Useful Free GUI and Self-Hosted Software
This is my “curated” list of useful general-use GUI software. Most of the items in this list are open source. All of them are free.
General
- awesome-selfhosted: A comprehensive list of self hosted software
- awesome-sysadmin Like awesome-selfhosted, but the software is more geared toward system administrators.
- Self-Hosting-Guide: Another good list
- dockerholics: A list of software which can be hosted using Docker. Looks good initially; I still have to read through the whole thing.
- voidtools Everything: Really fast search tool which searches across all files on the entire system.
- WizTree: Blazing fast disk space analyzer. Shows how much space each disk has left, and visually shows all files that take up the most space.
- KeePassXC: Cross-platform open-source local-only password manager. No cloud involved.
- 7Zip: General file compression tool.
- WireGuard: VPN (self-hosted?)
- code-server
- VSCodium: VS Code core, without the telemetry. Supports everything that VS Code does, except for a few Microsoft extensions.
Interesting ones I need to read about
- changedetection.io: Automatically detect changes in websites.
Organization and Collaboration
- Mattermost: Collaboration hub like Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Nextcloud (apparently also very good for file sharing)
- TODO: Look into nextcloud collectives
- Focalboard: Project management software
- Paperless (paperless-ngx): Document Management System with automatic OCR
- Docspell: Document Management System with automatic OCR
Document Editing and Office Software
- LibreOffice (LibreOffice Draw can be used to edit PDFs)
- OnlyOffice
- FreeOffice (They also have a PDF editor)
- Hedgedoc: Web-based, self-hosted, collaborative markdown editor
- outline: Open-source Notion alternative
- Okular: Universal document viewer
- gImageReader: Simple frontend to tessaract-ocr (visual text extraction from images and documents)
- Xournal++: Digital handwritten notes software. Good for marking up PDFs.
- pdfarranger: Simple program for doing basic operations on PDFs like merging, cropping, and page reordering.
- Joplin: Open source markdown editor
- Obsidian: My favorite free markdown editor. Can do much more using plugins.
- Trilium
- Zettlr
- Stirling-PDF: Self-hosted web application for performing various operations on PDF files
Images
- ShareX: General screen capture and file sharing tool
Photo managers
- PhotoPrism: Photo manger
- Lychee: Photo manager
Upscalers
Image Editing
- darktable: Image organizer and color modification.
Vector Graphics
- Inkscape: Very good open-source vector graphics editor. It has some hard edges, but is great overall.
Digital Painting
UI and UX Design
2D Animation
- OpenToonz: Open-source animation and production software.
Video
- OBS Studio: Free open-source video recording and live streaming software
- DaVinci Resolve: Free video editing, color correction, VFX, motion graphics, and more.
- Kdenlive: Free open-source video editor
- Natron: Compositing software for VFX and motion graphics
Multimedia players
Video Converters
- Handbrake video transcoder
Monitoring
Not entirely sure what these are for, but I’m writing them down in case I find them useful in the future.
- grafana
- prometheus (has something called AlertManager. Does this interface with grafana?)
Communication
- Discord: General chat, audio call, and video call software.
- thelounge: Self-hosted IRC messenger (maybe don’t use, I think IRC is very insecure by default.)
- Signal Messenger: Open source end-to-end encrypted communication like WhatsApp, but not owned by Facebook.
- Jitsi: Free open-source video conferencing software (Zoom alternative)
NFC
- NFC Tools: GUI for reading and writing NFC chips.
File Management
Deduplication
NAS Storage
File Transfer
- FileZilla: FTP client
File Sharing
- ProjectSend self-hosted file share
- LinShare self-hosted file share
- ownCloud
- send
- dufs
- FileRun
- filebrowser
Artificial Intelligence
- Ollama: Docker-like system for hosting LLMs (Large LAnguage Models) locally.
- stable-diffusion-ui-docker: Docker-compose project for easily launching one of several Stable Diffusion web frontends. Of the frontends, I recommend ComfyUI.
- OpenAI Whisper: Speech-to-text transcription for videos and audio files. A faster implementation is available at faster-whisper, and a C/C++ port is available at whisper.cpp. None of the given links are GUI frontends, but I’m sure good Whisper UI frontends exist.
Font Editors
BitTorrent Clients
- qBittorrent
- Transmission: (Also comes with a command line interface.)
Programming
- gitea: Self-hosted GitHub
- Postman: Backend API testing and request-making GUI
- VMware Workstation Player: Free virtual machine runner
- Docker Desktop: GUI frontend for Docker
- Rufus: GUI tool for creating bootable USB drives.
- OpenHardwareMonitor: Tool which monitors chip temperatures, voltages, and more.
- CPU-Z: View information about some of the system’s main hardware.
- WireShark: “Network protocol analyzer”; Interactively browse network traffic
- Kleopatra: GUI frontend for GPG made by the KDE project. Comes with Gpg4Win (GPG on Windows) by default.
IDEs and Text Editors
- VS Code: Amazing text editor. Probably the best for TypeScript and web-related project, and second best for almost everything else.
- Visual Studio: Microsoft’s IDE; Primarily for C, C++, and C#.
Misc. (Need research)
- Swig (bindings generator?)
- D5 Renderer
- Streamlit