Open Source Software Lists

For years, people who wrote about open source software would write articles listing all the coolest and most popular open source software projects--and all the software listed was the same. Mozilla (now Firefox), Emacs, OpenOffice, Linux, Apache, Gnumeric, GIMP, etc. Boring.

The great news is that these days those lists are getting not only longer, but also more interesting, with lots of very cool new applications that do very cool things. Rather than try to distill down all those lists myself, I'm just going to link here to the best ones I find.

It's worth checking them out, because not only do the original list compilers do a great job of sniffing out cool apps, but the magic of the Internets lets other readers add links to other cool apps that the original author didn't know about.

Here goes:

• Where can I download a free firewall?: Open source firewalls for Linux/*NIX systems.
• Best Open Source Software: A nice, big, list, not stuffed with the familiar names, but also fairly heavily oriented to sysadmins and developers. Even so, plenty of links to multimedia and messaging for the rest of us.
• Here's a nice little list of notable but not widely noted applications for Ubuntu from the nice/new Little Ubuntu blog/website.
• 94 of the Best Free Software Applications that are Better than Purchased Software, as the title says (though I think these are all Windows apps, many of them are cross-platform).
• Top 20 Linux apps
• The Linux Gamers' Game List
• 40 Coolest free applications around
• 125 Nautilus Scripts from Ubuntu Unleashed
• Cheat Sheets.org what it says: cheat sheets on everything you can have a cheat sheet for, just about.
• (more to come!)

If you've got suggestions for other lists that fall into this category, let me know!