Latest Software Reviews

• Emacs on Android
  FSF is working on an official port of Emacs to Google's toy operating system, for the upcoming Emacs 30.1 release. This is a port of its nice GUI (not only text as before), and it's already very usable, if you have a suitable keyboard. It can be downloaded from two places: F-Droid's store and Sourceforge.
  
• Xeyes
  xeyes is a very old and utterly simple X11 application that apparently just displays two eyes, included with the `xorg-x11-apps` package. There is no graphical configuration or any file other than the executable file, just a few command-line options.
  
• Vuescan
  
  
  VueScan is an app for Linux et cetera that supports scanners by 65 manufacturers such as "Brother" fully automagically and does not rely on drivers, set-up or complicated configuration. Autodetects everything and just will scan papers and work.
  
• Signal
  
  
  Signal is an open source chat app for Android, IOS, Windows, and Linux written in Java. It supports sharing images, video, and other files. It has support for stickers, video calls, video calls, and group chats. It's main target is to be an end-to-end encrypted messenger that works for non-computer savvy people. Signal provides download instructions for 64 bit Debian-based systems and there is a community maintained Flatpac that can be installed on other distros.
  
• PictureFrame
  
  
  PictureFrame, or "PictureFrame.App", is supposedly a image viewer for photo frames built using the GNUstep framework. The latest version 1.1.3 does not seem capable of actually displaying images. PictureFrame is therefore a utterly useless piece of software and a complete waste of time.
  
• No Kelvin
  
  
  No Kelvin is a PC demo scene demo released by the Norwegian demo group Outracks at the The Gathering 2005 demo party. It won 2nd place in the Combined Demo competition that year. It has a pretty cool sound track and alright graphics for a demo from the early 2000s. The demo runs half-way through in Wine 6.8 and then it crashes. We do not know any solution that would allow you to view the entire demo on GNU/Linux.
  
• Gorm
  
  
  Gorm is a "Graphical Object Relationship Modeller" for GNUstep modeled after some obscure piece of software released by some obscure American corporation called "NeXT Computer" in the 1990s. It does not scale to modern display resolutions, so it is practically useless on modern hardware. It may or may not be of some interest if you are using a computer from the 1990s.
  
• Lichess
  
  
  Lichess is an online, libre chess game. The website supports ranked games, anonymous play, puzzles, localization to Korean, high customizability, and much more.
  
• Fr-043: Rove
  
  
  Fr-043: Rove is a PC demo scene demo for Windows created by the Germans for the BREAKPOiNT 2o1o demo competition. It won second place. You can get the demo to sort-of run in Wine on Linux by installing some DLLs and killing PulseAudio, though you won't get any sound.
  
• Termite
  
  
  Termite is a discontinued terminal emulator that was based on the VTE library maintained by GNOME. The developer gave up maintaining it due to a series of problems with the VTE maintainers and GNOME in general in May 2021.
  
• Fr-025 : t h e . p o p u l a r . d e m o
  
  
  fr-025: the popular demo is a PC demo scene for Windows by the German demo group Farbrausch. It was released at the Breakpoint 2003 demo party held in Bingen, Germany, between April 18th and April 21st 2003. It one first place in the Breakpoint 2003 PC demo competition and it deserved it, it is still a really good-looking demo with a compelling sound-track and nice graphics after nearly 20 years.
  
• Phosphorysation
  
  
  Phosphorysation by Amnesty is a, size-wise, really big PC scene demo for Windows by the PC scene demo group Amnesty. Simple old-school graphics with thing lines and very bright and shiny colors. It is a bit long and a bit repetitive (three and a half minutes of mostly the same), and the sound track isn't all that, but it's alright, even if it's not great.
  
• Freon
  
  
  Freon, by Division, is a PC demo scene demo that fails to run in Wine on GNU/Linux. It is therefore completely uninteresting to GNU/Linux users beyond being a nice test-case for DirectX 9 software in new Wine versions.
  
• Genesis
  
  
  Genesis is a PC scene demo for Windows that was released by the Norwegian demo group Outracks at the The Gathering demo party on April 17th, 2006. It won second place in the PC demo competition that year. The demo has pretty a pretty good sound-track and well done graphics rendered using the OpenGL API. It works fine with Wine on GNU/Linux machines.
  
• Stellarium
  
  
  Stellarium is a pretty advanced free software planetarium program with a user-interface that gets so many basic things wrong that you will likely judge Stellarium to be a completely useless and worthless piece of software the the first time you try it. It is actually a quite advanced planetarium program with a lot of advanced functionality beneath the joke of a user interface that is filled with everything but the basic essentials you would need to get any benefit out of it.
  
• Ps
  Crawlergo
  
  ps is the ultimate shell tool for listing active processes on Linux and BSD systems. It may not appear that way because of the limited information you get if you just type ps terminal, but there is much more to it thanks to a rather huge number of command line options.
  
• Gallium Nine
  
  
  Gallium Nine (or "d3dadapter9") is a multi-GPU DirectX 9 graphics driver for GNU/Linux and other operating systems where it is possible to use the Gallium graphics driver API from the free software Mesa graphics stack. It is mostly useful as a Wine back-end for Windows software using the DirectX 9 API.
  
• GRUB
  
  
  GNU GRUB (short for GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) is the most common boot loader on modern GNU/Linux operating systems. It can be loaded from older computers with a BIOS that loads the bootloader off the first sector on a HDD or modern machines UEFI firmware that load boot loaders off a special EFI partition.
  
• ShellCheck
  
  
  ShellCheck is like a SpellCheck for shell scripts. It will analyze your shell scripts and point out many of the embarrassing mistakes, flaws and potential corner-case problems you made writing them, and propose changes. ShellCheck is not a magic bullet that will detect and point out everything that is wrong with any and all shell scripts, and a shell script may not work as expected, or at all, even if ShellCheck fails to produce any warnings. It does catch a lot, and it is absolutely worth using on every shell script you write or use even if your shell scripts seemingly look and work just fine.
  
• Rmw
  
  
  rmw (ReMove to Waste) is an alternative to, but not a replacement for, the standard rm file removal utility for Linux/Unix shells. rmw saves removed files in a waste folders instead of removing them from the underlying file system so you can easily "undelete" files if you accidentally "delete" something important. Automated eradication of files moved to the waste folder after a set number of days is supported.
  
• Mahou Shoujo ni naritai
  
  
  Mahou Shoujo ni naritai is a very Japanese demo scene demo by the Second World Demoscene Group that's more like what you would expect from a into to an older open-world game or in-game cut scenes in a game than a traditional PC scene demo. It won 2nd place in the "Modern Demo" competition at the Demosplash 2020 party. Mahou Shoujo ni naritai is available for Linux on x86 and x86-64, and Windows.
  
• DXVK
  
  
  DXVK is a DirectX 9, 10 and 11 to Vulkan translation layer for Wine. It performs a lot better than Wine's built-in DX9-11 translayer and it has better compatibility with games, scene demos and other graphical programs using DX9 to 11. It is something you definitively want to install if you run games and other graphical applications in Wine.
  
• Gamescope
  
  
  Gamescope is a really handy tool that lets you up-scale and play any game or graphical application full screen or in a large window while telling the game that it is running on a monitor with a lower resolution - if you have an AMD or Intel GPU using the Mesa drivers. It will not work with other graphics cards or drivers. It is, behind the scenes, a bare-bones Wayland compositor that works fine with both the X and Wayland display servers on Linux.
  
• Aurora
  
  
  Aurora is a PC scene demo released by Excess at the Revision 2018 demo party. It won 4th place in the Revision demo competition that year. It's not the best PC scene demo ever created, which is probably why it only won 4th place. It's also not boring, it's perfectly fine, it's just not very exceptional.
  
• Amoeba
  
  
  Amoeba is a PC demoscene demo by the still active Norwegian demo group Excess released at the Underscore demoparty in May 2002. It won 1st place in the demo competition. It is noteworthy for being the first demo party competition winner with Linux binaries and source code included in the release archive. It is still pretty cool and still worth a watch nearly 20 years after it was created.
  
• Bad brain sector
  
  
  Bad Brain Sector is a PC scene demo released at the Assembly 2020 demo party in October 2020. It is boring and meaningless and not at all entertaining. The graphics mediocre and there is no sound-track. It has annoying sound effects instead of an audio track. The demo attempts to do something psychedelic instead of showing fancy graphical effects. It fails miserably at that and everything else. It is totally not watching because it will be 3 minutes of your life that are utterly wasted and you will never get them back.
  
• Raspberry Psy
  
  
  Raspberry Psy is a really cool PC scene demo created by The Bad Sectors in collaboration with Desire. It won 1st place wild demo competition at the Function 2016 demoparty. It is noteworthy for including binaries for Linux, including one for the Raspberry Pi, in addition to a binary for Windows within the ZIPped release archive.
  
• Linux Kernel Runtime Guard
  
  
  Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a out-of-tree security module for the Linux kernel developed by Openwall. It does run-time integrity checks in order to stop known, and unknown, security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. It can log detected intrusion attempts or stop them by causing a kernel panic - resulting in a frozen machine or a reboot depending on how the kernel is configured.
  
• OSH
  
  
  OSH ("Oil SHell" or just "Oil") is a POSIX and bash compatible shell implementation with a unique shell language called the "Oil language". It is in theory, but not in practice, a drop-in replacement for bash with a cleaner syntax and more advanced shell scripting capabilities.
  
• Libreboot
  
  
  Libreboot is a project creating free software alternatives to the proprietary the BIOS firmware found on modern smartphones, laptops, desktop and laptop computers and other computing devices. It consists of a very lightweight system that does only the minimum tasks required to boot a modern (Linux-based) operating system. The number of computers and devices that are supposed as of April 2021 is severely limited.
  

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