WHO WE ARE

This issue we asked our experts: Jonni’s showcasing the best next-gen distros, so what open source software do you think readers should know about?

Jonni Bidwell

It’s hard to properly decouple from Google on mobile. But you can start the journey with the F-droid app store, where you’ll find builds of Firefox Focus, Telegram and Signal. And if you really need something from the Play store, you can use the slightly sneaky Aurora Store.

Nick Peers

Ventoy is a brilliant boot disk tool that enables you to place all your bootable media (as ISO files) on a single flash drive, then switch between them as required at startup. At last, one boot disk to rule them all!

Les Pounder

I regularly use my Android phone for work and recently I found out about a tool called scrcpy, which enables me to use my phone from my Ubuntu machine. So now I can answer calls, take pictures and look for cute cat photos without touching my phone.

Calvin Robinson

Audacity is an open source, cross-platform, audio-editing tool. It’s one of those handy applications that’s been around for over a decade and barely changed, which means that it does precisely what it’s supposed to do, and does it well. Great for editing audio, from making music to recording podcasts.

Mayank Sharma

I’ve recently run across ugrep, which is not only faster than the venerable grep utility, but also has lots of additional features including an interactive query UI, the ability to peek inside compressed files, and it ships with predefined patterns to search source code.

Due to the unprecedented circumstances created by the Covid19 outbreak, we’ve been forced to reduce the page count of Linux Format and drop the DVD. We wholeheartedly apologise for this – it’s certainly something we do not want to do. The real hope is we can resume normal business in a couple of months. Stay safe.