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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.
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?
Examples
Determing whether software belongs on this list often involves a lot of external research - all of which will be explored in these examples.
1. PearCleaner
Description - A free, source-available and fair-code licensed mac app cleaner
Stars - 4.2k
Contributors - 7
On the surface PearCleaner woudn't fit with a relatively small amount of stars and just seven contributors. But research brings about the following conclusion: PearCleaner is one of two major app cleaners for MacOS - the other being the proprietary AppCleaner. Despite just 7 contributors, they have been continuously pushing updates on a ~two week interval. They have a solid roadmap for future updates and been delivering on those promises.
Result: YES
2.
Description - 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
Stars - 48.1k
Contributors - 144
Every part of this project passes the test... except for the fact that it's abandoned. It's still insanely popular but hasn't had a commit in 7 months and the last release was two years ago.
Result: NO
Zed Editor
Description - Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
Stars - 52.3k
Contributors - 753
Just about any software on this scale will make it onto this list. Zed Editor has a massive user base, a massive team, a solid roadmap, and the means to execute on those promises well into the future.
Result: YES