Knowledge Base

Reasons

My life is made so much easier and more fun because of all the projects on the greater Internet. The vast majority of them are free and open source software. If I ever get spare money, these are the projects to which I would donate, in no particular order.

Projects to be thankful for

OS/desktop environments

• https://kororaproject.org/ Korora Linux: My first and only production desktop distro. I picked wisely when I switched off of a non-free operating system.
• https://www.gnu.org/ GNU project: Makes everything on top of the Linux kernel possible.
• https://www.kernel.org/ Linux Kernel Organization: Keepers of the Linux kernel on which almost everything in this list depends.
• http://developer.linuxmint.com/projects.html Linux Mint team: They write Cinnamon, my preferred desktop environment.
• http://www.xfce.org/ Xfce: My preferred lightweight desktop environment.
• https://getfedora.org/ Fedora project: Upstream distro for Korora and vital to my ecosystem of GNU/Linux computer systems and member of the Red Hat family.
• https://www.centos.org/ Community ENTerprise OS: The subscriptionless server operating system in the Red Hat family.
• https://almalinux.org/ The replacement for CentOS starting with version 8.0.
• https://www.redhat.com/en Red Hat: The organization that supervises Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ Freedesktop.org hosts projects that affect my daily life, including LightDM, fprint, Xorg, xdg-utils, and probably a whole lot more.
• https://devuan.org/ Devuan: A fork of Debian without systemd. I use systemd in my beloved Fedora, but on other platforms I like to have the choice to not use it!

Applications

• http://www.vim.org/ VIM: VI iMproved. My choice of editors on the cli.
• http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html SciTE: Programmer's editor I use on GNU/Linux.
• https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Notepad++: Programmer's editor on a non-free OS. I actually like this way better than SciTE.
• https://librewolf.net/ LibreWolf is a set of overlay patches for Firefox that makes it a real web browser.
• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Firefox web browser. My third-favorite web browser.
• http://classicshell.net/ Classic shell. This application modifies the Windows shell so it is extremely functional and include some of the removed functionality of previous iterations of Windows.
• http://puddletag.sourceforge.net Puddletag: My preferred mp3 tag editor. Its original goal was to provide functionality similar to mp3tag, which was also really useful to me.
• http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec PhotoRec: Data recovery tool. This software has rescued terabytes of data for me from disks where the partition table was overwritten.
• https://www.freefilesync.org/ FreeFileSync. Think rsync but with a gui. It allows you to make exceptions from a detailed file listing, before executing the sync.
• https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html Veracrypt: cross-platform disk encryption. This is basically the replacement to TrueCrypt. I still use this on portable devices, instead of cryptsetup and LUKS, in case I have to use a Windows client.
• https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ Waterfox: A fork of Firefox around version 55. It still preserves NPAPI plugins and disables all the random cruft Mozilla never should have added to Firefox. The only caveat is it is 64-bit only.
• https://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page FreeIPA: Provides identity, policy, and trust management. This tool provides a domain suitable for GNU/Linux hosts. This is arguably the best product to ever come out of Red Hat (after the .rpm file format). The FreeIPA team maintains sssd, the daemon that makes it easy for Linux systems to join Active Directory.
• https://cdemu.sourceforge.io/ CDEmu facilitates providing a disc drive to Wine.

Communications

• https://pidgin.im/ Pidgin: Chat client, and my window to irc.freenode.net

Network storage and transfers

• https://rclone.org/ rclone: Command line program to sync to cloud providers
• https://spideroak.com/personal/spideroak-one SpiderOakONE: Zero-knowledge storage!
• https://rsync.samba.org/ rsync: the humble sysadmin tool of yore