Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is F-Droid, a Free software app store for Android. (As in, the app is FOSS, and the apps available in the default repo are FOSS.)

F-Droid also runs the default repository used by the F-Droid app, but anyone can run their own repository, and users can add that repo and install apps from there (e.g. Bitwarden does this).

Works perfectly with GrapheneOS :)

https://f-droid.org/ / @fdroidorg

#FDroid #Android #FOSS

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent are some extensions which I find particularly useful.

For Thunderbird:

* Quick Folder Move lets me file email (including into folders in different accounts) via the keyboard. I use this goodness knows how many tens of times a day. https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quick-folder-move/

For Firefox:

* Consent-o-matic automatically suppresses malicious compliance cookie banners: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

* uBlock Origin blocks all sorts of problematic stuff, and helps make for a much nicer browsing experience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

* Recipe Filter foregrounds the actual recipe on recipe pages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/

* Shut Up is a comments blocker, which makes the web far more pleasant, with fewer random people's opinions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/shut-up-comment-blocker/

#FOSS #Linux #Firefox #Thunderbird

#FreeSoftwareAdvent Day 23: ffmpeg

This is the Swiss Army Knife of video tools, and actually underpins other tools I've mentioned by OBS and vlc. It does video manipulation on the command line, everything from format conversion, up- and down-sizing, re-sampling, filtering, and so forth: all ready to be used programmatically or wrapped-up in a friendly interface as required.

https://ffmpeg.org/

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is Elementary OS.

If I were looking for a first-time Linux operating system for a friend or family member, I'd happily give Elementary OS a try, as I have heard nothing but good things about it.

Plus, supporting small projects doing impressive things FTW.

https://elementary.io/ / @elementary

#FOSS #Linux

All my #FreeSoftwareAdvent posts in one place:

https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/12/freesoftwareadvent-2025/

Thanks to everyone who shared their own Free software recommendations.

Somewhat fewer thanks to those who grumbled in my replies about my choices. Don't forget to ask for a refund.

All my #FreeSoftwareAdvent posts in one place:

https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/12/freesoftwareadvent-2025/

Thanks to everyone who shared their own Free software recommendations.

Somewhat fewer thanks to those who grumbled in my replies about my choices. Don't forget to ask for a refund.

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is paperless-ngx, a key part of keeping us, well, paperless.

It is a document management tool, but I use it in a very basic way: it is hooked up to our scanner, and anything we scan gets automatically converted to PDF and OCRd. We then shred the paper. I try to scan, and shred, everything on the day that it arrives.

It is particularly useful around tax return time, as it means I can easily get the information I need from stuff which people have posted to us.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

#FOSS #SelfHosting #Paperless

#FreeSoftwareAdvent Day 23: ffmpeg

This is the Swiss Army Knife of video tools, and actually underpins other tools I've mentioned by OBS and vlc. It does video manipulation on the command line, everything from format conversion, up- and down-sizing, re-sampling, filtering, and so forth: all ready to be used programmatically or wrapped-up in a friendly interface as required.

https://ffmpeg.org/

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is Elementary OS.

If I were looking for a first-time Linux operating system for a friend or family member, I'd happily give Elementary OS a try, as I have heard nothing but good things about it.

Plus, supporting small projects doing impressive things FTW.

https://elementary.io/ / @elementary

#FOSS #Linux

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent are some extensions which I find particularly useful.

For Thunderbird:

* Quick Folder Move lets me file email (including into folders in different accounts) via the keyboard. I use this goodness knows how many tens of times a day. https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quick-folder-move/

For Firefox:

* Consent-o-matic automatically suppresses malicious compliance cookie banners: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

* uBlock Origin blocks all sorts of problematic stuff, and helps make for a much nicer browsing experience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

* Recipe Filter foregrounds the actual recipe on recipe pages: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/

* Shut Up is a comments blocker, which makes the web far more pleasant, with fewer random people's opinions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/shut-up-comment-blocker/

#FOSS #Linux #Firefox #Thunderbird

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is F-Droid, a Free software app store for Android. (As in, the app is FOSS, and the apps available in the default repo are FOSS.)

F-Droid also runs the default repository used by the F-Droid app, but anyone can run their own repository, and users can add that repo and install apps from there (e.g. Bitwarden does this).

Works perfectly with GrapheneOS :)

https://f-droid.org/ / @fdroidorg

#FDroid #Android #FOSS

Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).

It's one of the key elements in my podcast listening (more on that to come later this month), where my podcatcher pulls down podcasts into a backlog tree structure, and I rsync the whole thing to my phone for listening. It also undergirds my blog deployment, building in Nikola (still gotta find some time to switch that to my custom Makefile driven build process) and then rsync'ing the output/ tree up to my web-server.

And last night our teen wanted our family photo website content's pictures for a school project, so I was able to rsync the latest copy of them to a backup USB drive that he could browse offline.

It's reliable and does a particular job (keeping two directory trees in sync) very well. Yes, ZFS send/receive is more efficient if both sides support it and they're whole datasets, but that's not always the case.

Also, since I use bash as my shell, the "^" substitution makes it easy to issue something like

$ rsync -n -avr $SRC $DEST

and if it looks good, use

$ ^-n

to remove the dry-run flag and run it for real.

December 19 #FreeSoftwareAdvent

#DokuWiki: Simple, effective wiki software

It's hard to beat the wiki format for good old fashioned knowledge management. Dokuwiki is a file-based wiki which doesn't need a database and runs on pretty much any PHP-based hosting. It's very easy to set up and use. While it's simple to jump in, DokuWiki also has loads of advanced features like access control and revision history. It supports 50+ languages, alternative visual themes, and has a rich plugin ecosystem.

Thanks @dokuwiki !

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is LibreOffice, the amazing free office suit (document editor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, etc).

I know that I've included this in previous #FreeSoftwareAdvent toots, but I use LibreOffice, particularly Writer, every day.

Better still, this one isn't just for Linux users, so if you are thinking about moving away from your Microsoft or Apple office suite, you can give LibreOffice a try, for free, alongside whatever you use currently, and give it a good go before you made a decision.

#LibreOffice

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 13:

VideoLAN Client, a.k.a. VLC

Some distro maintainers apparently hate it. It is very customizable, which results in multiple and frequent UI changes.

But damn is it useful! I MUST have it.

I have found very few video formats that VLC won't play, at least if you install all the codecs (some of which are non-free, which is why you have to install them later -- but that's not VLC's fault).

It is my usual music player, and video player. I use it to check my newly-edited videos.

Somewhere in there is a way to edit metadata in files -- I know I've used it, though not in a long time.

And if I go to "Media -> Convert/Save", it can convert video formats, which can be a life-saver.

If my computer should shut down suddenly, my screenlogging script will produce a corrupted video. VLC can read it and convert into a corrected format that other programs can read. Handy!

https://www.videolan.org/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #VLC #VideoLan #MusicPlayer #VideoPlayer #Multimedia

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's ZFS. It gives me

• all in one volume management (no volume-groups and logical volumes and manually resizing partitions on those logical volumes with a dozen different commands, no playing the "oof, need more space on partition A and have too much free space on partition B, back up all the files, nuke both, shuffle partition-sizes/locations, restore the files" dance)

• transparent file compression

• transparent volume encryption

• fast and effectively free snapshots and clones (you start paying the cost if they diverge or deleting files that remain in a snapshot, but that's to be expected)

• same-disk redundancy with copies=2 to help prevent against bitrot, and multi-disk redundancy with effectively zero effort

• the CoW means no need for fsck(8) horribly slowing my boots or finding orphaned fragments of files and shunting them into a lost+found/ directory (my biggest frustration with OpenBSD's FFS2) in the event of an abrupt power loss

• efficient send/receive (beats rsync hands down in terms of speed)

• fine-grained quota/reservation control

• utilities make scripting easy with output-formatting options

• cross-OS support in a way that very few other filesystems provide (other than FAT 😆)

I'm sure there are additional reasons that didn't percolate to the top of my brain, but it's just so much more pleasant than any other disk management I've done on any OS.