-
XnView
"Fast, lots of features, very manageable, many plug-ins, supports nearly any OS." (Review)
|
-
 GIMP
"Currently the only freeware package I am aware of that can be called an advanced image editor.
If you are inexperienced at using image editing programs GIMP will likely be too overwhelming to start learning on as it has a steeper learning curve but it is feature rich. It has lots of advanced features and can do almost everything the Photoshop can do.
Its multi-windowed interface makes it a little unusual if you're used to a windows program." (Review)
-
Pinta
A simplified alternative to GIMP and modelled after the popular Windows program Paint.Net, Pinta is good for average users and includes most basic features including common drawing tools, resizing and cropping, adjustments and effects for tweaking images as well as supports for multiple layers.
|
-
 MyPaint
Designed for pressure sensitive graphics tablets, MyPaint allows you to use a large collection of brushes including charcoal and ink to emulate real media, with color changers and opacity controls, unlimited canvas and basic layer support.
You can also download and import more brush packages for use with the application.
|
-
 Luminance HDR
Luminance HDR (previously known as Qtpfsgui) is an open source graphical user interface program and a high quality application to provide a workflow for high dynamic range imaging.
It has great tone-mapping and aligning facilities, allowing for 8, 16 and 32 bit channels and two means of manually manipulating the image.
|
-
Picasa 3
"Simply sensational editing features that provide you with every function amateur photographers need." (Review)
-
digiKam
A digital photo management program designed to import, organize, enhance, search and export image files. With this you can add comments and tags to albums, view and edit items, create slideshows and calendars, and share your creations.
|
-
Inkscape
"A top product enhanced by an excellent user interface and the impressive set of tutorials, helps wean the user away from the world of digital images to the nodes, lines, curves and shapes that form the basis of vector editing." (Review)
|
-
Hugin
A GUI front-end of Panorama Tools allows you to stitch overlapping digital photos taken from the same location into a complete panorama, with advanced features and workflow options such as correction of exposure and white balance, generate HDR, supporting a full range of cameras and lenses, multiple rows of photos, cropping, masking, control points, optimizer and more.
|
-
 Sweet Home 3D
"This software package is sure to tickle every bone in your body. You can model your dream home, along with all of its cherished appointments, and then watch it come to life. You can start simple with just the bare walls or import an image of your intended floor plan to serve as a basis for the design-to-be.
The user interface is as intuitive as it gets; drag and drop furnishings from the built-in catalog onto your floor plan. Clear graphic handles then make it easy to edit the items. Once you've finished your home design and tweaked every niche and corner to your liking, the fun has only just begun." (Review)
-
 Blender
"A complete software package for 3D modeling, texturing, rendering, animation and physics. It has a complex but merciful user interface, and the entire repertoire of its capabilities are made available through a scripting language, so the creation of 3D games beckons.
The software can import from and export to more than 20 different file formats. There is a large and growing community of Blender users who've already contributed numerous add-on scripts that can make your going easier. If it can be imagined then it can be realized, with Blender freeware." (Review)
|
-
 QtQR
A graphical frond-end for python-qrtools allows you to easily create and decode QR codes, supporting URL and other data type, configurable pixel and margin sizes, error correction, and save QR Codes in png format.
You can also use it to decode a QR image from a file on your computer or captured on a Webcam. (Note: Install python-qrtools in your system before installing qtqr; both debian and rpm packages are available.)
|
Subscribe to our Top Picks RSS Feed or enter your email address below to get the feed delivered to you by email:
We are looking for people with skills or interest in the following:
3. Best Free Image Tools for Linux
Printer-friendly version
Comments
"... Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server ...":
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for OS X, Linux, and the rest of the family.
Features:
- Autosuggestions
- Glorious VGA Color
- Sane Scripting
- Web Based configuration
- Man Page Completions
- Works Out Of The Box
http://fishshell.com/
"... Obnam is an easy, secure backup program. Backups can be stored on local hard disks, or online via the SSH SFTP protocol. The backup server, if used, does not require any special software, on top of SSH.
Some features that may interest you:
* Snapshot backups. Every generation looks like a complete snapshot, so you don't need to care about full versus incremental backups, or rotate real or virtual tapes.
* Data de-duplication, across files, and backup generations. If the backup repository already contains a particular chunk of data, it will be re-used, even if it was in another file in an older backup generation. This way, you don't need to worry about moving around large files, or modifying them. (However, the current implementation has some limitations: see dedup).
* Encrypted backups, using GnuPG ...":
http://liw.fi/obnam/
FireBox - A 3D Internet Browser supporting the Oculus Rift:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mccrae/projects/firebox/
The Courier mail transfer agent (MTA) is an integrated mail/groupware server based on open commodity protocols such as ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SSL, and HTTP. Courier provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, Webmail, calendaring, and mailing list services:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/courier/
PDFtk Server is a command-line tool for working with PDFs:
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
PDFtk Server can:
- Merge PDF Documents or Collate PDF Page Scans
- Split PDF Pages into a New Document
- Rotate PDF Documents or Pages
- Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
- Encrypt Output as Desired
- Fill PDF Forms with X/FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
- Generate FDF Data Stencils from PDF Forms
- Apply a Background Watermark or a Foreground Stamp
- Report PDF Metrics, Bookmarks and Metadata
- Add/Update PDF Bookmarks or Metadata
- Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
- Unpack PDF Attachments
- Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
- Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
- Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
SimpleScreenRecorder:
Features:
* Graphical user interface (Qt-based).
* Faster than VLC and ffmpeg/avconv.
* Records the entire screen or part of it, or records OpenGL applications directly (similar to Fraps on Windows).
* Synchronizes audio and video properly (a common issue with VLC and ffmpeg/avconv).
* Reduces the video frame rate if your computer is too slow (rather than using up all your RAM like VLC does).
* Fully multithreaded: small delays in any of the components will never block the other components, resulting is smoother video and better performance on computers with multiple processors.
* Pause and resume recording at any time (either by clicking a button or by pressing a hotkey).
* Shows statistics during recording (file size, bit rate, total recording time, actual frame rate, ...).
* Can show a preview during recording, so you don't waste time recording something only to figure out afterwards that some setting was wrong.
* Uses libav/ffmpeg libraries for encoding, so it supports many different codecs and file formats (adding more is trivial).
* Sensible default settings: no need to change anything if you don't want to.
* Tooltips for almost everything: no need to read the documentation to find out what something does.
http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/
Bitmessage is a P2P communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs:
https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Compiling_instructions
NCurses Music Player Client (Plus Plus) - featureful ncurses based MPD client inspired by ncmpc
Main new features:
* tag editor
* playlist editor
* easy to use search engine
* media library
* music visualizer
* ability to fetch artist info from last.fm
* new display mode
* alternative user interface
* ability to browse and add files from outside of MPD music directory
... and a lot more minor convenient functions:
http://ncmpcpp.rybczak.net/
Fastwiki is an Offline wikipedia software:
http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html
Missing categories is more interesting to me than disputes over which game is truly the best.
Best RPG? Perhaps 0ad
Best Sim game? Perhaps Micropolis
Best Tower Defense game? Perhaps CreepTD
Best Racing game? Perhaps TORCS
"Best" is sufficiently subjective that I think you ought to add an Honorable Mention list for those games not the "best" but competitive.
I do appreciate the list and read it every time it comes out. I never fail to find something I'm interested in trying. Thanks for your work.
Good suggestions CorporalPunishment. TORCS has been reviewed by editor George J. and is now added to this list as well. Other suggested games will be looked into.
Minetest is an infinite-world block sandbox game and a game engine, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft and the like:
http://minetest.net/
Thanks Panzer for the many suggestions. I'll try them out one by one once I get time.
Pinot is a D-Bus service that crawls, indexes your documents and monitors them for changes, and a GTK-based user interface that enables to query the index built by the service and your favourite Web engines, and display and analyse the results:
http://code.google.com/p/pinot-search/
marathon is a minimal bash/unix based launcher that tries to be smart about running or focusing apps:
https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon
Freelan - multi-platform, highly-configurable and peer-to-peer VPN software:
http://www.freelan.org/
http://www.freelan.org/page/faq#comparison_grid
dwb is a lightweight web browser based on the webkit web browser engine and the gtk toolkit. dwb is highly customizable and can be easily configured through a web interface. It intends to be mostly keyboard driven, inspired by firefox's vimperator plugin.
Features:
- vi-like shortcuts
- Link following via keyboard hints
- Bookmarks
- Quickmarks
- Cookie support, whitelisting of cookies
- Proxy support
- Userscript support
- Tab completion for history, bookmarks, userscripts
- Custom stylesheets
- Javascript blocker with whitelisting support
- Flash plugin blocker with whitelisting support
- Adblocking with filterlists
- Webinterface for keyboard and settings configuration
- Custom commands, binding commandsequences to shortcuts
- Extendable via extensions/scripts
- Extension manager
http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
"... The Gnome Encfs Manager (or short GEncfsM) is an easy to use manager and mounter for encfs stashes featuring per-stash configuration, Gnome Keyring support, a tray menu inspired by Cryptkeeper but using the AppIndicator API and lots of unique features. Whether you want to let it do things as simple as mounting a stash at startup, which is often used in conjunction with cloud-synced folders on services like Dropbox and Ubuntu one, or whether you want to let it automatically mount and unmount your stashes on removeable drives like USB-sticks, SD cards or even network-resources, GEncfsM is designed to do all the work for you ...":
http://www.libertyzero.com/GEncfsM/
Untangle is a Linux-based network gateway with pluggable modules for network applications like spam blocking, web filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention, bandwidth control, captive portal, VPN, firewall, and more:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/untangle/
Midnight Commander is a visual file manager. It's a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included:
http://www.midnight-commander.org/
mpg123 is a real time MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 audio player/decoder for layers 1,2 and 3:
http://www.mpg123.de/
EqualX LaTeX Equation Editor:
http://equalx.sourceforge.net/
NitroShare - a network file-sharing application that makes sending a file to another machine on the local network as easy as dragging-and-dropping:
https://launchpad.net/nitroshare
Freeciv has moved to HTML5 - now you can you play it right in your browser:
http://play.freeciv.org/
traGtor - Convert all your Audio and Videofiles in Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo through FFmpeg without using a terminal:
http://mein-neues-blog.de/tragtor-gui-for-ffmpeg/
2ManDVD is a program to simplify the creation of DVD-Video:
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/2ManDVD-45319.shtml
OGMRip:
Features:
* transcodes from DVD or files
* outputs OGM, AVI, MP4, or Matroska files
* supports a lot of codecs (Vorbis, MP3, PCM, AC3, DTS, AAC, XviD, LAVC, X264, Theora)
* calculates video bitrate for a given file size
* autodetects cropping parameters and scaling factors
* supports multiple audio and subtitles streams encoding
* extracts subtitles in SRT or VobSub format
* uses maximum quality codecs switches
* rips contiguous chapters
* supports external audio (PCM, MP3, AC3, DTS, AAC, Vorbis) and subtitles (MicroDVD, SubRip, SRT, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, PJS, MPSub, AQT, JacoSub, VobSub) files
* provides customisable encoding profiles
* is extensible through plugins
http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
"... LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features ...":
http://lives.sourceforge.net/
kissdb - (Keep It) Simple Stupid Database
Features:
* Tiny, compiles to ~4k on an x86_64 Linux system
* Small memory footprint (only caches hash tables)
* Very space-efficient (on disk) if small hash tables are used
* Makes a decent effort to be robust on power loss
* Pretty respectably fast, especially given its simplicity
* 64-bit, file size limit is 2^64 bytes
* Ports to anything with a C compiler and stdlib/stdio
* Public domain
https://github.com/zerotier/kissdb
TreeLine stores almost any kind of information in an organized tree structure. Each node in the tree can contain several fields, forming a mini-database:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/treeline/
"... Prey lets you keep track of your laptop, phone and tablet whenever stolen or missing -- easily and all in one place. It's lightweight, open source software that gives you full and remote control, 24/7 ...":
http://preyproject.com/