Latest Software Reviews/2

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.
Lagrange
Lagrange is an advanced and fully featured Gemini site/"capsule" browser. It has configurable themes for both the interface and page content, tabs, configurable keyboard shortcuts, easily adjustable text scaling, bookmarks, the option of having sidebars on either the left or right side and a lot more. It is overall the best, most fully featured and most user-friendly Gemini client for graphical desktop environments. Everyone who is familiar with a web browser will feel comfortable using it.
Moonlander
Moonlander is a plain and simple Gemini capsule browser written in Rust using the GTK toolkit. It has no functionality beyond the ability to display and bookmark gemini:// sites. Many of the keyboard shortcuts you would expect a browser to have are missing. It will let you view Gemini sites and that's about it.
GnuPG
GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is a command-line utility with many front-ends available that lets you encrypt and/or sign instant messages, e-mails, and files using a public/private key-pair. It is very widely used within the free software world where it is used to encrypt e-mails, sign ISO image releases and packages in distribution repositories and much more. Nobody outside of the free software community knows about it, and most won't care about securely encrypting their e-mails if they are made aware of its existence.
Teeworlds
Teeworlds is a FOSS retro multiplayer puzzle and shooter game with an active community. You control a Tee character, and usually work with others to solve different missions. Teeworlds supports both English and Korean, with 500+ players online most days.
Crystal Dream 2
Crystal Dream 2 is a classic DOS PC demo released at The Computer Crossroads demo party led in Gothenburg, Sweden, in June 1993. It won 1st place in the demo competition. It is one of the two most noteworthy PC demos released in the early 1990s. Crystal Dream 2 runs fine in DOSBox as long as you select Gravis Ultrasound as the (emulated) soundcard.
Unreal II - The 2nd Reality
Unreal II - The 2nd Reality is a classic DOS PC demo from 1993 created by the Finnish demo scene group The Future Crew. It won first place at the Assembly 1993 demo party. It was ground-breaking at the time. The graphics may not be all that impressive after nearly 30 years since its debut, yet it is quite cool to see what could be done with early IBM PC compatible hardware without any 3D graphics hardware and the soundtrack is really good. It's worth a watch if you haven't seen it.
100 0 11 111
100 0 11 111 is a PC demo released by the PC demo group United Force at the Function 2007 demo party in Budapest, Hungary. Function 2007 went on from September 21st to September 23rd that year. 100 0 11 111 won first place in the PC demo competition.
Asahi
Asahi is a pretty neat Windows PC scene demo using Direct 11. It was released by the Polish demo group Futuris at the Revision Revision 2020 demo party. It won fourth place in the PC demo competition. It works fine in Wine if you use DXVK with it.
Notcurses
notcurses, as in not ncurses, is a thread-safe library for building complex user interfaces for modern terminal emulators. It is written in C with C++ safe headers. It can be used to create games, image viewers and a lot more. The library comes bundled with a tetris game, a image viewer and a "demo" application that shows of its capabilities.
MAME
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a complete computer emulator for so many ancient computer systems it is hard to count. Most of those systems were used in something called "arcade machines". The "arcade machines" were special computers designed to play just one video game. MAME lets you play those kinds of games on a variety of modern hardware like computers and smartphones.
QEMU
QEMU is a very versatile and powerful multi-platform computer emulator capable of both full emulation and hardware virtualization. It can be used to run operating systems for a variety of hardware and CPU architectures without hardware acceleration or Linux operating systems for x86-64 on x86-64 hardware at near-native speeds using virtualization hardware extensions on Intel and AMD processor hardware.
G'MIC
G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a free software framework for image processing. It comes with a really long list of filters you can apply to images in order to add effects, turn them into cartoon-like drawings, manipulate colors and so much more. There very little it can't do, if you need a image processing filter then you'll likely find that G'MIC has it. G'MIC can be used stand-alone with a basic Qt interface or as a plug-in in image editing software such as Krita and the GNU Image Manipulation Program. There is also a command-line tool for wizards and advanced users.
Ncdu
ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a shell utility that lets you quickly and easily see how much space the sub-folders in a directory are using. It gives you the same information du does in a much more convenient way.
Midori
Midori is a light-weight cross-platform web browser made with the Electron web browser framework. It has a simple, slick and modern interface, support for Chrome/Chromium extensions and decent performance.
AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux is a fork of the commercial American GNU/Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux developed by CloudLinux incorporated. It is a 1:1 clone of the latest stable RHEL releases with different branding. It has a stable software base very suitable for production servers.
Open-RMS-Letter Chart Generator
Two competing open letters were posted on GitHub towards the end of March, 2021. One of them voices support for honorary doctor Richard Stallman, the other viciously attacks him and demands that he is kept out of leadership positions in any and all organizations. A simple Python program can show you the popularity of each of the letters over time on a chart.
Wumpus
Wumpus is a text-only turn-based strategy game written by Eric S. Raymond in C in 2015. It is an exact clone of a much, much older game named Hunt the Wumpus. The original was written in the BASIC programming language. It is not particularly fun or exciting to play.
VkBasalt
vkBasalt is a visual effects layer for games and applications rendering using Vulkan API. It comes with a five effects that can change the visual output in a range of ways. Using most of its effects will cut your FPS in half.
GOverlay
GOverlay is an heads-up display and overlay manager with support for MangoHud, vkBasalt and ReplaySorcery. Those programs have no configuration editor of their own, they are only configurable by hand-editing a text file. GOverlay provides a simple graphical user-interface for configuring them.
Xclock
xclock is a very old and seemingly utterly simple clock program for X11. It is part of the X11 reference applications (xorg-x11-apps). It has no graphical configuration interface, user-savable configuration file and no context-menu if you right-click on it. It does have a few command-line options that let you change things like the size of the window it launches and that's about it.
Internet geolocation
Internet geolocation (GeoIP) is what it sounds like: Locating the geographical location of a Internet-connected device or service. This has historically been done by looking IP addresses up in a database. The advent of smartphones and other smart devices has made it possible to lookup a devices exact location using GPS, nearby Wi-Fi hot-spots and other data if those markers are available to the operating system.
Xfdashboard
xfdashboard is a GNOME and macOS style application switcher and launcher written primarily for the Xfce desktop environment. It provides a application management interface similar to the GNOME shell dashboard and the "Mission Control" interface on macOS.
KIO
KIO (KDE Input/Output) is a library in the KDE Frameworks that lets applications built on the KDE Frameworks read and write local and remote files over a wide range of protocols such as mtp (mtp://), ssh (fish://) and samba (smb://). It is what makes it possible to easily open and work on remote files in text editors like KWrite and Kate, file managers like Konqueror and Dolphin and a whole range of other applications built on the KDE Frameworks.
NeoChat
NeoChat is a very memory-hungry and somewhat feature-rich Matrix client chat client built on the KDE Frameworks and the libQuotient library for communicating with Matrix servers. It is kind of hard and annoying to use, it is very slow and overall not that great.
Lazy Chess
Lazy Chess is a simplistic multi-platform chess game for novices who want to learn the game and people with some skill who want to learn some new moves. It uses the stockfish engine to propose the two deemed best chess moves each turn. You get to choose one of those two moves each round, and that is all you can do. It is not a regular computer chess game, but it is a nice chess game for those who want to learn chess or learn a trick or two from a computer chess engine.
UwUfetch
UwUfetch is a simple tool similar to Screenfetch and Neofetch that gathers and displays some basic system information in a terminal. The initial public version can show you your systems "OWOS", kernel, "CPUWU", "WAM" and, most importantly, "UWUPTIME". It will also show some ASCII art that may or may not reflect the GNU/Linux distribution it is running on.
Denemo
GNU Denemo is a free open source multi-platform music notation program and sequencer. It supports the most common audio file formats and it can also export scores, or sheet music, as PNG and PDF files. Denemo can handle typesetting via the LilyPond music engraver.
Quantum
Quantum by Outracks vs Nazareth Creations is a Windows PC demo released at The Gathering demo party in April 2009. It won 2nd place in the PC demo competition. It is a really good and entertaining demo with a great sound-track and some quite interesting graphical effects.
Whalebird
Whalebird is a desktop application for social media websites running Mastodon, Pleroma or Misskey software. It has limited support for multiple sites (cross-posting and things like that are not implemented). All the features you get when you use a social media site based on the supported platforms directly are available in Whalebird. Whalebird is strait-forward and easy to use. It is a good alternative to using the websites it supports directly using a web browser.