Top Websites for finding FREE and Open Source Software
One thing’s for certain! The free and open source Linux platform has many thousands of applications to satisfy practically all of your computing needs. Below is a list of websites where in addition to the Software Center included with your Linux distribution, you can find just about any type of application you’re looking for.
Change is difficult. Businesses and individuals tend to stick with software that’s common or well-known. We’d like to challenge that thought!
Rather than placing the priority on the software you need in order to perform a given computing task, place the priority on the task itself. AlternativeTo.net allows you to find alternative software (much of it free and open source) that you can use to help you to perform your various computing tasks.
You can find alternative applications that run on Windows, macOS, Linux, iPad and iPhone, Android and Chrome OS, etc.
Do you think that PowerPoint is the only solution you can use to create professional-quality presentations? Think again! Just type “PowerPoint” into the search box on the site and click “Find”. You’ll be amazed at all of the alternatives out there to choose from (many of them are PowerPoint compatible if you need that capability).
Flathub aims to be the place to get and distribute apps for Linux. It is powered by Flatpak which allows Flathub apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.
If you are a Linux user, you can use Flathub to gain access to a growing collection of Flatpak applications.
Snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud and Internet of Things devices that are easy to install, secure, cross‐platform and dependency‐free. Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store, the app store for Linux with an audience of millions.
AppImages are Linux applications that run on any Linux distribution. Essentially an AppImage is a downloadable file for Linux that contains an application and everything the application needs to run (e.g., libraries, icons, fonts, translations, etc.) that cannot be reasonably expected to be part of each target system.
The site is broken into 3 main sections:
Core Apps >> Apps that cover ordinary tasks. Some of them come pre-installed with several Linux distributions
Circle >> GNOME Circle contains applications extending the GNOME ecosystem. It champions the great additional software that is available for the GNOME platform.
Development >> GNOME Development apps help develop and design new apps and make it easy to contribute to existing ones.
