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My Favorite OSS Projects, V2

The last post I wrote about this (My Favorite Open Source Projects) was written some time back in early 2015 (I migrated blogging platforms several times, so the original author date is lost to the interwebs). I think it is time to write a new one.

Operating system / Linux Distro

I feel like I should start with my OS. At risk of sounding a little like "BTW, I run Arch", my favorite Linux distro these days (and for many years), is Crux Linux. It's an awesome source-based distro that has package files written in standardized shell formats. In fact, its packaging system was the inspiration for the Arch user repository (AUR). I feel it is a sweet medium between (for example) Slackware and Debian.

Desktop Software

• Markdown, specifically common mark. This is a C implementaiton of the markdown spec, with the goal of trying to unify the various specifications around the internet. It is super fast, minimal, and powers most of this blog (at this time at least). I use markdown as a spec for note taking of all kinds, many times a day.

• ** Darktable** is an open source photography tool, specifically for post-processing of raw image formats. It is very powerful and the community maintains it well, with frequent updates.

Server Software

• Synapse and Element Web: First, Synapse is the reference implementation of the Matrix server software, a decentralized and standardized chat software. Element web is the front-end webapp for it so you can text your friends without using that tiny smartphone keyboard. Of all the chat mediums in existence today, this is the one I'm putting my support behind.

• Nextcloud: Nextcloud is a little like self-hosted Google apps. Without plugins, it supports file, contact, and calendar sync protocols with a pretty slick web interface, helping you get away from Google's apps if you wanted to. With some extra plugins, you can add a mail web interface, tasks, password management, and more. This software is what helped me get off of Google's services.

• CGit: An awesome CGI Git web UI app that is super lightweight and super fast. It's very stable and just functional enough. It doesn't provide its own database or git protocol implementation, just the web UI. As such, git protocol interraction needs to be set up over SSH or the git smart http protocol - a beautiful separation of concerns.

• Lighttpd is a simple, lightweight, and extremely fast webserver. While its docs aren't the most clear for setup, and you won't find a ton of help on the internet due to its smaller userbase by comparison to the behemoths of NGINX and Apache, it's still a great web server and documented well enough. It got its start with the goal of building a web server that could handle 10,000 simultaneous connections on normal hardware. My site doesn't need to scale that much, but I've seen it handle with no issue thousands per second. This little webserver is great!