from HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to linux@lemmy.ml on 14 Jun 11:58
https://feddit.org/post/14167855
Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?
For me, there are two three things for personal information management:
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for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
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for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
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for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
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oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
threaded - newest
xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without “installing” them on the target device, which is great because you don’t have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.
Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.
wdfs - It’s an old project that is patched by this random github user. It’s the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user. I mount it from a bash script because that way I can use KDE wallet to store the credentials instead of having a plain text file somewhere on my fs, the script waits until the wallet is unlocked, then reads the credentials from it and mounts the webDAV to a path in my home. That is more accessible to apps and other scripts (e.g. recent files) instead of doing it via Dolphin, which generates a random string in the path every time when opening network storage.
Can rclone mount it transparently? I thought it is more like a one time copy / sync.
What I mean by that is that the remote storage should look like a normal directory to the rest of the system and any reads and writes should go over the network directly to the remote without occupying local disk space.
Also it seems to me that you have to write your credentials to the rclone config file, which I explicitly don’t want.
Rclone can do file mounts as well as sync.
didn’t know that, thank you!
I’ve never heard of xpipe until now - I just set it up and this is amazing
Pithos, it’s a desktop client for Pandora.
It’s the first time I see a Ban. This must be really bad…
Genocide supporting mod probably disliked the username.
That’s just speculation and accusation without proof. Let us not do this here.
Every day?
rio -e ‘tmux attach -t#’). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.
Interesting. Have you tried Stumpwm as well, and if so, how would you compare it to Herbstluftwm?
That’s one I don’t remember, but I probably wouldn’t have: the config file is in Lisp. Not only is Lisp something I never use anymore, which gives it a high cognitive load, but I don’t particularly care for Lisp-like syntax.
I’m certain there are several less common WMs that I haven’t tried. It’d probably be almost impossible to try every WM every written for X; it seems to be a common hobby project for folks interested in the X protocol.
I did say “almost every”, but perhaps even that was exaggeration. I do think I’ve tried the majority, though.
My differentiator for hlwm, the killer feature, shared by only two other projects that I’m aware of, is that hlwm has no configuration file. All configuration is performed through client commands. Every command interaction that can be performed by a user input - and much that can’t - can also be performed on the CLI. All (?) windowing events can also be monitored on the command line, and therefore scripted. The other two WMs that share at least some of these features are bspwm and river.
Hooray to Helix!
+1 for helix. I was new to linux and TUI editors. The vim tutor was a good intro to the concept of modal editors, but needed lsp and syntax highlighting. At the time I struggled a lot with configs, so neovim was out. Helix is just a fantastic, batteries included experience. Approachable for beginners, but feature rich for novices.
Edit: typo, grammer
Right now https://jeena.github.io/recoder/ which I just released and here is why (copied from the website):
🎬 Why Recoder?
I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, and suddenly nothing worked right. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife's iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.
😤 Too Much Fuss, Too Many Steps
Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.
My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.
🔄 Vertical Videos? Extra Pain
That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.
✨ Enter Recoder
I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.
GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.
For example:
ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3.parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2}then copies each FLAC file's metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the--xapplyoption).edit:
copytagsis https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that's useful for anyone.Parallel is great!
Alternatively your second command can be written as:
parallel “copytags {1} {2}” ::: *.flac :::+ *.mp3.Also it is nice to exec commands on multiple devices.
KDE's Dolphin + Konsole's integration to Dolphin is great for seamlessly managing files with an UI and terminal hybrid.
Though closed source (overly dramatic music plays), the text editor Sublime Text works great, and at least with major version 3 (last I checked it was in version 4), it can be converted to AppImage without major issues (at worst, paths with spaces have issues).
Firejail is great for starting specific programs offline.
Newsboat is the best RSS feed reader I could find for Linux, specifically due to, with its inbuilt macros, I can set it up to open in new tabs several posts from a comically large amount of feeds.
How does the dolphin/konsole integration thing work? I’m curious.
You press F4 (I believe) in Dolphin and it spawns “tab” of Konsole pointing to curre t location inside Dolphin window.
Whoa, I had no idea! I knew about alt+shift+F4 to open a terminal in the current folder, but that spawns a whole separate konsole instance, F4 is amazing, thank you!
You press F4 and a window within Dolphin comes up, already "cd-ed" to the current directory, the terminal working as Linux's default bash terminal:
https://media.ani.social/01/97/74/79/47/67/7d/23/b3/7d/49e623d62d04.webp
Seems like a simple thing? Indeed. But it's a small detail that saves a lot of time in the long run for helping with the workflow. No need to switch back and forth between two different windows.
and the konsole is kept automatically in the dir you are currently. is very handy when you need do do something in the terminal and you need immediate feedback.
Simple but extremely useful, someone pointed that out the other day and I’ve been using it ever since. It’s my favorite feature of dolphin so far.
Not Linux exclusive, but freefilesync.org and goaccess.io my beloved
Easy file sync and easy log checking
Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I’ve ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.
+1 for qalculate! I use the cli regularly for doing quick calculations while working in the terminal, it’s awesome!
why not
bcthen?Wasn’t aware of bc, it also looks great thanks!
FreeTube, a desktop client to watch YouTube videos, without an account. Why not use a browser without an account? Well, it has a watch history, favorites and subscriptions as if you had an account - but its all “offline” account, without Google involved (besides watching their video). So it manages an account with subscriptions, without YouTube account. Plus it integrates an ad blocker and SponsorBlock, and has a few more features on its sleeve.
kdotool, a xdotool like program for KDE on Wayland. Just learned about it when setting up another application. But I will use it for independently too.
There are more, but this is what came to my mind right now.
Upvoted for FreeTube.
What do you use to send YouTube links to FreeTube? Personally I'm using LibRedirect https://libredirect.github.io/
I don’t. I just copy the link and enter it in FreeTube directly.
Same, go FreeTube! And NewPipe for mobile.
I like game emulation and to manage my ROM library, I use Geode-GEM. It is simple but cusomizable app to manage your ROM based on console and emulator you have.
KDE Connect
- https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
I've used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I'm sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone's lockscreen to pause the music.)
I'm starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.
There's more too I need to explore.
- https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect
(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a 'device unreachable' error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)
I just introduced my partner to this a week ago. Trying to slowly convert him into a Linux user haha. It works with Windows too!
I’ve been using that a lot, but I wish there was a “disconnect” on the phone’s app, rather than keeping a persistent connection.
Kde connect is great. You can get notifications on pc and read texts fully in messages. I also use it to file share and send 2fa codes.
It’s the best.
Being able to communicate with apple users who are still clinging on to sms with a keyboard is great. I detest typing on touchscreens.
Localsend is rad, super useful: localsend.org
Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.
I mean if it’s local network I’d use kde connect. It has a bazillion features, but sending files through the normal share button is one of them.
Localsend works on Mac and windows as well
KDE Connect also works on Mac & Windows.
Definitely should use whatever software you’re comfortable with.
But I seriously cannot recommend KDE Connect highly enough. It’s a great piece of software
You can send to different machines then your kde connect one with localsend, e.g. wife’s PC, kid’s tablet, brother’s phone, etc.
KDE connect can be good too but I like localsend for sharing files with any and all devices like when I’m moving phones and need to send a file to the new one or between my PCs. You’re not wrong though, KDE connect works well for fileshare too.
There’s also Packet if you want to use Android’s Quick Share to transfer file with your desktop
Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.
Yea this is great ty!
I used eapanso for a few years, but kept running in to issues with it spawning hundreds of versions of itself.
I really miss it though. Would you say it has matured?
I’ve used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven’t encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it’s daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.
Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.
Thanks for the feedback - It was a systemd issue. Something caused it to continue generating slices for espanso until the machine locked up - probably spawned with each terminal. It happened on out of date fedora install 36 (when 41 was out) with gnome on it.
Since then I’ve moved to a window manager for all my machines and would likely invoke it the same way - perhaps now it’s time to revisit!
sshuttle github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle
need it all the time, super minimal, easy to usw
Aside from ones listed here:
System Tools
Productivity Tools
Media & Entertainment
Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.
I’d love your list of selfhosted stuff. I’m running a little server with TrueNAS Scale and it’s working really well.
Media & Content Management
Productivity, Documents & Task Management
Good Deeds
I have been running Jellyfin for a while now with great success, and prefer Immich over Photoprism. The rest look real interesting, especially Sterling PDF.
I currently use Immich for photo backup and whatnot. Would you say PhotoPrism is better than Immich?
I was using it for auto tagging of categories. I haven’t tried immich but I just moved my photos to my snapraid, so I might give it a shot. It looks like it’s come far since I looked last.
It does work really well. Backs up everything, the mobile app works. Though I am having trouble with it auto switching URL dependant on local or remote but I think that’s a me thing
Is there any concern to be had with archive warrior regarding legality (like scraping piracy sites)?
You can pick the project you want to participate in. :)
You could give a try to running a gemini server like agate. It is text + file serving protocol similar to gopher.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi
github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
It is really good for organizing and distributing text, media and files like with gopher. And I think due to its simplicity, it is perfect for using it in a home or lab network.
What is the use case for it?
Gemini is kinda a modernized version to the old Gopher protocol. Its purpose is to share hyper-linked text documents and files over a network - in the simplest way possible. It uses a simple markup language to create text documents with links, headings etc.
Here is a FAQ
Main differences with similar technologies are:
It is much, much easier to write hyper-linked documents than in HTML
a server is much much smaller and easier to set up than a web server serving HTML. It can easily and securely run on a small Raspberry Pi without special knowledge on server security.
in difference to gopher, it supports modern things like MIME and Unicode
There are clients for every platform including Android and iOS
also, there are Web gateways which allow to view stuff in a normal web browser
unlike Wikis, it is only concerned about distributing content, not modifying files. This means that the way to store and modify content can be matched to the use case: Write access to content can be via an NFS or Samba server, or via an SFTP client like WinSCP or Emacs.
the above means that it does not need user authentication
the protocol is text-centric and allows for distraction-free reading, which makes it ideal for self-hosted blogs or microblogs.
Practically, for example, I use it to share vacation photos with family.
Two more use cases that come first to my mind:
When I did my masters thesis, our lab with about 40 people had a HTTP page hosted on a file server that listed tools, data resources, software, and contact persons. That would be easier to do with Gemini because the markup is simpler. Also, today it would not be feasible to give every student write access to a wen server’s content because of the complexity of web servers, and the resulting security implications.
One time at work, we had a situation with a file server with many dozens of folders, and hundreds of documents. And because all the stuff had been growing kinda organically over many years, specific information was hard to find. A gemini server would have made it easy to organize and browse the content as collaboratively edited hypertext which serves as an index.
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Thanks, upvoting for those two.
I invented WinApps. nowsci.com/winapps
I had a conversation started with the org fr their takeover and they just dropped off. If anyone from there is reading this, please reach out.
Thanks for your baby! It’s great.
Thanks… I had no idea this existed. I can now connect to the work remote desktop software with a single window perfectly integrated. This is incredibly helpful. Moreover I can now say I’m using Winapps in order to run Windows App. I guess now they can rename the remote desktop app again to Winapp to go full circle. Or maybe Winamp, just to confuse people. Or just App, to make it impossible to ever troubleshoot.
EDIT: At any rate, this works really beautifully. It’s a bit of a PITA to set up if you’re having the VM via virt-manager but hell if it’s not as smooth as native.
As someone who worked build/rel before working OS security: if you’re intentionally breaking Single Source of Truth for software state management, then you’re in for a bad time. This can only delay the inevitable, but the technical debt comes at a high credit cost on top.
Building an RPM is SO trivial to do, even without some LLM feeding it to you; and maintaining an existing one or rebuilding it to suit another distro or version even more trivial. Save your sanity and avoid out-of-band ‘package’ managers!
For me it’s Perl’s rename, which of course cones in a variety of package names depending on the distro you use. In trying to find a link, I landed on this stack exchange answer that gives a great overview of how the tool works and the different packages available on different distros.
I have to bulk rename files every day, and using regex and the other features of Perl’s rename makes it so much easier to do.
Ed Along with rlwrap it gives me a very fast and powerful workflow.
Rlwrap It wraps around a program and gives it the ability to make use ofthe readline lib.
Screen I use it when I boot without X. Gives a very fast workflow, being able to switch between programs.
Mpv Multimedia powerhouse. Even works (pretty) well without X, with a framebuffer.
Ecasound Cli daw. Have several scripts to make a recording on the fly or to be able to jam.
ed (which is the more frugal, older brother of vi/vim) might indeed be a bit under-hyped. Which advantages does it have for you?
Funny thing a while ago I had a small side-project for a data collection task in my PDA - a kind of minimal database to record daily stuff. So, a PDA has limited screen space and typing speed, and I tried to make the UI with as little typing as possible. And then it dawned to me that I was essentially replicating ed’s interface!
I primarily edit groff-, shell- and (small) c-files. I like it to simply search a line make the edit and move on.
All my groff and c projects have makefiles, with ‘m’ being an alias for ‘make’. So a simple ‘w’ and ‘!m’ will do.
I use ‘z’ a lot to view portions of the file.
If I need to transfer a part of a file to another file I simly write that part to a temporary file and import it.
There are some situations when I open vi instead. Primarily when I have to escape a lot of characters to make the edit.
Fun thing by the way, one can use Emacs without X, and then it is like screen - only with an editing window at the outermost shell.
And also, one can have the same space efficiency in text mode within X: Using the ratpoison or Stumpwm window managers.
I simply never tried emacs. No special reason for it. Moved from Kate to Vim to Vi to Ed. And kept using the last two from then on.
Maybe I’ll take a look at it someday.
Logseq for notes and task tracking. It’s an open source alternative to obsidian. Life saver for tracking stuff at work.
logseq.com
This. Thanks mate!
I agree
I started on Logseq, because I’m a contributing open source advocate. I fully intended to stay with Logseq.
However, it seems to indent everything in the markdown including headings, bullet points and so on. When one loads a document into a markdown editor, one ends up removing all these indents before the document becomes ‘valid’. They’ve made some other unusual design choices that mean the markdown doesn’t read very well in plain text. I used Logseq for a year.
There’s also a difficulty for me with getting help. For some reason Logseq help community seems to be based around the Discuss (sp?). It’s not easy to read because the lines are very short as it’s a messaging platform. The community is very very active though.
I eventually got frustrated with trying to debug my Markdown outside Logseq, and went looking for another vehicle.
Rather distressed, I installed Obsidian. It’s been designed with a more logical approach. To link to a heading in another document, the document is linked in a Wiki-like way (if you’ve chosen that format) with the heading separated by a hash symbol; in Logseq you get an unintelligible UUID plus all that indenting.
There’s a lot of help within the Obsidian community but some of it is locked down in medium paid-for content. However, the hundreds of Obsidian YouTube channels and videos, obsidianrocks and obsidian.md sites are very well authored. AI searches augment the rest, TBF I don’t really use Google proxies anymore.
Even though I’m a personal user, it’s worth it to me to buy a commercial licence to show my appreciation for the work that the two(?) developers have put in.
The plugins use the published API and are all (?) open source AFAICT.
Most of the issues I have with Obsidian are just related to my workflow. I think that there are probably plugins that will solve them.
I don’t expect to be looking for another note-taking app anytime soon and it’s been over a year since I started with Obsidian. Understanding templates opened my world up enormously. I haven’t started data-mining in any meaningful sense yet.
Just my tuppence.
I tried logseq to manage my notes at work and it just didn’t click with me.
I ended up using QOwnNotes www.qownnotes.org which might be not as polished, but it is very easy to start with. I don’t need nor want cloud/sync, and since this ones notes are plain .md files in a folder, it’s easy to back up (or edit) externally when needed. I like it for what it does.
Glad you found one that worked for you.
As far as I’m aware, Logseq also just uses .md files. I back those up regularly and I do use the cloud sync. The cloud sync lets me alternate use between my computer and my tablet for work. I could use just one device, but this was a significant advantage for me.
I also keep a separate log for personal work which I can add to via special shortcuts from my phone.
Great topic. I’m going to have to investigate some of these suggestions later.
Since my first pick, helix, was already mentioned here and i commented on it, I’ll add gitui. Git can be very overwhelming for me. Gitui arranges frequently used git commands in a sensible, visual layout and makes it easy for me to understand and interact with git.
For doing more complex tasks with git, you could have a look at jujutsu. It is really good and provides most of git’s power in an conceptually much simpler CLI interface.
Thanks for the rec! The anonymous branches and working-copy-as-commit subsuming git stashes is intriguing. I’ll give it a closer look when I have a chance.
Qalc. Best calculator ever hands down
You mean Qalculate, right? If so, I agree.
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✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
SpeedCrunch for the win ! 😉
But seriously, compared to qalculate I prefer SpeedCrunch UI.
Yeah that’s the one, but I use the CLI and to run that you type
qalcin the terminal.better than
bc?rofi-calc, because it’s qalc in rofi. Rofi makes everything better 🙂
Pinta is the main one that comes to mind. I don’t use it every day, far from it, and that’s a part of why I love it. On the rare occasion that I have to do some image editing, I load up Gimp and then proceed to fight against it for at least a whole day to make it do the simplest of things before finally ragequitting. Then I load up Pinta and actually get the task done in either minutes or hours at most.
It’s like old school MS Paint, but better. Simple, intuitive, no huge learning curve, just enough features to get my nonprofessional tasks done. It should be a distro default.
digiKam was the first Linux application I encountered that was so polished and useful for what it does that I tried to shoe-horn it into any and every DE I experimented with, as well as installing it onto my windows machines under KDE4Win.
Why not the Windows native version on the Windows machines?
Talking 10ish years ago. Today you can get KDE apps running on Windows as Native stand-alones, but at the time, you first had to install KDE4Win.
I see, thanks for explaining!
Sorry to thread jack. One little app I miss from Windows is a simple screengrab annotator? Wondering if people have anything to recommend.
Eg to circle some on screen text, add an arrow and maybe add some of my own text.
I cant get my Loigtech KB to screen grab, so I just use the Screengrab app in Mint, which is fine but zero annotation abilities.
I have tried Flameshot but it is a shitshow and doesn’t work properly and is unstable (for me) and doesn’t allow me to put it in the clipboard and paste in say Signal.
I think that is a signal limitation not a flameshot one.
Nah, I’ve had no issues pasting from the clipboard into signal, from either the Mint screenshot tool or Flameshot. Not sure what issue the top commenter is having…
Greenshot GPL3
…but also Linux.
Thought you meant ‘app for Windows’.
Like mentioned here, I usually tap PrintScreen and then annotate elsewhere, usually in Gimp.
I don’t have issues you are describing with flameshot, however a clipboard manager greatly enhanced the copy-ability between apps and certain websites (looking at you JIRA and Slack), including when the source is flameshot.
Perhaps not exactly what you need, but I have been using “scrot” and the magnificient drawing program Krita for the same result.
Ksnip does the trick for me
Me, too.
it’s a bit tedious but i usually just use libreoffice/openoffice impress to annotate on a screenshot made using xv
I use what’s built in KDE - Spectacle: github.com/KDE/spectacle
Does everything I need.
I’m not sure about the annotation part but I think spectacle supports that
solaar one of the best gui based apps for mouse settings
What problem does it solve?
dealing with logitech devices. i love their hardware, but i feel like they’re really bad at doing any kind of software… i know that there are alternatives for configuring logitech devices, but i quite enjoy solaar.
logitech mouses i been using a g502 for a decade it died an i got a new one only app i found that let me change dpi piper didnt work
if you need to set an mx master, the logiops is the way. github.com/PixlOne/logiops
i had it integrated with my tilimg wm and it was damm fast to do stuff.
you can configure gestures for both the thumb button ans the dpi button.
also you can can configure touch of the horizontal scroll wheel.
i use g502 sadly its unsupported
Man, I have so many apps, but here are a couple that I install first thing on a new install:
Timeshift is possibly at the top of the list.
Then Deja Dup.
Stacer
Strawberry
Open TV
It could be helpful if you explain what they do and how they relate to your computing needs. For example, I have been using Linux for over 25 years, and the only name in yor list which I have an idea about what it does is Deja Dup (personally, I use tar for backups, in a simple incremental setup).
I know Strawberry, because I use it too. It’s a music player, forked from Clementine years ago. I find it the best for my use case, as it can handle library by tags, do folder view for separate locations, do tag editing, lyrics and art download, etc. Can highly recommend!
You could just click on the links and read?
UpNote. I use it like a combination of the gollum wiki described by OP, but I just put everything in there. I have watch and reading lists for things I want to check out, writing projects, notes for TTRPG games, I keep extensive notes on healthcare-related stuff, and so on. I like UpNote because it’s lightweight, has windows, linux, and android apps, and because it has a one-time $25 lifetime membership that does free syncing forever instead of a monthly subscription like most other things seem to. I’ve tried OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian, Joplin, AnyType, and a bunch of others and didn’t like them for various reasons, but UpNote is both pretty small and also has a pretty full-featured editor that can do rich text, all kinds of formatting, media files, etc.
The only thing I’ve run into that UpNote wasn’t ideal for is I started writing a novel a couple months ago and managing the structure and notes and all that got a little unwieldy so I picked up Scrivener. Still wish they had an updated linux client or there was some good, complete, feature-rich linux-native equivalent, but it runs pretty good under wine, so.
Well, my main reason to use Zim Wiki and Gollum is that all the information stays on my computers -no sync service is needed, I sync via git + ssh to a Raspberry Pi that runs in my home. And this is a critical requirement for me since as a result of many experiences, my trust in commercial companies that collect data to respect data privacy has reached zero.
The differences between Zim and Gollum are gradual: Zim is tailored as a Desktop Wiki, so each page is already in editing mode which is slightly quicker, while Gollum is more like a classical server-based wiki, which is normally accessed over the browser (but by default, without user authentication). The difference is a bit blurry since both just modify a git repo, and Gollum can be run in localhost, so it is good for capturing changes on a laptop while on the road, and syncing them later. A further difference is that Zim is a but better for the “quick but not (yet) organized” style of work, while Gollum is better for a designed and maintained structure.
Both can capture media files and support different kinds of markup, while always storing in plain text. Gollum can also handle well things like PDFs which are displayed in the browser, and supports syntax highlighthing in many programming langages, which makes it nice for programming projects - it is perfect for writing outlines and documentation of software, and I often work by writing documentation first.
Yeah, I have since discovered pCloud as a replacement for OneDrive and that I could just have everything saved to a pCloud directory to auto-sync… but IMO UpNote is worth the $25 anyway so I don’t mind. Also it requires considerably less effort to just install the android app vs setting up some kind of multi-device syncing with pCloud/equivalent and managing that myself. I guess I value convenience over privacy in this one area.
Thanks for the explanation re:gollum/zim, I was curious why you were using 2 different sets of software to accomplish what seemed like the same thing. My notes are definitely more of the ‘scribble some shit down and organize it later if I get around to it’ variety, but I stopped using zim because I wanted synced notes with multiplatform apps and also it felt a little archaic, and I wasn’t really using the real star feature of wikis (cross-linking) anyway, I just wanted something with a traditional tree structure.
ffmpeg - www.deb-multimedia.org . I edit podcast videos for distribution to subscribers. High-quality video produces very large files but if they’re only going to be watched on laptops, tablets, and phones, I can throw away a lot of bits without noticeably affecting quality on a phone screen.
And nothing does that better or faster than ffmpeg.
I’m trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!
In that case, the curated list of applications in the Arch wiki could be invaluable for you:
wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications
Also, if you need something, I’ve found it often to be a good strategy to sit and write down what you personally need from a software - what are your requirements, and then go and search which available software matches these. The other way around, there are just too many alternatives: Any larger distro has tens of thousands of packages, and you won’t have time to try them all.
I do a fair amount of pentesting and I’m on mobile, so I’ll just list software.
Trufflehog & nosey parker (both kinda suck, but there’s nothing better)
Subfinder
Nuclei
Credmaster
To name a few.
Check out earlybird as an alternative to trufflehog.
github.com/americanexpress/earlybird
Can you expand on these later when you have time?
You’ve heard of it for sure, but shout out to Audacity. I used Cool Edit Pro for years before having to switch to Adobe Audition. The UI in Audacity feels surprisingly familiar and it does what I need it to do.
I believe audacity was forked over issues with privacy or something like that.
I didn’t know that. Should I be using a fork instead? Name or link?
I don’t know the details, I’m afraid. That’s just my memory.
The name of the fork is: Tenacity tenacityaudio.org
The developers of the fork have a detailed history explaining why the fork happened: tenacityaudio.org/…/Introduction_and_Motivation.h…
Their mastodon account floss.social/@tenacity
I just removed it’s network access from the flatpak, I don’t make extensive use of it but it’s really handy to have at hand
Not foss but Ocenaudio is leaps ahead of audacity imo.
auto-cpufreq to automatic CPU speed & power optimizer to improve battery life for Laptops.
Syncthing for syncing folders and files directly between your devices.
Also whatever software or driver I loaded to make this HP Thunderbolt Docking Station work with Linux.
AutoKey automation / word expander tool.
ALT + i/j/k/lto ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts.git commit -m 'CTRL + Shift + [it surrounds the selected text with a tag:text_selected = clipboard.get_selection() text_input = dialog.input_dialog(title="Wrap with a tag.", message="E.g., type cite to get <cite>x</cite>.", default="") keyboard.send_key("<delete>") clipboard.fill_clipboard(f"<{text_input[1]}>{text_selected}</{text_input[1]}>") keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+v")I’m likely not even harnessing AutoKey’s full capabilities and it’s already absolutely indispensable for being a huge time-saver and annoyance reducer.
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✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Steam added an excellent screen capture feature to their overlay, but I like being able to capture my screen anytime, not just when playing games with the steam overlay.
gpu-screen-recorder is the perfect tool for this, you set up a command to run at startup and the software records the last X minutes in the background, with barely any hardware utilization. Add a hotkey for another command that saves the recorded clip to a file, and boom, simple and efficient replay recorder. I’m honestly surprised this app wasn’t mentioned yet.
I love GPU Screen Recorder. It would have been much more difficult for me to switch to Linux if it didn’t exist
Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:
Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.
Fair point
Ocenaudio for audio editing. It’s not FOSS but it’s native, simple to use, and doesn’t have backend library issues I kept having with audacity.
Try tenacity, it’s audacity fork, available on flathub. I have good experience with it.
100%, super impressed with Ocenaudio.
I really like
units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.Cool! Though I’ll probably still use krunner for this
This looks amazing and I need to have it in my life. Thank you so much for sharing
unitsis really powerful. I worked with the team there to appropriately support Gaussian units since it seems no other tool would—took a bit of retrofitting to support fractional exponents like “grams^1/2”, but I have yet to find another tool that handles this even remotely correctly..
I also like it very much. I hope they make a library for it soon, I can’t wait to use it to make unit aware calculators.
qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.
The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server.
I would say Rymdport (github.com/Jacalz/rymdport). It’s a GUI for the magic-wormhole tool (another recommendation in itself). It let’s you easily and safely transfer files to another computer.
I use Localsend to send files between my computers. Also to family and friends if they are local at the time. I keep seeing magic-wormhole mentioned on Lemmy. Do you know if wormhole is better somehow? Is it worth me trying it?
Biggest difference is that wormhole will pass traffic between devices on different networks as long as both are routable. So it’s not limited to a local network connection.
Very different tool. Magic-wormhole is dead simple, works over CLI and requires no setup. It’s not dependant on computers being within the same LAN. I wouldn’t use it with non-technical people. For users with some skill Rymdport is an option for them to interface with magic-wormhole. The tool is great for transferring secrets when setting up computers for example.
gnome-network-displays let’s you cast your screen to a wireless display (Miracast) or to a Chromecast device.
It works with KDE no problem and even under Wayland.
It creates a virtual display that can be organized like any other display: unify with another screen or extend the desktop using your DE’s default method/UI. And then it uses standard screen sharing conventions to send content to that virtual display.
I don’t know what kind of dark arts the developer(s) employed to make this possible, but the end result is simple wireless display in Linux that just works! A MUST for using Linux in a business setting.
FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.
+1 Any chance you got it working with multiple monitors on kde Wayland? That’s seriously my single biggest issue right now
I honestly haven’t tried on KDE, but I can give it a shot this coming weekend and report back. I’m up for a distro hopping round anyway.
But in Gnome, dual screens, it works like a charm, also on Wayland.
Damn… I might consider swapping the other way then. KDE is great. Especially the file browser and “KDE connect” for android is fantastic. There’s just issues like these now and then
Gnome has an extension called GSConnect which is their re-implementation of KDE Connect. I have in my tablet and phone, and it’s flawless.
But don’t change yet, give me until the weekend, I’ll spin Fedora with KDE in my laptop, and come back with my experience with FlameShot.
No need to change if that’s what you like and it ends up working.
Flameshot does require some tweaking to work anyway, so I’ll need check if it’s the same in KDE.
Doesn’t even work well on a single monitor on Wayland. It gets confused with screen size or sth, fills a small area on top left with screen contents and lot of black space
even on windows, far better than the windows thing.
Last windows I used was 10,and I’ve always found it lacking in the screen capture arena. Full disclosure, I had no idea Flameshot had a windows version.
GitHub Application Manager (GAM): github.com/fmstrat/gam
It’s like
aptfor installing directly from Github releases. A plug, sure, but I still use it regularly for things like FreeCAD, Cura, OrcaSlicer, and so on.Boxbuddy makes it incredibly easy to use distrobox, a great way to install software that might not be available for your distro, but is available on another distro, or just a way to keep a piece of software in a stable state (like DaVinci Resolve with davincibox).
If you use a “gaming distro”, I’m sure you’ve seen Input Remapper. It’s a neat utility that can create macros for all your peripherals or rebind keys as you like. Want to bind you controller so it works like a mouse? Possible. Want to macro key pressed by using the forward button on your mouse? Possible.
Did you leave Foobar2000 behind when you switched to Linux? Why not give Fooyin a try. It’s a relatively new audio player with aspirations of becoming just as configurable as FB2K. For me replaygain is quite important, and while some other FOSS audio players support it, not many has replaygain generation. And Fooyin does. While also being just as easy to set up and use as Foobar. Worth a look.
A good Foobar alternative is Deadbeef music player, another one with modular design, replaygain, and lots more. Built on GTK
Any benefits to help notes stuff over obsidian or other?
GNU Stow, definitely. I can’t stress enough how wonderful this app has been for my sanity. I use it to manage my dotfiles and personal data.
I made one
dotfilesfolder, which containshome,etcandusrsubfolders. I put all my configs in it (dotfiles, themes, custom keyboard layouts, etc) in the relevant subfolders, then with Stow I symlinkdotfiles/hometo/home/username,dotfiles/etcto/etcanddotfiles/usrto/usr, and poof symlinks are created for everything in it. That way all my configs are in one folder, I can sync it to my NAS easily, make it a git repo for version control, and even upload it to github. It’s amazing 🥰 I also made apersonalfolder which containsDocuments,Pictures,Videos, etc, all symlinked to/home/username/Documentsand such, so I only have one folder to back up for my personal data. Yes I’m very lazy and hate doing backups 😅Rofi (or here for the X11 version) : It’s the best app launcher by miles, even if I used a DE I’d still use rofi. But I also use it for a lot of other stuff that it’s much less well known for: the run mode for launching scripts and other executables, the ssh mode for ssh, rofi-calc for a very light and fast calculator that understand natural language, rofi-games as a games launcher, rofi-emoji as emoji selector… Rofi is life, rofi is love, rofi is God.
Libation to liberate audiobooks from Audible. There’s tons of apps to download and un-DRM your files from various platforms, but most only work on Windows. This one does work on linux 🥳
Lots of self-hosted apps for my media server, but they are all pretty well known (Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Komga) except maybe Suwayomi Server for manga (it can sync progress to AniList, and there are plugins to enable downloading from online manga reading sites)
ani-cli for watching anime because I’m a crazy person who grew up with MS-DOS and TUI apps make me happy. Also it’s often more convenient than having to check ten different websites to find the one anime you want to watch only to discover that half of them have been taken down.
yt-dlp to download videos from YouTube. I use wrapper scripts to make it more convenient to use because I’m lazy, but it’s great.
Have you used chezmoi in the past? Do you know how it compares to gnu stow?
No I wasn’t aware of it but it looks interesting! It seems to have a lot more features than GNU Stow. It says it requires a GitHub repo though, so it wouldn’t do for personal data, but for configs it looks interesting!
It doesn’t require a github repo, you can use any personal git repository. I personally have set it up with a selfhosted gitea instance. I also assume you could setup a git repo on the device.
Oh cool that’s good to know!
I’m a chezmoi user and I’ll be honest: as powerful as it is, it’s way too clunky to get right. I spend too much time configuring and then am too worried I’ll mess it up if I need to add or remove anything.
I’m going to give stow a try to see if it fits my workflow better.
Redshift, it changes the brightness/color on the display bluer closer to midday and redder at night. Twilight is a similar app on android.
KDE includes now a default option in their settings to do this. It’s in the Colors & Themes > Night Light menu.
Gnome too, btw 😉
ledger-cli.org
Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.
OTPClient
Awesome TOTP app that can import your Aegis Authenticator database, which then you can keep in sync with your phone and desktop.
Super handy.
Do i understand correctly that you can use aegis an your phone and also the same keS with this on a computer desktop?
Yep
Running a TOTP app on desktop seems like a potential security issue. Get a malware on your desktop and you’re fucked
I believe the reason we use mobile devices is that they have better isolation and are generally less vulnerable
You can install it via flatpak and use selinux as well if you need. You can also encrypt and password protect the database, which can also be held in your keyring.
As with any app its up to you to decide and mitigate any perceived risks.
I don’t know if it has been already mentioned but I love bat a lot. It’s like the cat command but with colors and line numbers. Makes things a little bit easier.
actualbudget.org
github.com/actualbudget/actual
It’s software for budgeting. You can run it entirely local, or set it up as a server. It stores everything in an SQLite dB, let’s you import and export CSV files, and it gives you great options for querying and seeing reports on your financial records.
I’ve got a handful of accounts, so I set up a small python utility to parse the CSVs my banks give me to something actually sensible and readable for Actual. I do that once a month, add a reconciliation entry here and there, and it’s all kept on sync very well.
I have one morbid report titled “money pissed down the landlord drain”, and it’s far higher than I’d like to be. But it’s got close to every penny I’ve ever spent on that bullshit in one place.
there is also:
github.com/maybe-finance/maybe
looks promising and it SHOULD support bank connection.
this is more a selfhosted thing but i adore it: github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
you can write your own Javascript functions (will be lua in the near future) and use them directly in the editor.
Someone may have mentioned this, but Syncthing changed my life.
Please when sharing wikipedia links remove the m. as the browser will decide if it wants the mobile version anyway. Thanks!