Open-source software tools continue to increase in popularity because of the multiple advantages they provide including lower upfront software and hardware costs, lower total-cost-of-ownership, lack of vendor lock-in, simpler license management and support from active communities.

In the following slides, as part of the CRN 2024 Year In Review project, we take a look at some of the most popular open-source software products that have caught our attention this year.

whowatch is a simple, easy-to-use interactive who-like command line program for monitoring processes and users on a Linux system in real time.

A window manager manages the windows that applications bring up. We recommend the best c.ompositing, stacking, tiling, and dynamic window managers.

This is going to be a pretty quick post – I found out about entr relatively recently and I felt like WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS BEFORE?!?! So I’m telling you about it in case you’re in the same boat as I was.
There’s a great explanation of the tool with lots of examples on entr’s website.
The summary is in the headline: entr is a command line tool that lets you run a arbitrary command every time you change any of a set of specified files.

Applications to run at the command line.

One of the first things that impressed me about Mac OS X when I first saw it was its screensaver. Instead of just showing a simple slideshow of your pictures, it actually used a ‘Ken Burns’ panning and zooming effect with a fancy fading transition to make the otherwise static pictures really come to life. It always sounded like a fun project to create a standalone tool to create slideshow movies that used this effect, with full control over where and how much pictures should be zoomed.

One way to get started with an open source community is to write about it. You can contribute to technical documentation, share how you use the software, or write an article for Opensource.com. But getting started writing is easier said than done. The two most common excuses I hear for not writing are: "I have nothing new to say" and "I'm not a good writer." I'm here to dispel both of those myths. What should you write about? "Hunt for the stories that often get left out." —Erik Larson

I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contacts which I do not. I’ve gone through all the steps Apple recommends, done the upgrades and the reboots, but there’s nothing doing. All the swearing and threatening of moving to a different operating system aren’t really helping.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an enormous amount of changes in how people work, play, and communicate. By now, many of us have settled into the routine of using remote communication or videoconferencing tools to keep in touch with our friends and family. In the last few weeks we've also seen a number of lists and guides aiming to get people set up with the "right" tools for communicating in hard times, but in almost every case, these articles recommend that people make a difficult compromise: trading their freedom in order to communicate with the people they care about and work with.

Ever considered setting up and running your very own git server? It’s actually
quite easy! In this post, I’ll outline the steps I took to set up my
own so that you can give it a try yourself. But first, why
might you even want to go through the trouble of setting up your own server?

exa is a replacement for the venerable ls command. exa sports more features and arguably better defaults. Free and open source software.

Pngquant is a free, open source and cross-platform command-line lossy PNG compressor. It is based on a portable libimagequant library and is written in C99. It reduces the file size significantly by converting the PNG image to more efficient 8-bit PNG format and preserves full alpha transparency. As you may already know, 8-bit PNG files are often 60-80% smaller than 24/32-bit PNG files. The images compressed using Pngquant are fully-compatible with all web browsers and operating systems. Pngquant can compress one or multiple images at once.

I am not going to discuss why you need strong passwords. It is an open secret that strong passwords keep you relatively safer.

Generating strong passwords is something you can do on your own but putting all the combination of lower and upper cases, numbers, symbols can be a tiresome work.

But you need not worry. Linux has got you covered. We’ll see 5 best password generators for Linux that will ease the task for you.

WallGen is a small command-line utility that generates HQ poly wallpapers with only a few text arguments for inputs. Free and open source software.

rga (or ripgrep-all) is a command line tool to recursively search all files in a directory for a regex pattern, that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. It's a wrapper for ripgrep, the line-oriented recursive search program, on top of which it enables search in a multitude of file types like PDF, DOCX, ODT, EPUB, SQLite databases, movies subtitles embedded in MKV or MP4 files, archives like ZIP or GZ, and more.

Stack overflow command line client written in Python. Search and browse stack overflow without leaving the terminal.

Serverless computing is transforming traditional software development. These open source platforms will help you get started.

A curated list of websites with beautiful free icon design sets that can be used for personal and commercial projects.

On June 29, 2019, the FreeDOS Project turns 25 years old. That's a major milestone for any open-source software project! In honor of this anniversary, Jim Hall shares this look at how FreeDOS got started and describes its Linux roots.