The transition to virtual conferencing has enabled work from home for office teams and eLearning for students. A new era is ushering in, given the use of technology for imparting education, managing workloads, and leading by example.
Whiteboards have become the thing of the present, considering how often you need to present your thoughts to other people over virtual mediums. Given the rise in virtual presentations, it’s time to move over to whiteboards to do your bidding.
Without further ado, you should try these seven open-source whiteboard applications on your Linux system for a seamless experience.
OpenBoard is a leading open-source whiteboard application suite you can download on your Linux desktop. It is a highly responsive, dynamically accurate, whiteboard content creation tool.
You access a versatile mix of drawing, highlighting, pointing, and multilingual content processing tools within this application. Its newly added PDF-reading capabilities, updated and stabilized handwriting aids, virtual keyboard, and well-coordinated geometry tools will enhance your presentations in no time at all.
Teachers, researchers, and lecturers continue to rely on OpenBoard, for it gives them a full-accessible EdTech library with its K-12 integration capabilities. Its document importing features and live drawing aids, make it an ideal virtual classroom companion.
The application runs smoothly on laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. Its extensive, configurable settings make it compatible in multiple use cases.
The suite’s easy-to-learn UI and extensive documentation offer a smooth learning curve for the end-users. OpenBoard’s multi-platform support, regular updates, and bug fixes make it a must-have whiteboard app.
Download: OpenBoard
Behold Rnote, an open-source note-based application, that doubles as a freehand whiteboard for Linux users. The application gives you free rein over tactile, screen-based presentations, annotations, documents, and image-marking options.
Rnote is flexible enough to adapt to a majority of the touch surfaces. It gives you an extensive, usable whiteboard activity area with configurable touch sensitivity settings. You can find your important markers, erasers, pens, (multiple) brushes, shape-makers within the necessary toolbar.
Rnote allows you to customize its interface instantly so that you can switch colors and play with elements fit for driving optimum visibility. Draw lines, grids, dots, and lines without missing the mark. Zoom and pan rapidly to enunciate your demonstrations better.
Download: Rnote
Xournal is an open-source note-taking app for Linux tailor-made for GNOME/GTK-based desktops. You can use it for writing, sketching, and maintaining personalized journals.
Xournal comfortably lets you sync your stylus to wield your tactile devices like a notepad or canvas. You can easily create and erase content, or add more depth to your content by importing images into this application.
Xournal tackles whiteboard editing differently. Its intuitive lasso tool lets you select what you need to alter and leave the rest.
Use this app for PDF annotations, and print out your whiteboard creations with a few clicks. This whiteboard app’s quick onboarding time allows you to master it rapidly for fluid digital presentations.
Download: Xournal
Lorien introduces itself as an infinite canvas drawing/note-taking app. The cross-platform app supports Linux, amongst other popular open-source and proprietary OSes.
Lorien comes with a toolbox comprising multiple brushes, pencil/pen tools, line drawing and geometric shape tools, erasers, selection tools, and many others.
You will find color palettes to create visually vibrant whiteboard creations. Additionally, the app features a distraction-free mode that permits fluent, hassle-free presentations without any inherent notifications.
Lorien is swift and performance-driven, as it is based on the Godot game engine, which explains its panache for graphically rich whiteboard content rendering. The app saves your collections as a collection of points, akin to a vector image.
Hence, it is easy to save and reopen the app without compromising on your productivity, even when you have content-heavy files.
Download: Lorien
Rainbow Board is a self-proclaimed open-source whiteboard app available on Linux. Additionally, Rainbow Board is a cross-platform app, which means you work on the same interface, irrespective of whether you use it on a tablet, laptop, or phone.
Rainbow Board offers you a multi-faceted view-port for writing, drawing, and note-taking. It is made with Electron, React, and SVG Renderer.
It aptly brings luster to your whiteboard creations by flawlessly integrating with your stylus. It responds to the slightest changes in hand pressure and gestures for enhancing accuracy.
You can repurpose Rainbow Board for sketching, doodling, designing, highlighting, and annotations. It has a multi-color palette and advanced settings to manage line thickness and brush types, among other features.
Download: Rainbow Board
Hoylu is a free-to-use online application; it is a free-form whiteboard tool created with modern documentation and project management needs in mind.
It offers smart options for organizing your work in Kanban, Agile, Scrum, and various frameworks. It has advanced file shareability and other interactive features.
Hoylu integrates with the best productivity and collaboration clouds and toolchains in the market, such as Jira, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Agility, and more. So, your project management, product development, and team meets are more organized.
Hoylu allows you to engage with your team within the application remotely, so you spend less time arranging meetings and more on productivity. You can collaborate with multiple users to boost your brainstorming and presentation outputs.
Excalidraw is an online drawing and whiteboard tool specializing in creating graphs and diagrams, commonly used to explain data science and logic flows.
Draw shapes and fill them with colors or text quickly with Excalidraw. You can adjust strokes across the viewport in customizable stroke styles and widths. This whiteboard app further allows you to manage the transparency/opacity of shapes to derive a more nuanced and dynamic presentation style.
Excalidraw provides some nifty pointers that help you connect the shapes to derive logic between them. It also offers curved arrows and lines to help you create engaging and flexibly arranged content.
With this application, you can further import spreadsheets, add geometric element layers, and collaborate with others in these activities.
Presenting Ideas Visually on Linux
Each of these seven applications will give you the best whiteboard presentation experience on your Linux desktop.
Rest assured, you can try and work on these applications with ease. Take your visual presentations up a notch, so that there is always something exciting to look forward to with these applications.
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