How do you find and choose free software?

“So you’ve got your GNU/Linux based box. You’ve installed the
base system and you’re good to go. Welcome to the world of freedom.
But then what? How do you determine what packages to install. How
do you decide which of the alternatives to go with?

“Package managers

“I accept that the obvious answer here is to find your software
in the package management tools provided by your distribution, but
that may not help very much. Take Debian for example: excellent
package management via dpkg, apt and associated tools but you still
have something in excess of 20,000 packages to deal with. Whilst
many of those will be libraries, data files and the like, it still
leaves you with a lot of applications from which to choose. No
matter how simple a package manager will make the installation of
software, it doesn’t always help that much with choosing it in the
first place. Even if you use the search tools in the package
manager you are still left with a decision between the various
options presented in the results.”

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