#freesoftwareadvent — Public Fediverse posts

@scumsuck
When I did my top software list for #freesoftwareadvent I noticed some tech folk who had never heard of AO3. I think most techy guys who aren't writers don't know the problems of fanfiction, and might be malleable to help with a project if the parameters were clearly stated.

@HI_Greens Possibly worth listing the most useful equivalents! Simon Dobson has a good few under his #FreeSoftwareAdvent
Some are rather specialised but a good number are generally useful like #LibreOffice here:
https://mastodon.scot/@simoninireland/115741439244229122

Also hardware: https://libreboot.org/
Explains why you should use a different Bios!

I recently participated in #FreeSoftwareAdvent suggested by @[email protected] , coming up with 25 FOSS packages that I rely on.

Today, I collected those (and 2 extra that I thought about afterwards) into a new article on my Production Log:

"27 Essential FOSS Packages Our Animation Studio Relies On"
https://lunaticsproject.org/2025/12/29/essential-foss-packages/

I changed the order to be slightly more topically organized, although the text for each packages is nearly the same as what I used in my thread.

I'm never quite sure whether Advent should run 24 or 25 days, so if you're of the "24" persuasion, consider today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent a bonus 🙂

Today it's rss2email¹, which is I read my RSS feeds². I prefer to read my RSS via email for a number of reasons:

• I don't need to learn Yet Another Set of Keyboard Bindings because I already know my MUA's key-bindings

• I can use any standards-compliant MUA to read my RSS feeds, whether I have them delivered to my mbox file and read with mail(1), or delivered to my normal mail account and read them via mutt/neomutt/Claws/Thunderbird/whatever

• I have offline access via OfflineIMAP/mbsync and any changes (deleting entries, read-status, flagging, stars, tags, filing, etc) gets synced back up to my server, even across multiple machines

• I have all the filtering power of my MUA

• plenty of utilities also speak IMAP, so I can write scripts to (post-)process my RSS feed too

• sharing an interesting article with friends is as simple as forwarding an email

• my backup process for email also automatically backs up my RSS feeds too

• because it runs from cron(8) on a schedule I establish, I have more control of my distractions (I usually run it around 4am gathering feeds for me to read with breakfast). I found if it ran hourly or even multiple times per day, I'd get sucked into constantly checking to see if anything new/interesting had arrived

• control remains with me on my machine rather than handing my reading habits over to some 3rd party RSS reader-service

And I love RSS because it is a pull rather than a push. If I subscribe to your email newsletter, I have to trust that you'll respect my email address and not share it or lose control of it, and cutting off email subscriptions is sketchy. But with RSS? I just stop polling that feed if I'm done with it and it's gone.

⸻
¹ https://github.com/wking/rss2email

² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/reading-rss-feeds-via-email-on-the-cli/

#freesoftwareadvent

DAY 25 - LINUX
https://static.lwn.net/Distributions/

Arguably the most important free software is Linux. The open source operating system that runs all of the other software. It can run on a desktop, or on smaller devices, even a USB stick.

Linux is the software that runs the computer. Resilient, customizable, supported by a diverse worldwide community and free to download and use. It is the present and the future of computing. Switch to using Linux now. It's the best!

This blog post links to all my #FreeSoftwareAdvent posts which are revolving around tools used in our VFX pipeline.

https://www.comp-fu.com/2025/12/free-software-advent-2025/

Here are the last of my recs for #freesoftwareadvent 2025

DAY 24 - XFCE4-PANEL
https://fandom.ink/@Rozzychan/115776604751319471

DAY 25 - LINUX
https://fandom.ink/@Rozzychan/115780681581021242

And that's all folks. Thanks for playing.

#freesoftwareadvent

DAY 24 - XFCE4-PANEL
https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/start

This is the software for the little panel at the bottom of the screen in my Linux instance. I mention it because I often modify it and it is easily overlooked.

I have different desktops and I show them on this panel so I can switch back and forth. I also add clocks and CPU monitors. I just added silly eyes that stare at my mouse. I just wanted to mention it, because it's always there with me. 😎

#freesoftwareadvent

DAY 23 - PS2PDF

This one was a recommendation.

PS2PDF is a command-line program that converts a postscript file into a pdf file. This program is awesome because some programs make pdf files that are MUCH too big. Using this utility can covert a big file into a much smaller file. PS is the format that goes to the printer, and if you can save it as a ps, then you can convert it.
Actually I saved an image file from GIMP as a pdf it was 38MB but this saved it as 2MB

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 25:

K3B

My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔

In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.

This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.

And it's the final stop for my list.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #K3B #DiscBurner #Multimedia

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 25:

K3B

My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔

In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.

This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.

And it's the final stop for my list.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #K3B #DiscBurner #Multimedia

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 25:

K3B

My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔

In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.

This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.

And it's the final stop for my list.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #K3B #DiscBurner #Multimedia

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 25:

K3B

My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔

In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.

This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.

And it's the final stop for my list.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #K3B #DiscBurner #Multimedia

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 25:

K3B

My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔

In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.

This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.

And it's the final stop for my list.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #K3B #DiscBurner #Multimedia

#freesoftwareadvent Day 24: Linux Mint. Everyday since the first COVID confinement. Three continents. A job. a book. A business. For work. For fun. To collaborate. To work with the kids. I'm very, very thankful for their work and for such an amazing operating system.

And here's my wrap up of my list of #freesoftwareadvent entries.

https://www.treblig.org/daveG/advent2025.html

(Although I did wonder about ending on the old 'tree' program, but I can't remember actually ever really using it https://oldmanprogrammer.net/source.php?dir=projects/tree 🎄 )

You all deserve a break; so for my last #freesoftwareadvent I suggest the game
'Frozen bubble':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Bubble

#FreeSoftwareAdvent Day 24: sqlite

In the spirit of saving the best until last... sqlite is almost certainly the single most deployed software package of all time, underpinning pretty much all cellphone apps and many websites: everywhere that needs persistent data that's more structured than a simple file. Along with Linux, probably the crowning glory of free software -- all the more so because only programmers even know it exists.

https://sqlite.org/index.html

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's pandoc(1).

I author most of my prose in raw HTML (something I've done since the 90s, stemming from my appreciation of WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" functionality), or occasionally I'll use Markdown. It's nice to just hand the file off to pandoc and get some other format (PDF, Word, RTF, plaintext, whatever).

Is the output flashy? Not really. Is it what I would get if I hand-crafted the desired output document? No. But does it let me lazily do conversions with basically zero effort? Yep!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent finale 2025! Without these free and open source projects our pipeline couldn't exist at all:

Python, the VFX world's favourite programming language. And of course... Linux itself 🥳

Happy Holidays!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 24: Ubuntu Mate

I've saved the biggest until last. I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop since 2004 with 4.10. I'd been using various distributions, and hadn't really settled on any, then a member of Cumbria LUG mentioned Ubuntu. I tried it, found that it just worked, and I've been using it ever since.

My first experiences with Linux were using fvwm, then I switched to KDE, but Ubuntu defaulted to Gnome, and I soon got used to that. I never really got on with Gnome 3 though, so I was pleased to discover the Mate desktop, especially as there's an official Ubuntu flavour.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a tool I've barely scratched the surface of.

https://www.audacityteam.org/

#Audacity is a great audio editor package! I don't really edit audio, but sometimes I want to trim a file, or break one up into smaller files. Audacity can do so much, this is like lighting a cigarette with a flame-thrower. But that's the nice thing. I can just use it for 1% of its capability and if I need more, it's probably right there. Somewhere.

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 24:

Firefox

I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since Netscape, and I still do.

And a LOT of my time is spent using the browser, whether socializing on the Fediverse or managing my server.

Despite the current kerfuffle over Mozilla incorporating opt-out AI features that no one wants, I think they are still the best option. Perhaps I'll have to tinker with my settings, or perhaps I'll use one of the several available forks -- but it'll still be Mozilla underneath.

Also, I think it is critical to retain an ecosystem of multiple browsers, rather than a single approved one. We saw the dangers of that with Internet Explorer, and we see it now with Chromium dependencies.

https://www.firefox.com
https://www.mozilla.org
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #FireFox #Mozilla #WebBrowser

'mtr' is a TUI traceroute with a bunch of extra features (which I occasionally find more of) - in it's default mode it shows all the network hops between you and your destination - and shows packet loss on each link, which is great for finding who is to blame for a *partially* dodgy connection. Hitting 'Z' shows you the ASN for each hop, which lets you find who owns it; Hitting D gets a scrolling display so you can see where momentary blips happen.
https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/
#freesoftwareadvent

#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/

I'm not sure #OpenDataAdvent is a thing, but in the spirit of #FreeSoftwareAdvent two tools based on open data that I use very frequently and currently have open:
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ and https://bustimes.org/

Mostly useful in Great Britain, but both give real time information about public transport based on open data and are frequently more useful than the more official apps/websites.

#transport #opendata

Getting ready to head home for the festive season, so an early-ish #FreeSoftwareAdvent post today, and with a hat tip to @gumnos for the topic I will add @AntennaPod - https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/ to the list as my podcast client of choice.

Syncs nicely with NextPod as part of my Nextcloud server, although I'm not currently using any other clients,

Now I just need to add enough episodes to the queue to cover the journey!

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent entry is my podcatcher, castget(1). I've used several CLI podcatchers over the years, changing mostly because hpodder (my then-favorite) became deprecated and dropped out of repos, so I had to find a replacement.

Configuration is a simple INI-style file, it allows me to post-process files (certain ones I cut off the 7-minutes of advertising at the beginning, customize ID3/ID3v2 tags), and give them a naming-convention that works for how I listen.

It runs nightly from cron(8) downloading to my queue directory-tree, emailing me the resulting output, and saves its state in files that can be fairly easily tracked in version-control (annoyingly it doesn't sort them, so every run mangles them, but a little processing with vim makes quick work of them, meaning the resulting diff output is just the new podcasts and a top-level timestamp change, not a complete remunging of the file). About every 3–4GB of queued-up files, I've usually reached the ones on my player/phone, delete those, and replace them with the fresh queue. It does mean that news podcasts are largely worthless because there could be a 3–4wk lag between when the episode releases and I eventually catch it in my player.

It's simple, it works, and it plays well with the rest of my ecosystem. I like it.

#FreeSoftwareAdvent day 23: F-Droid

F-Droid is my preferred app store for Android. I use the Google Play store to install apps that I can't find in F-Droid, but where possible, I install apps from F-Droid. Some of the Android apps I've mentioned this month aren't available on the Google Play Store, but are available in F-Droid.

Installing via F-Droid is a bit more involved, largely because Google want everyone to use their app store. I was concerned that it was going to get more difficult, but it appears that Google have stepped back from plans to do that.

https://f-droid.org/

@fdroidorg

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is all about security.

https://github.com/prowler-cloud/prowler

#Cloud Security Posture Management. Golly those words are all boring, and super boring put together like that. But #Prowler at least gives you the tools you need to audit your cloud services and tighten up the config.

Checking against best practices from CIS, NIST, CISA and others, Prowler can identify weaknesses in the systems you have running on other people's computers and help keep them safer.

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is all about security.

https://github.com/prowler-cloud/prowler

#Cloud Security Posture Management. Golly those words are all boring, and super boring put together like that. But #Prowler at least gives you the tools you need to audit your cloud services and tighten up the config.

Checking against best practices from CIS, NIST, CISA and others, Prowler can identify weaknesses in the systems you have running on other people's computers and help keep them safer.

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent
#newsraft #RSS

```
git clone https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft
cd newsraft
sudo apt install libcurlpp-dev libgumbo-dev
make && sudo make install
````

1 minute later (without parallelization on a 8yo cpu), you have built a complete RSS reader.

You can even get Gemini feeds (gemget needed though).
ex:

$(gemget -sq https://geminiprotocol.net/news/atom.xml) "GeminiProtocol main feed"

Thank you Grigory Kirillov!

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent
#newsraft #RSS

```
git clone https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft
cd newsraft
sudo apt install libcurlpp-dev libgumbo-dev
make && sudo make install
````

1 minute later (without parallelization on a 8yo cpu), you have built a complete RSS reader.

You can even get Gemini feeds (gemget needed though).
ex:

$(gemget -sq https://geminiprotocol.net/news/atom.xml) "GeminiProtocol main feed"

Thank you Grigory Kirillov!

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent
#newsraft #RSS

```
git clone https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft
cd newsraft
sudo apt install libcurlpp-dev libgumbo-dev
make && sudo make install
````

1 minute later (without parallelization on a 8yo cpu), you have built a complete RSS reader.

You can even get Gemini feeds (gemget needed though).
ex:

$(gemget -sq https://geminiprotocol.net/news/atom.xml) "GeminiProtocol main feed"

Thank you Grigory Kirillov!

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 23:

Pelican (and Pelican Importer)

While I use Wordpress for my live Production Log, I also keep annual offline permanent archives on M-Disc media. For these, I need a static HTML site that I can read offline with a browser.

There are a number of static site generators, but I use Pelican. Partly because I'm partial to stuff written in Python, and partly because it has a really good import utility to get the content from Wordpress's XML export.

I also like that I can add articles in HTML, Markdown, or reStructuredText formats.

https://getpelican.com/
https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Pelican #Python #Static

@cherizilla

YW

Been following it all month. For me, 3 categories:
1. Yup, I know that
2. Not relevant to me
3. Wow, I want that!!!

#FreeSoftwareAdvent

#freesoftwareadvent Day 22: #elementaryos !!! It's the first linux os I tried and it currently runs on my mom's laptop. They've just come out with Elementary OS 8.1 and it looks like it's a fairly substantial release. The dock and the accessibility features look like they're especially welcome. Shout out to those who made it possible to also run it on Arm. It's going on a spare Raspberry Pi 5 right now. I'll report back to let you know how it runs.

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 22:

LibreOffice Calc

Behind the scenes, I have found a lot of uses for Calc spreadsheets (which I refer to as my "odious spreadsheets", because they're in "ODS" format).

In the screencap below from a doc, I was using it to establish the finishing state of various 3D assets.

I also use it every year for accounting for income taxes.

https://www.libreoffice.org

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #LibreOffice #Spreadsheet #Calc #FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 21:

DVD Styler

When I want to master my own DVD, with menus and easter eggs and all the other goodies, DVDStyler is my tool of choice.

It provides a grapthical front-end for DVDAuthor, and supports most of the features you'd expect to be able to create on a DVD (I think there may be a few gaps, but I haven't found them limiting).

The program does have simple default templates which makes it easy to whip up a simple DVD for your home movies, but I usually want something more complex and original, so I start from scratch.

https://www.dvdstyler.org/en/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdstyler/

Also see DVDAuthor, the backend:

https://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #DVDStyler #DVD #Video #Publishing

What's in today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent? Why, it's our old friend #PuTTY!

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Remember when we didn't have an ssh client for Windows? And then we did! I've used PuTTY for so many switch configs, then later for accessing Linux systems too.

It's still handy. Sure, I can just run ssh, but if the target doesn't support all the modern ciphers, PuTTY will just figure it out and connect.

It also works great as a good ol' serial terminal, and I still have switches to configure.

What's in today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent? Why, it's our old friend #PuTTY!

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Remember when we didn't have an ssh client for Windows? And then we did! I've used PuTTY for so many switch configs, then later for accessing Linux systems too.

It's still handy. Sure, I can just run ssh, but if the target doesn't support all the modern ciphers, PuTTY will just figure it out and connect.

It also works great as a good ol' serial terminal, and I still have switches to configure.

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 18:

MKVToolNix

This is a tool kit of utilities, including a GUI front end, for manipulating Matroska streaming multimedia files (usually "MKV" or "MKA" files).

The Matroska container format allows for multiple audio, video, and text streams, which means you can encode a video with multiple options for audio and subtitles (as well as alternate video tracks).

It also supports setting up "Chapter" marks.

A must-have for authoring and checking complex videos for streaming and download use.

https://mkvtoolnix.download/

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #MKVToolNix #MKV #Multimedia #Matroska

#freesoftwareadvent day 16

#keyd is a gem I discovered recently, and couldn't believe exists.

Do you like programmable keyboards? But sometimes, you don't have one, or you're using your laptop's keyboard?

Keyd turns your non-programmable keyboard into a programmable one, through software, but at a level low enough that it just works everywhere.

Now you can use Caps-Lock as control, or long-press tab for Alt, or double-press it to escape, or press compose to hold ctrl+alt+shift+meta. Etc.

For #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm highlighting open-source tools in our #VFXpipeline. Today: #OpenColorIO

OCIO is a library that is part of all modern DCC applications. It color-manages images, that is: add or remove gamma corrections, apply LUTs (look-up tables) and so on in a well-defined way. Before OCIO for example, every application had to write their own formulas for sRGB or logarithmic curves and one program might load LUTs in format A but the other needed format B.

https://opencolorio.org

Free Software that I rely on. One per day.

Day 15:

Vokoscreen

I use my special script for daily screen recordings, but I started by using Vokoscreen, and I still use it when I want to make a more intentional screen recording (often at a faster rate like 10fps).

Vokoscreen gives me the flexibility to choose what part of the screen I want to record, frame rate, whether I want to record audio from microphone or output from the system. Which is what I need.

There is also OBS Studio, which I know some people love, and which has more options for live-streaming. But I don't do that. I record, and then I edit. So it's just more complexity than I need.

Upstream:
https://linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen/vokoscreen.html

But I just get the Debian package:
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/vokoscreen-ng

#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Vokoscreen #Video #Multimedia

#freesoftwareadvent day 13

Yes, I've skipped a day again. 🤷‍♂️

Today a tiny program called #gitui

It's what you imagine, a terminal Ui for git. I use it more and more to review log history, list of changes in commits, what's in a stash, etc.
Even though I'm not a developer I keep a lot of things in git repos (some are code, some are config files or similar) and this is a nice add-on to the cli version of git.

#freesoftwareadvent day 13

Yes, I've skipped a day again. 🤷‍♂️

Today a tiny program called #gitui

It's what you imagine, a terminal Ui for git. I use it more and more to review log history, list of changes in commits, what's in a stash, etc.
Even though I'm not a developer I keep a lot of things in git repos (some are code, some are config files or similar) and this is a nice add-on to the cli version of git.

#freesoftwareadvent day 13

Yes, I've skipped a day again. 🤷‍♂️

Today a tiny program called #gitui

It's what you imagine, a terminal Ui for git. I use it more and more to review log history, list of changes in commits, what's in a stash, etc.
Even though I'm not a developer I keep a lot of things in git repos (some are code, some are config files or similar) and this is a nice add-on to the cli version of git.

#freesoftwareadvent day 13

Yes, I've skipped a day again. 🤷‍♂️

Today a tiny program called #gitui

It's what you imagine, a terminal Ui for git. I use it more and more to review log history, list of changes in commits, what's in a stash, etc.
Even though I'm not a developer I keep a lot of things in git repos (some are code, some are config files or similar) and this is a nice add-on to the cli version of git.

#freesoftwareadvent day 13

Yes, I've skipped a day again. 🤷‍♂️

Today a tiny program called #gitui

It's what you imagine, a terminal Ui for git. I use it more and more to review log history, list of changes in commits, what's in a stash, etc.
Even though I'm not a developer I keep a lot of things in git repos (some are code, some are config files or similar) and this is a nice add-on to the cli version of git.