## Submission Guidelines To avoid the clutter trap that many other lists succumb to as they scale, only the best software is included. But "best" is relative and differs person-to-person. Here, it's mostly guaged based on five criteria. Keep in mind every "guideline" is more of a suggestion and can be skirted, thus, pay greater attention to the real-life examples I've included - they do a much better job of articulating what makes it onto this list. ### 1. Popularity Projects with over 5000 stars are preferred. Popularity is far from the best method, but people use specific software for a reason - probably because it's halfway decent. Again, this isn't foolproof. People can be allergic to change and there's plenty of times where a piece of software is blatantly better than an alternative but the majority use the latter because they either aren't aware or just don't care. ```css Note: Criteria [2,3,4] are closely intertwined ``` ### 2. A Foundation The project should have a solid foundation: - A solid set of contributors, not neccesarily in quality but commitment ### 3. Activity The project must show signs of recent activity. Abandoned software will not be placed on this list - **no expections.** ### 4. Future Proof Going alongside the above criteria, the project must have consistent activity and evidence of a future. ### 5. Quality Lastly, is the software decent?