Latest Software Reviews/3

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.
Wine Launcher
Wine Launcher is a front-end for Wine and Wine variants like Proton. It supports sandboxes for individual games, installed games can be installed using squashfs to save space and it supports using different Wine variants for each game. System-installed Wine, Proton and other Wine variants are supported.
Rocky Linux
Rocky Linux is a upcoming stable-focused GNU/Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It will be binary-compatible with RHEL and follow upstream development the same way CentOS did before CentOS went from being a stable distribution based on stable RHEL releases to a beta-quality test-bed for RHEL towards the end of 2020.
PilferShush Jammer
PilferShush Jammer is a completely useless and, from a security perspective, dangerous application that claims to be able to prevent other applications on an Android device from using the microphone. It doesn't. It does absolutely nothing in that regard.
Uranus Flowers
Uranus Flowers is a PC scene demo created by the The Bad Sectors demo-group. It won fourth place in the Tokyo Demo Fest 2014 in the combined demo/intro competition. The demo is notable for being light-weight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pi version as well as Linux and Windows versions are included in the release archive.
Loop 1
Loop 1 is a PC demo by The Bad Sectors which is notable for having a Linux version in addition to the Windows version. The demo on 7th place in the demo competition at the Function 2020 demoscene party held September 18-20, 2020, in Budapest, Hungary.
Matomo
Matomo is a highly advanced free GNU GPL licensed web traffic analytics server written in PHP with a lot of features. You will have to install it on a server, preferably one capable of handling a bit of a load of you plan on using it to do web traffic analysis using JavaScript tags on one or more websites with high traffic volume. There's also a HTTP tracking API available.
AWStats
AWStats is a free very configurable and highly advanced log analyzer written in Perl. It can be used to create detailed statistics using web server logs, mail logs or FTP server logs. AWStats creates a statistics file from parsed logs (using a cron job or system timer) that can be used to either create web traffic reports on the fly or static HTML pages with a timer/cron job. The reports cover a wide range of areas.
Analog
Analog (CE) is a web log analyzer that creates pretty simple reports using a web servers logs. It will show a lot of data based on the logs. Some of the information it shows is slightly useful, a lot of it is not.
Open Web Analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a free software web traffic analysis package written in PHP. It can be used to track visitors by placing a JavaScript snippet on a web page, by calling it in a PHP file or by using a special WordPress plug-in. There's also, in theory, a MediaWiki plugin but it's broken. OWA will, once it is setup and configured, provide a lot of detailed and useful information about a web sites visitors.
Webalizer
Webalizer is a primarily Apache log file analyzer that creates a simple report with some small graphs and a high-level overview of page-views, unique visits, files, kilobytes transferred and the total amounts of file hits. It's fast, and it supports a history file that allows you to simply throw old logs away once webalizer is done with them. It does have some shortcomings like the inability to separate browsers user-agent strings by device and operating system.
Slimjet
Slimjet is a non-free Chromium-based freeware web browser with a built-in ad-blocker and many extra-sauce features like a YouTube video downloader, "hi-speed" download manager, "photo enhancement" and several other things that don't normally come with a web browser. The GNU/Linux version says "Aw, Snap!" and that's it, that's all it does.
Fancontrol
fancontrol is a simple bash script that lets you control your fans on Linux machines. It is part of the lm_sensors package. It is not very easy or strait-forward to setup but it does work really well once you've got it working on your machine.
Nanonote
Nanonote is a really simple note-taking application for Linux written by Aurélien Gâteau using the Qt 5 framework. It is as basic as you get. There's a window you can type text into. That text is automatically saved to one file regularly. That's it, that's Nanonote.
Time
time is actually two (or more) commands on most GNU/Linux distributions. One is the shells built-in time command and the other is GNU time which can be executed using it's full path. time is useful for measuring how long it takes to complete a process and how much of that is real, user and system utilization time.
LuxMark
LuxMark is a free open source OpenCL benchmark application used by AMD to promote their Radeon VII graphics cards. The benchmark can be ran using either the Mesa Clover OpenCL 1.1 implementation or the AMD ROCm OpenCL 2.0 driver.
AMDVLK
RealSR
Real-World Super-Resolution via Kernel Estimation and Noise Injection is a photo up-scaling program. It won a contest called CVPR NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real-World Super-Resolution in "both tracks". A Linux version using Vulkan (realsr-ncnn-vulkan) is available. RealSR does a really good job at up-scaling photos. It is better than Waifu2x when up-scaling photos and comparable to it when up-scaling anime and other cartoons.
Fake News Detector
Fake News Detector is a very nice and handy web browser extension for NAVER whale and Microsoft Edge that lets you know if a web page contains fact or fiction. It is entirely user-driven, others using the Fake News Detector extension can vote on news stories and share if they think a news story, or other web content, is "Fake" or "Fact".
Sonic Robo Blast 2
Sonic Robo Blast 2 3D platform game with all the concepts of a classic 2D platform game in a 3D world. The main character you play is a hedgehog called Sonic. The objective is to run around and collect rings and avoid monsters. The game-play is not very exciting and the graphics is mediocre by today's standards.
Grep
grep is a very old and very handy command line utility that prints any lines matting a regular expression. The most widely used modern grep implementation is GNU grep which supports search recursive file trees, basic regular expressions, extended regular expressions, fixed strings and Perl-compatible regular expressions.
Liquid Prompt
Liquid Prompt is a adaptive and configurable command-line shell prompt extension. It provides a nice prompt with colors that displays a variety of information depending on what you are doing and how your box is doing. The default prompt is a short and simple one similar to the default bash prompt, but with colors. Liquid Prompt is a great alternative to manually setting the shell prompt using $PS1= that can enrich the everyday command-line experience.
DOSBox
DOSBox is both a x86 and DOS emulator which lets you run old MS-DOS software on modern computers and phones running just about any operating system, DOSBox supports more operating systems and platform than most software. DOSBox emulates old PC hardware, it does not run any code natively, which is why it can run MS-DOS programs on just about any hardware/OS combination. DOSBox is mostly known for enabling you to play older games, but it is also very capable to run spreadsheet programs and all kinds of other programs. It will run the vast majority of all MS-DOS software perfectly.
Fr-041: d e b r i s
Fr-041: debris is a PC scene demo for Windows using DirectX 9 to render graphics. It was released by the German demo group farbrausch on April 11th, 2007. It had very impressive graphics for the time when it was released and it is still a very good-looking and generally very nice PC demo with a decent, but not superb, audio track.
Fr-063: Magellan
Fr-063: Magellan is a pc scene demo by the German demo group farbrauch. It was released in December 2018. The screenshots of it on sites like pouet and scene.org look pretty nice. Running in it in Wine results in disaster.
Isolated, in sunlight
isolated, in sunlight is a Windows scene demo made for the Revision 2020 Party demo competitions. It is not very exciting or very impressive, it is, in fact, kind of boring. The only remotely interesting about it is that it's a piece of Windows software with graphics which makes it a fun thing to test in Wine staging and development versions just to see if it runs or not.
Blue Nebula
Blue Nebula is a free very fast-paced online teamed first person shooter with decent graphics. There are many game-modes like death-match and capture the flat to choose between. It has very few hardware requirements making it a really cool and nice game to play either at high resolutions at high frame-rates on modern hardware or standard 1080p resolution on old and/or modest hardware.
GNOME Web
GNOME Web, or just "Web" as it appears in desktop menus, formally known as Epiphany before the GNOME team decided to rename everything according to general names resembling their function, is the default web browser in the GNOME desktop environment. It is built on top of the WebKitGTK rendering toolkit which, as the name implies, is based on Apple's WebKit rendering engine. It is, much like the default Edge browser on Windows, only suitable for downloading a better web browser.
Unvanquished
Unvanquished is a multiplayer first person shooter strategy game where you can choose to be on a human team or a alien team and fight the opposing side. There are bases and structures to protect and maintain, weapons to acquire, resources to earn and enemies, either aliens or humans depending on what team you pick, that need to be eradicated.
Qmmp
qmmp is a very nice playlist-based media player with support for skins, including those made for old-school programs like xmms and Winamp. It is modular and plugin-based and there are plugins for decoding all the audio formats.