linux.
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6 Best Free and Open Source Haskell Linter Tools
A linter is a tool used to analyze source code for potential errors, stylistic issues, and adherence to coding standards.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro running Linux: Dual Booting Bluetooth Issues
Having an issue with Bluetooth when dual booting? I look at an easy fix for the Minisforum AI X1 Pro mini PC.
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Useful Ubuntu Touch Apps – Music Recognition
Music Recognition is a free and open source application for Ubuntu Touch that that provides a similar function to Shazam.
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BrosTrend 8 Port 2.5GB Switch Review
The BrosTrend 8 Port 2.5GB Switch retails for £50. It’s an inexpensive way to upgrade your local network for faster transfers. Here’s my review.
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7 Best Free and Open Source Image Upscaling Tools
Image upscaling brings the power of AI upscaling to your fingertips, allowing you to turn low-resolution images into high-quality outputs.
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9 Useful Free and Open Source JavaScript Linter Tools
This article picks some useful tools to help you fix JavaScript code.
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13 Useful Free and Open Source DNS Tools
This roundup selects a motley collection of useful DNS tools.
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The Tradeoff between Silence and Power with Mini PCs
Fan noise can ruin my enjoyment of using a computer. In this article I report my findings on three modern mini PCs.
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Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Mini PC: Internet Radio
We maintain a roundup of the finest internet radio software. Let’s take a look at the top entries from a Raspberry Pi 5 perspective.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Upgrading to Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 is the first release of Ubuntu Touch that’s based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a major upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04.
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BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC: AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
The AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS has 8 cores, 16 threads and is competitive against newer processors from AMD and Intel.
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10 Best Free and Open Source Web-Based Food and Drink Software
This roundup focuses on the finest web-based food and drink software for Linux.
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BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC running Linux: Power Consumption
I put the BOSGAME M4 Plus under a series of power consumption tests and compare it to other machines.
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17 Best Free and Open Source Linux Chess Apps
Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It’s a very popular game, played by millions across the world.
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Survey of Image Upscaling Tools on the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H
Linux has lots of software with upscaling functionality, some of which offers a wider range of features than the GIMP AI plugin.
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ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.1 released: advanced PDF tools, faster formulas, and various suite-wide improvements
ONLYOFFICE Docs 9.1 brings a significant upgrade.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Ubuntu 25.10
I look at a few issues I’ve experienced when upgrading to Ubuntu 25.10.
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Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Mini PC: Music Player
Let’s play some music on the Raspberry Pi 5. It’s a very capable music player.
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5 Best Free and Open Source Go Linter Tools
This article picks some useful tools to help you fix Go code.
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15 Best Free and Open Source Web-Based Linux File Managers
A file manager is software which provides a user interface to assist in the organisation of files. It helps users manage their files.
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14 Best Free and Open Source Self-Hosted Cloud Storage Tools
This roundup looks at self-hosted cloud storage solutions.
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Benchmarking the BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC
The BOSGAME M4 Pro is a powerful mini PC based on an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS with integrated Radeon 780M. I put it through various benchmark tests.
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Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Radxa ROCK 4D single-board computer.
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BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC running Linux: Introduction to the Series
The BOSGAME M4 Plus Mini PC is a powerful computer based on an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor with integrated Radeon 780M graphics.
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Radxa Cubie A7A Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Radxa Cubie A7A.
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Best Free and Open Source Software: September 2025 Updates
September 2025 updates to the largest compilation of recommended free and open source software available for Linux.
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ChessMD – lightweight PGN database viewer and analysis tool
ChessMD is a free and open source lightweight PGN database viewer and analysis tool. Here’s my verdict on this software.
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AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 NPU in Linux: Gaia – Run LLM Agents
Gaia is open source software designed for the quick setup and execution of generative AI applications on local PC hardware.
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8 Best Free and Open Source Linux Mapping Tools
This roundup includes mapping software which offers quick access to maps all across the world. We also include some specialised tools.
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AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 NPU in Linux: Introduction
This blog documents my adventures with using the NPU present in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in Linux.
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Active Linux Distributions
A distro provides the user with a desktop environment, preloaded applications, and ways to update and maintain the system.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: Gerbil – Run Large Language Models Locally
Gerbil is a desktop app to easily run Large Language Models locally. The software is powered by KoboldCpp, a fork of llama.cpp.
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Benchmarking the Radxa Cubie A7A Single Board Computer
For this article in the series I put the Radxa Cubie A7A single board computer through a series of benchmarks.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 came to market in the third quarter of 2024. It has 12 cores and 24 threads, with 4 Zen 5 cores, and 8 Zen 5c cores.
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9 Useful Free and Open Source Scrobbler Tools
Scrobbling is the process of automatically tracking and recording the music you listen to, sending the data to a service.
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Benchmarking the Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer
For this article in the series I put the Radxa ROCK 4D single board computer through a series of benchmarks.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Waydroid battery life
Waydroid is a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on Ubuntu Touch running Wayland based desktop environments.
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Radxa OS – Debian-based Linux distribution
Radxa OS, or Radxa, is an open source operating system developed by the Radxa team based on the Debian Linux distribution.
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Radxa Cubie A7A Single Board Computer Running Linux: Introduction to the Series
Radxa Cubie A7A is billed as an ultra-compact yet feature-rich SBC designed to deliver powerful performance in space-constrained environments.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: ComfyUI – Generate video, images, 3D, audio with AI
Let’s start with ComfyUI, open source node-based software for generative AI. I install ROCm, ComfyUI and a useful model manager.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: Jan – Chat with AI without privacy concerns
A simple real-world test of the performance of the Radeon 890M with Jan, an open source ChatGPT-alternative that runs 100% offline.
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Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer Running Linux: Introduction to the Series
This series looks at the Radxa ROCK 4D single board computer. It’s billed as a high-performance SBC for Edge AI and 4K multimedia.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro running Linux: Power Consumption
I put the Minisforum AI X1 Pro mini PC under a series of power consumption tests and compare it to other machines.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: GIMP AI Plugins
I’m exploring GIMP AI plugins for the Arc 140T. These provide a set of OpenVINO based plugins that add AI features to GIMP.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Linux Desktop Applications
Libertine is a confined sandbox where you can install deb-packaged desktop-based Ubuntu applications on the Volla Quintus.
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6 Useful Free and Open Source Linux WhatsApp Clients
WhatsApp is a popular, free messaging, social media, and voice-over-IP service that lets users send text, voice messages, and video messages
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mtoc – visually-rich music player and library browser
mtoc (music table of contents) is billed as a visually-rich music player and library browser. It’s written in C++ and built with Qt, TagLib and GStreamer.
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Benchmarking the Minisforum AI X1 Pro
The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is a powerful mini PC based on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with integrated Radeon 890M.
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Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Pre-installed apps
I explore the apps already present on the Volla Phone Quintus, a premium smartphone running Ubuntu Touch.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro running Linux: Introduction to the Series
The machine has the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with integrated Radeon 890M. This is no ordinary processor and no ordinary integrated GPU.
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15 Best Free and Open Source Linux Ham Radio Tools
Ham radio is a popular hobby and service bringing people, electronics and communication together. We pick our favorite ham radio tools.
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14 Best Free and Open Source Linux Video Converters
The best video converters make the process simple, and support a wide number of different codecs and formats.
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7 Best Free and Open Source Zsh Configuration Frameworks
We highly recommend installing a framework with Zsh as it makes dealing with configuration, plugins and themes a lot more straightforward.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 255H
The NUC BOX-255H has the mobile/embedded class 15th generation Intel Core 7 255H processor, based on the Arrow Lake architecture.
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Radxa ROCK 5T Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Radxa ROCK 5T single-board computer.
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LinuxLinks – The Home of Linux
Our popular series on the best free and open source Linux software, hardware, programming, Android, and much more.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Introduction to the Series
This is a new series looking at the Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch. This phone sports a powerful Mediatek Dimensity 7050 with 8 cores and 8GB of RAM.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: OpenVINO AI Plugins for Audacity
The plugins provide AI-enabled effects, generators and analyzers. I can run them on the NUC Box-255H with no internet connection needed.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Stable Diffusion
In the series I’m going to explore the GPU capabilities of the machine covering AI and gaming. Let’s start with deep learning.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series I’m looking at the power consumption of the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H.
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Benchmarking the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H
In this article I’ll benchmark the machine. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Introduction to the series
This is a series of articles looking at the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H. In this series, I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail.
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13 Best Free and Open Source Linux Business Intelligence Software
A business intelligence platform includes three layers: a database layer, a business intelligence layer, and an analytics/performance management layer. Here’s our roundup of the best business intelligence software.
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EterTICs – Linux distribution
EterTICs Linux is a free distribution for community radio stations based on Devuan.
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SSHM – transforms how you manage and connect to SSH hosts
SSHM is a command-line tool that transforms how you manage and connect to your SSH hosts.
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Drauger OS – Ubuntu-based Linux desktop gaming distribution
Drauger OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux desktop gaming distribution that ships with many modifications and optimizations
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Document Scanner – GNOME based tool
Document Scanner lets you capture images using image scanners (e.g. flatbed scanners) that have suitable SANE drivers installed.
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Merkato – monitor stocks and currencies
Merkato is a modern financial data tracker that brings market information directly to your desktop.
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Easy Flatpak – manage flatpaks with a simple GUI
Easy Flatpak helps you install Flatpak apps in a user-friendly way. The tool has recipes for some of them to install them even better.
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VailuxOS – Debian-based Linux distribution built on Ubuntu
VailuxOS’s main goal is to make the transition from Windows to Linux as seamless as possible by maintaining familiar ways of working.
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bibiman – TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database
bibiman is a simple terminal user interface for handling your BibLaTeX database as part of a terminal-based scientific workflow.
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