Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?

With my OpenBSD developer hat on, I'll say we're grateful for hardware donations (from new laptops, to esoteric networking gear, etc.)

https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

Also the OpenBSD foundation is ~5% away from its fundraising goal for 2025! :-)

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2025.html

R! If you're a data person and you've never used R, give it a shot. It's a lovely language for cleaning and analyzing data, and the core development team keeps making improvements.

Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me.

Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course.

Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year.

KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project.

The entire python "data science" stack, numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas/plotly/polars/pyarrow/jupyter, which is essential to my work. Tiny projects too, like nptdms.

The raspberry pi foundation, in particular for the pico, rp2040 and rp2350. Joy to work with, great documentation, super cheap and available, perfect for one-off projects, prototypes and hobby stuff, which is pretty much always neglected by the big silicon vendors.

I set up my own NAS this year, running many self-hosted apps. I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.

So many cli apps that I use daily:

- starship prompt - fd - ripgrep - fzf - lazygit - yazi

Firefox gets sometimes deserved criticism, but I have been using it continuously since Firebird 0.7 and I believe it contributes to keeping the web open.

I think Linux is one of the great accomplishments of modern human society, together with Wikipedia. OpenSSL and the other Open Source cryptographic libraries for providing a safety net when our politicians decide to tighten their grip on privacy and secure communications. At least we as developers can still fall back on all the OpenSSL cloned repos and see from there.

Linux Debian OpenBSD Lineageos Mastodon + the fediverse

Jellyfin. Always Jellyfin <3

GrapheneOS, OpenBSD, Wireguard

PHP, Symphony, Laravel And all the Linux ecosystem like the drivers, plugins and UI

FZF, Ripgrep, Fish, fd-find, Helix, Lazygit, ripgrep-all, ffmpeg, and pandoc are the ones that spring to mind.

https://github.com/ShawInnes/SshKeyGenerator change your life. this saves me so many clicks of what would otherwise be a really stupid alternative method of automation regarding these deployments i have to do. i couldn't prompt chatgpt for this code if my life depended on it.

Linux, particularly Debian.

Surprised we made it this far with no love for Firebird... err... Firefox.

(It's got tabs!)

Linux #1

And recently:

Bluesky Social - https://github.com/bluesky-social

AT Protocol - https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

I am grateful for Django, Python, Rust, Zig, PostgreSQL.

Entire development/software stack: Linux+gnu/Debian, gcc/llvm, PostgreSQL/MySQL, git, Kotlin/Java/jvm, TypeScipt/js, maven, frameworks (currently Javalin+Vue.js).

And Firefox. And open-weights LLMs we can run locally/privately.

Django! Literally owe my career to it and still enjoy using it daily.

A lot of them. They might not always look nice, unfortunately, but there sure are a ton of tools that equal or rival professional stuff (and professional stuff often uses a bunch of them anyway nowadays)

(Open)SSH Caddy PostgreSQL Linux - KVM/Qemu GCC/LLVM

Perhaps a little old fashioned, but Spring for java and others.

IMO gamescope is the #1 most underrated project in the Linux gaming world

A lot of things are already said so I go with Linkding.

Home Assistant

FreeTube [1], and yt-dlp [2], especially in combination with a ready supply of VPNs. Switching them around to avoid being blocked by Google reminds me of adjusting the tuner for better reception on an old analog tv. Infant me might have imagined a malevolent being who inhabits the airwaves deliberately causing interference, and in the world we've created since then that's not far from the truth. Many thanks to the developers tirelessly compensating for Google's frequent deliberate breakage.

[1] https://freetubeapp.io/

[2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Jellyfin, Debian, photoprism, node.js, chart.js, TypeScript, VS Codium, PiHole

Ruby :) on Rails

Python

Most recently, the Zed editor. Also lazydocker and zellij.

marisa-trie: https://github.com/pytries/marisa-trie

Open Source Seeds.

Linux, VS Code, Electron, Ghidra, Sqlite

git, nodejs

I owe my career to them.

python, perl, LLVM, rust, Go, k8s

Discourse

nvim, yt-dlp, gnome I'm sure there are many more I don't recall right now

linux, ffmpeg, vim, lazygit

Envoy, Kuvernetes, Terraform

The Linux kernel and (neo)vim.

Ublock, no comparison folks.

Homebrew

solidjs and vite has been a breeze to prototype with so far i love it

GNU Linux BSD

  curl

coreutils, nix, vim, Haskell (ghc), postgresql, latex

Linux & LibreOffice. At the end of the day I'm grateful to all people who work on open source and free software.

linux, git, vim, golang/go

Obviously it's

* Docker

* WASM

* Rustlang

* Web itself

Zarf

Git

curl, atuin, zed

Vite. Vitest. Storybook. React.