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Michelle Duke
Michelle Duke

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5 open source projects I use every week. You might not even know these are OS!

Last week, I shared five of my favourite open source projects in celebration of Maintainer Week. I promised this week I'd share five more. So here's five I use every week. I love them, and many of them you might not even realise are open source!

VS Code

Yep, Microsoft's VS Code is open source. It's one of the largest open source repos out there. Thousands of people contribute to this code base, and it's available to the community completely for free.

GitHub logo microsoft / vscode

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code - Open Source ("Code - OSS")

Feature Requests Bugs Gitter

The Repository

This repository ("Code - OSS") is where we (Microsoft) develop the Visual Studio Code product together with the community. Not only do we work on code and issues here, we also publish our roadmap, monthly iteration plans, and our endgame plans. This source code is available to everyone under the standard MIT license.

Visual Studio Code

VS Code in action

Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license.

Visual Studio Code combines the simplicity of a code editor with what developers need for their core edit-build-debug cycle. It provides comprehensive code editing, navigation, and understanding support along with lightweight debugging, a rich extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools.

Visual Studio Code is updated monthly with new features and bug fixes…




It's my favourite code editor with hundreds of plug-ins. One of the best things about VS Code is its collaboration mode. You can have colleagues jump in and help you debug, or have a guest join you on a Twitch stream for some pair programming.

Android

A lot of people often forget Android: the open source mobile operating system based on Linux. As a Samsung fan-girl with more than one Samsung phone πŸ˜› I'm using Android every day. I've played around with the dev settings, flashed devices, and added some of my own software on top.

It's great for testing mobile apps and has so much more functionality than any other mobile OS's out there. If I ever got stuck with a non-Android phone, I'd be trying to flash Android onto it... somehow!

Ubuntu

Speaking of Linux; you can't really talk about Linux without talking about Ubuntu. It's the Linux distribution based on Debian. As a GitHub Actions user, Ubuntu often comes up in my daily usage.

I also heavily use Ubuntu when fixing PCs: just stick Ubuntu onto a bootable USB, boot into Ubuntu, grab all the files from the hard drive, wipe the PC, and start again. It's the perfect way to fix my mate's computers when they somehow manage to crash and burn their system. Jokes aside, Ubuntu is super powerful, and can do a lot.

Twitch Leecher

As someone who often appears on other people's Twitch streams as a guest, how do I get a copy of the stream, short of asking the host? That's where Twitch Leecher comes in. You can search for any channel or copy and paste the URL to download your Twitch video.

GitHub logo Franiac / TwitchLeecher

Twitch Leecher - The Broadcast Downloader

TWITCH LEECHER IS DISCONTINUED




It's also super handy if you need to export all your Twitch videos in one go. The downloads manager is really easy to use and the interface is simple, yet effective.

Nicehash Miner

As more people get into GPU mining, it's good to have an awesome to-go miner. Nicehash Miner is the perfect GPU miner that manages the highest hashrates and does so all automatically. It auto tunes for best performance and efficiency, and even switches to the best crypto algorithm at the time.

NiceHash Miner

Introduction

NiceHash Miner is a continuation of NiceHash Miner Legacy. This version is intended for beginners or experienced miners that want the quickest updates and highest hashrates, and are okay with customization of the antivirus. Please check out quick guide about NiceHash Miner, so that your experience will be even better.

Please follow us on Twitter @NiceHashMining or on our Blog for updates on new versions and other important information.

What are the benefits?

NiceHash Miner is an advanced auto-miner that supports the latest algorithms and miners. No need to go through tons of configuration files, various mining software versions, configuration tuning or cryptocurrency coins market analysis. Auto-tuning for best performance…

Make sure you're using a good throttling tool to manage your hardware and ensure you don't overheat your devices. Nicehash Miner will do everything else for you. You can select to mine with your CPU or GPU depending on which will get you the best outcomes.

Open source projects

There you have it. Five open source projects I am constantly using. What projects are you using in your daily work? Did you thank any maintainers during Maintainer Week?

Top comments (4)

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andreidascalu profile image
Andrei Dascalu

Android is a bit of a mixed bag. There is AOSP, the project to which Google contributes heavily but I'm not sure if there are phones in the wild which still use AOSP.
Samsung modifies it heavily (lots of OEM do mostly cosmetic changes but Samsung makes changes all the way down to kernel and also brings their own drivers - you couldn't run AOSP on Samsung devices unless you build your own flavour and backport drivers).
So yeah, you may be using Android but you're not using the open source version.

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mishmanners profile image
Michelle Duke

Definitely. There's a lot going on with this one.

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cjsmocjsmo profile image
Charlie J Smotherman

Why not just use Debian? Thats where all of Ubuntu's rescue tools come from. Debian offers a "Live" cd image you can copy to a usb drive

debian.org/CD/live

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mishmanners profile image
Michelle Duke

This also true πŸ˜„ thanks for posting this.