Latest Software Reviews/5

• KDE System Monitor
  
  
  The KDE System Monitor (ksysguard) is a task manager and system monitoring program made with the KDE Plasma desktop environment in mind. It has two default tabs for showing a process list and system load graphs by default. Its functionality can be expanded using a wide variety of downloadable plugins.
  
• Xfwm4
  
  
  Xfwm4 is a optionally compositing window manager for the Xfce desktop environment. It supports themes, configurable keyboard shortcuts, placing windows always-above other windows, sticking windows to multiple desktops and it has configurable compositing support that can be turned on or off.
  
• Monero
  
  
  Monero is a decentralized payment network with a digital currency (XMR). It provides a very high degree of user privacy. It has a obfuscated blockchain which makes it very hard to tell the source, destination or amount of any given transaction.
  
• XMRig
  
  
  XMRig is a crypto currency mining program for crypto currencies like Monero (XMR). Many anti-virus scanners consider it to be malware. If you have found it on your system and you are wondering what it is malware then it is likely a part of a malware infection. Xmrig supports mining using the RandomX, CryptoNight, AstroBWT and Argon2 algorithms. It can mine using both the CPU and the GPU depending on what algorithms is used.
  
• Mpstat
  
  
  mpstat is a very handy terminal utility for of showing per-processor or per-core system statistics such as user process load, system load, I/O statistics, IRQ activity and other useful information.
  
• Radeontop
  
  
  Radeontop is a simple terminal program that shows you how much of various resources are used on a modern AMD graphics card using simple bar graphs. It will give an overview of the total "Graphics pipe" load as well as graphs showing utilization of various GPU pipelines like the texture addresser, shader export, sequencer instruction cache, shader interpolator, color and depth blocks and the scan converter.
  
• Lemmy
  
  
  Lemmy is a free website content management system made for federated forum-style link collection sites similar to Reddit and Hacker News. Users can post stories and links and have other user vote them up or down or comment on them. The federated nature of Lemmy allows users on one site website running the software see and comment on stories running on another. Each site can have their own local rules and moderation policies (with some hard-coded limitations).
  
• Internet Explorer
  Internet Explorer was a web browser made by Microsoft in the early 2000s. It quickly became the dominant web browser once Microsoft started bundling it with their Microsoft Windows operating system.
  
• Parcellite
  
  
  Parcellite is small and lightweight basic-features-only GTK+ clipboard manager. It has a clipboard history, supports synchronization of mouse selection and clipboard events (ctrl+c), persistent history, hostkeys and clipboard-based actions. It works well under Xfce, LXQt and fluxbox. Support for system tray icons either by the window manager or the desktop environment is preferable but not required, the clipboard history can shown using any defined hotkey.
  
• WebTorrent Desktop
  
  
  WebTorrent Desktop is a simple graphical bittorrent client written in JavaScript. It is notable for supporting the WebTorrent protocol in addition to the standard bittorrent protocol. It is a very simple bittorrent client. It is not very configurable and it lacks many of the basic features more powerful bittorrent clients have. WebTorrent Desktop has a built-in video player that can be used to watch a somewhat limited number of videos while they are being downloaded.
  
• Pixelfed
  
  
  Pixelfed is a social media platform technology for image sharing similar to Facebook-owned Instagram. It consists of an Android and iOS applications (coming soon) and web server software that can be used to setup a image hosting website the Android application can interact with. Both are entirely free software. The Pixelfed server application supports the ActivityPub standard, image sharing sites running Pixelfed can interact with other federated fediverse servers running ActivityPub-compatible server software such as Mastodon, Pleroma and PeerTube.
  
• Mousepad
  
  
  Mousepad is a simple easy to use GTK based text editor for GNU/Linux systems. It is quite limited in terms of features compared to more advanced text editors but it does its job as a simple text editor. It is useful for doing a quick small edit or two to a text file. It is small and resource-efficient and it has a very short start-up time.
  
• Mimic
  
  
  mimic is a small and efficient text to speech engine that works well on modern GNU/Linux systems. It can speak English in several different artificially voices. It is not very useful for other languages. mimic is free software licensed under a mix of BSD licenses, Apache licenses and public domain. It is a pure command-line tool, there is no GUI.
  
• SimpleScreenRecorder
  
  
  SimpleScreenRecorder is a, despite the name, fairly advanced screencasting program for GNU/Linux systems. It can be used to record the a single screen, the entire display area (on multi-monitor setups), a fixed rectangle, what happens to be below the cursor or OpenGL windows. It can scale video and a desired frame-rate can be set.
  
• DeaDBeeF
  
  
  DeaDBeeF is a music player which is, in its "About" window, described as "The Ultimate Music Player". And it is if you want a basic easy to use music player capable of playing all the common audio formats. DeaDBeeF does not any kind of music collection database features, there is no file indexing or searchable database. If you like to manually manage playlists using a file file picker or a file manager and you want a easy to use music player then DeaDBeeF may be for you. DeaDBeeF is available for Linux and macOS.
  
• Quaternion
  
  
  Quaternion is a Matrix client written in Qt. It is capable of showing chat-rooms but it is not at all usable as a general-purpose chat client; it is way too buggy.
  
• Xfburn
  
  
  Xfburn is a CD/DVD/BlueRay disc authoring program written with the Xfce desktop environment in mind. It can be used in any desktop environment. It can be used to burn ISO images, create audio discs and data discs. It supports CDs, DVDs and BlueRay discs. It does not support authoring playable video DVD or BlueRay discs. Xfburn is fine if you still have a CD/DVD/BlueRay writer and you want to demonstrate how that ancient technology works when you are giving a tour of your museum or something like that.
  
• ClamAV
  
  
  ClamAV is a free GPL-licensed anti-virus solution for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Windows and macOS. It has a command-line utility that lets you scan for viruses, a on-access scanner daemon called clamonacc and a virus-database update daemon called freshclam.
  
• OBS Studio
  
  
  OBS Studio is a free software screen recording and live streaming application for Linux, Windows and macOS. It can record web camera streams, single windows, single monitors or entire desktops. It supports hardware accelerated video encoding using VAAPI on Linux. It is the single best and most feature-complete application for both screen recording and live screaming.
  
• Spectacle
  
  
  Spectacle is a simple and easy to use screenshot utility written with KDE in mind. It is the default application bound to the PrtSc (printscreen) key in KDE Plasma. It can also be used in any other desktop environment. It has all the features you could possible want from a screenshot application which makes it a good choice to set as a default action when the PrtSc button is pressed in any desktop environment.
  
• Polari
  
  
  Polari is a extremely simple IRC client designed specificially for GNOME. It uses the practically abandoned Telepathy communications framework to communicate with IRC servers. Polari will, by default, not run in the background so you get messages if it is minimized. There is no system tray support since GNOME 3 does not have any system tray. There are no configuration options what so ever and no useful options in the mobile-phone style hamburger menu beyond Quit which is something you will likely want to do after testing it and discovering how much of a joke of a IRC client it is compared to any other IRC client made the last two decades.
  
• Nano Adblocker
  
  
  Nano Adblocker is a web browser advertisement filter based on Ublock Origin. It is basically Ublock Origin with a few patches on top and one additional Nano-specific filter list with around 300 entries. Nano Adblocker releases trail the Ublock Origin releases and the Nano Adblocker offers shockingly little extra compared to the original it is based on. It works fine but there is no reason to use it over the original it is based on.
  
• MangoHud
  
  
  MangoHud is a heads up display for Vulkan and OpenGL games and applications. The project started as a modified version of the built-in Mesa heads up display for Vulkan. OpenGL support was added in version 0.3.0 in March 2020. MangoHud is prettier and more configurable than the built-in Mesa HUD and it has handy keyboard shortcuts for turning the HUD (F12) and logging (F2) on/off. It is specially useful for games who play Windows games using Wine and DXVK.
  
• NodeTube
  
  
  NodeTube is a free software video hosting package written for Node.js. It uses MongoDB for storage, redis modules and ffmpeg for video conversion. It does not use WebTorrent or any similar technology for bandwidth reduction which means that hosting using NodeTube is quite bandwidth-expensive. NodeTube is easy to install for those who are familiar with hosting applications on Linux servers and it is mature enough to be used as a smaller personal video hosting platform. Scaling it to serve a really huge number of users may be somewhat problematic.
  
• MongoDB
  MongoDB is a document-oriented database program utilizing JSON-like documents with a schema. It is licensed under a special sort-of free software Server Side Public License (SSPL). Many free software web applications requires it.
  
• NAVER whale
  
  
  NAVER whale is a Chromium-based web browser from the South Korean Internet giant Naver Corporation. It has many unique features like a toolbox with a calculator, timer, calendar and unit converter and a built-in music player. There are also a lot of not-really builtin features like stock price monitoring and exchange rate conversion which in reality access and use various NAVER web services. Most of those services are only available in Korean language. The web browser itself has English text in most menus and help texts. Some features, like the built-in music player, do not have any English translation. Whale is overall a fine web browser but the tie-ins with South Korean web services who are only available in Korean language and the lack of translations for some of its features means that it is not the best choice for English-speaking people.
  
• Alien
  alien is a command-line tool for converting Linux software packages between Debian .deb, Red Hat .rpm, Software .tgz and even Solaris .pkg file formats. The resulting converted packages it produces may or may not install and they may or may not work depending on the original package which has been converted. Converted packages who do install will, in most cases, only do so after going through some hoops.
  
• Tor Browser
  
  
  The Tor Browser is a web browser bundle distributed by the non-profit Torproject organization which includes a customized version Firefox ESR, some Firefox extensions and a Tor client for accessing the traffic analysis resistant Tor anonymity network. The Tor Browser sends your web traffic through the Tor network so the websites you visit will see a Tor exit nodes IP address instead of your actual IP address.
  
• Chromium
  
  
  Chromium is a BSD licensed web browser developed by Google. It is used as the basis for Google's commercial "Chrome" web browser product. The Linux version of Chromium is very easy to use and the fastest there is when it comes to WebGL performance. It does not come with any web garbage filtering, user script manager or style editor so you would have to install those things yourself.
  
• Xfce 4.16
  
  
  Xfce 4.16 is the next iteration of the popular light-weight Xfce desktop environment. It is scheduled to be released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2020. It will have client side decorations for all the configuration dialog boxes, a more advanced optional Whiskermenu, animated panel when it is set to auto-hide and it could get support for hybrid sleep when the power button is pressed or a laptop lid is closed. There will likely be more changes before Xfce 4.16 is released around October/November 2020.
  

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