Today is Free Software Day 2025!
The idea behind Free Software Day is to give thanks to all the free software projects that make your life a little bit easier. In today’s world of surveillance capitalism and restricted digital freedoms, it is more important than ever to support those that support us with tools that let us get things done without being constantly watched or being told how and where we can use the tools.
There are so many tools that I use every day that I could never give thanks to all of them in a reasonable length post. I’ll focus on the new and the ’everyday’ for this post.
While licenses matter, I don’t want to get into that with this post.
Also, if you are able, consider supporting these projects financially.
Operating Systems
I have a ‘short list’ of operating systems that I use for day to day work and for running experiments with custom embedded systems.
Lately, I am using Trixie on the my front end computers and I have been using Stable on my servers for a year or so now. Fantastic operating system and rock solid.
How many of your containers use Alpine as a base image? Probably a lot! It’s also a great operating system for custom little devices and prototyping small scale systems. In the past I’ve even run it as a desktop operating system and hypervisor.
I ran Pop for the past year, until recently moving to Debian. It’s a great operating system and is rock solid. I love the direction they are taking with the new Cosmic Desktop alpha; it matches my aesthetic for a GUI.
I’m just starting to get into postmarketOS. It seems like a great embedded device distribution and has a mature ecosystem.
This is another operating system that I use from time to time for prototyping and experiments. It’s very easy to get into the weeds! I ran it for the better part of 3-4 years as a desktop and as servers. Great experience.
Fabulous BSD distribution with a strong user base. I waffle back and forth about switching from Linux to FreeBSD every now and then, mostly to try something new on the desktop. It is a very stable, cohesive experience when the operating system user land and kernel are all developed by the same project. Every major release I spin up a copy and play with it to see what’s new. In the past I’ve used it directly as a custom network appliance for network security as well as via downstream projects like PFSense and OPNSense.
I ran e as my main desktop OS for several years. Fantastic desktop environment (Pantheon) with a sane and cohesive user experience. I really like what e is doing as an accessible operating system.
I haven’t run Gentoo in a while but back in the mid-aughts it was my go to for work and play for servers, desktops, and embedded. We even ran it in the data centre - effectively doing devops automation and such before that was classified as a thing in pop culture terms. I still spin up a VM every now and then to shake off the cobwebs of using the portage build and packaging system.
Sometimes you can’t get things to work on Raspberry Pi OS. It’s true! I couldn’t get some GC9A01 round displays working on Raspberry and after pulling my hair for many hours it just kinda worked on DietPi. Probably fat-finger, ‘versionitis’ issues and not RPI OS’ fault - but it helped my sanity to prove the devices worked! I like the underlying system configuration and management under DietPi. Don’t @t me for thinking about it similarly to smitty.
Low cost embedded hardware for prototyping with a free operating system based upon Debian? Yes please! Thank you! I haven’t touched this stuff in a couple years, need to get back at it!
Window Managers & Desktop Environments
So much diversity in this space, it’s hard to thank them all.
Mature, elegant, and efficient. Can’t ask for much more. In some respects it is a bit of a paradigm shift to use but I appreciate that. Nowadays, this is my daily-driver desktop environment.
Another fantastic desktop environment. Much less ‘opinionated’ than Gnome; it let’s you customize anything and everything practically.
Minimal and speedy but having everything you need. If you are running a low power machine this is a great desktop environment. If you are running a high power machine too! You don’t give up anything with respect to features and XFCE can be customized out the whazoo!
SXMO is a mobile focused environment that uses either sway or dwm tiling window managers. I’ve only started playing with it in the last week or so. I’ve never been big on tiling window managers beyond what can be done when shelled into a remote host on a console or using a floating window manager’s tiling features for ad hoc placements when doing something like a ‘visual diff’ between two windows. However, getting back into messing around with embedded devices this environment brings me back to my ‘carputer’ days with Fvwm.
Ah, classic Fvwm. It is still actively developed and is lightning fast with many ‘desktop environment’ type features if you include ‘button swallows’ as a form of integration for your favourite stand alone tools. I used it as a desktop on some computers in the ’90s and used it for prototyping a ‘carputer’ in the 2000s.
These projects are the display server underpinnings of desktop environments and window managers. We can’t give thanks for the above GUIs and tooling above without thanking the underlying software that gives them life.
Creative Tools
I’ve used many tools to create graphics, image maps, and 3D renders.
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
GIMP is great for photo editing. It has powerful tools for working with layers, fades, effects, etc. The new imminent 3.0 release looks like it will make the user interface more modern.
It’s primarily a ‘drawing program’ but I also use it for creating multi-layer graphics with photo content. I wish I could get Krita on my iPad.
A vector drawing program that is very approachable. I’ve been using it to create logos and number roundels for our autocross cars. I create the graphics and then import into our vinyl cutting machine for output. I need to get an open API vinyl cutter and cut out the middle man process that involves invasive and inefficient cloud garbage.
I recently started working with Shotwell and it is great for sorting and tagging images. I’ve dabbled with Darktable as well but have not been using it lately - perhaps too powerful for my simple needs.
I’ve been using it to migrate Sketchup and Collada files back and forth for a closed-source, architectural design CAD software that I use. As I get more into 3D printing I expect to learn more beyond doing the few online tutorials that are out there.
Another great tool that has seen a huge improvement over the last year or so. I use it for working with 3D printing objects primarily. Still very neophyte but that will improve as more design projects go through my workshop.
Office Suite
LibreOffice is fantastic and is what I use for for writing and spreadsheets.
Website Tools
I have an internal wiki site where I keep data and notes related to projects. I’ve been using Mediawiki for over a decade for this purpose. It’s great, and easy to use for populating content, especially nowadays. I’m really excited about the new Chameleon theme that gives the ability to really change the took of the web site so it doesn’t look like Wikipedia. ‘To do’ list stuff.
Hugo
Hugo is a static site generator. I really like this approach to building web sites on the public Internet. It reduces the attack profile in the public space (no scripting language or database to break).
I came across this CMS when doing research several weeks ago and was impressed by how it looks. If I wanted to set something up where other, less technically involved people needed to make website updates, I would take a hard look at this software.
Databases
I won’t ‘drain’ this topic beyond saying that MariaDB, Postgress, and SQLite are awesome.
Development Tools
Code life-cycle management, gitops, change tracking, oh my!
A great, minimal (in implementation - not features!) git server.
Infrastructure & Services
It’s impossible to list everything that I use and am thankful for in the FOSS/FLOSS world. Here’s a list of some more tools I enjoy using most everyday or am working into incorporating into my ‘daily ops’.
- GNU Tools and Busybox
- Shells like Bash, Fish, zsh
- Filesystems like Ext4, ZFS, BTRFS
- Samba, Postfix, nginx, PHP, OPNSense, MQTT, ffmpeg, ImageMagick
- Docker, Podman, LXC, Incus, Ansible
- Pi-hole, Leantime, Jellyfin, Frigate, Immich, Octoprint, Nextcloud, Searxng
I’ll end it there. I feel like there are many other projects that deserve our thanks.
If you’d like to comment, I posted on Mastodon.
Thanks for reading.