Hi Linux Lemmites. Recently finished up school and started working full time and kind of miss working on personal projects. I’m looking to try to make something in rust and try out gpui if I can figure it out or maybe egui. I also want to make something maybe even a handful of people would actually use as I find that motivating, so I ask what would actually be useful to you?
Edit: thank you all very much for the input, I think that maybe doing something akin to a “settings+” would be a fair target for me for a n initial project. If I make anything interesting I’ll make another post in this sub.
GUI for Pipewire configuration. Being able to reliably change the sample rate and buffer size without having to mess with config files would be nice.
I think I’d shoot for something like this for maybe a project 2 or so. I’ve messed a bit with cpal already because I wanted to mess around with doing some basic dsp stuff so I’d love to do a full easy effects replacement with this included. Or alternatively include something basic in the settings project I mentioned a bit higher up
Three finger drag in Wayland, a new gui for opensnitch where i can isolate network activity by app like little snitch
GUI for managing fingerprints/PAM that allows complicated or at least some customization with PAM such as requiring password on first login then allowing graphical fingerprints for sudo, unlock and other prompts with fallback to password.
I think this a pretty good idea. There’s a few other ideas below as well that are like settings tweaks or ui for them, it might be cool to build out something kinda like what opensuse has with a bunch of settings put into a graphical app.
- ImageMagick
- Ghostscript
- Pandoc
- LittleCMS (CMS: Color Management System)
- Wireguard
- Rclone
I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.
This is some sage advice thank you. I’m guilt of always starting something super difficult and then going back. My first couple qt projects were forcibly scoped because I had actually end users I needed to keep in mind and that helped immensely.
I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.
That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.
A real Photoshop replacement. GIMP is cool, but ain’t it. I have yet to find ANY software that can replace PS. I’ve even tried using multiple programs to replace PS, and it just doesn’t work. I fucking HATE Adobe.
Krita, after som tinkering, has replaced it for me, but I’m not a Photoshop power user either.
Graphite is getting there
I’m not an artist by any definition, but I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment of excising the cancerous growth that is the Adobe company out of existence. You may have seen this website before, but have you checked out fuckadobe.com? Alternatives are a little ways down, past the wall of text.
I’d love to do something this big in scope eventually maybe a couple projects down the road but I’d definitely want rust to be at the level of my main languages before I delve into that depth. I also would want to avoid the gimp development times it seems it takes forever for stuff over there
Absolutely
I understand why it doesn’t exist because it’s pretty niche and a shitload of work, but I wish there was a a really good dedicated 2D animation software similar to Moho Pro or Toon Boom Harmony on Linux. That’s one of the only reasons I’m still keeping Windows around.
Also as a side note, don’t trust Toon Boom. I bought a perpetual license from them that was super expensive, and then they switched to a subscription model and turned off my perpetual license.
Its funny because there is really good animation software on Linux. Problem is its difficult. But what it does is real good!
Cant say that and not mention the name my guy
Ok for example, and this isn’t the only one, OpenToonz. It is the direct and open source descendant of the same software that Studio Ghibli used.
You would need to learn it. You would need to create your own custom pipeline workflows. And you would need to be an artist.
Blender and davinci? Prob doesn’t compare, but they run natively ar least.
Kvm/libvirt windows vm maybe? It opens windows apps as linux apps, issue comes with using gpu but toonboom seems cpu and ram intensive?
You would just set it up normally in the vm then open the app through your start menu as you would normally.
A standalone utility for decoding QR codes that will work on a desktop. All I want is to be able to put a picture of the code in and get whatever text it was concealing in a little text box where I can read it, and C&P it if it’s useful to do so. If something like this exists, I’ve never been able to find it, although there are seemingly dozens of programs for generating QR codes.
Kde’s spectacle (screenshot utility) does this by default now.
Not op, but holy shit, it actually does! Wish I knew that before, ty!
I wrote a little script a while back that would save a temp file with fswebcam, run zbarimg on it to decode the qr, delete the temp file and if it worked it would pipe the output into xclip/wl-copy, otherwise it would try again (up to 8 times).
I hooked it up to a keyboard shortcut and I’ll see the webcam light flash one or two times when I hit it, then know it’s good.
It wouldn’t be a ton of work to also have a popup with the qr value using zenity or something, maybe use the --question and pass it “copy $output to clipboard?”. You could have an --error if all the scan attempts failed.
Feel free to shoot me a pm if you want help.
Ya know I tried for years to make QR codes a thing. Now they’re a thing but everyone uses them wrong and it drives me absolutely nuts.
Should be very possible. Are you on Linux or Windows? Please write me again at the end of the week if I didn’t come back to you.
zbarimg decodes them on CLI.
For a bit of mindfuck check kdialog : Tool to show nice dialog boxes from shell scripts
Maybe the shell truly is enough BUT in some cases, say you want to help somebody who for some reason doesn’t want the terminal, you can bring the bare minimum of UI to give utility. My favorite example is the file picker e.g
kdialog --getopenfilename "*txt" | wc -las most CLI commands do support a filename as input.This is the KDE take on yad/zenity, no?
Looks like, I’m not familiar enough to spot obvious differences.
A comicbook viewer that is lightweight and supports .cbt well, without slowing to a crawl depspite it being a simple tar. Just needs to have pic-for-pic and webtoon (attach at bottom) modes.
Btw, why is the nonsensical format .cbz (zipping already compressed images) the default? And why is such a simple format always in electron GUI?
All things must become electron do not resist
Paint.net for Linux. Most of my experience with making art digitally came from paint.net and there’s not really a good alternative that doesn’t require me to recreate my workflow from the ground up (Krita).
Pinta is technically an option, but it’s missing many of the features that modern paint.net has.
For now, I have to make do with a VM to run it.
The new Gimp 3.0 is quite a lot better than the last versions for digital art. Maybe try it again?
GIMP is still missing a way to draw a circle without some convoluted method. It won’t work for my needs currently.
WinSCP is a Windows tool I use at work to send files between machines and I wish there was linux version. Programs like Dolphin are similar but I always manage to find something I can do in WinSCP that I can’t do in the linux alternatives
Edit: commenters just pointed out a bunch of potential solutions I wasn’t even aware of, so I’m probably just dumb please carry on
FAR manager (clone of Norton Commander) might be worth giving a look. Not a GUI, though, it’s TUI but responds to mouse.
On Debian,
sudo apt install far2land then runfar2l.BTW, to add ssh-agent authenticated scp connection, press F11, go to NetRocks and create connection. in the dialog you’ll need to select the protocol to
scpand then auth method in “protocol options”. you can edit an existing connection by going back to the connection “directory” and using F4 on the connection. Once you connect you can copy/move files back and forth.Along with scp it supports eg. smb, nfs and davs.
I’m not sure what WinSCP has what linux SCP hasn’t? I guess WinSCP is a GUI tool?
I do a lot of scp to send files between machines (even mac<->linux).
It’s a GUI tool that lets you see both filesystem side by side and drag and drop items to transfer them
Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?
I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.
Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/
Pursuing feature parity with Calibre would be a long journey, but we have to start somewhere
I wish there was a graphical or CLI option to add a Linux drive to etc/fstab.
gnome-disk-utility can. And PySDM.
Ah, I’m on KDE though.
GNOME
It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be. Extensions break with every update. There seems to be no long term plan with it.
Honestly, bring back unity.
It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be.
Wow, I feel the absolute opposite. Of all the UXes I have ever used, Gnome feels the most like they have a vision they’re committed to.
Not everyone likes it, and I get it’s very different to the WinUX that most others have settled on, but they absolutely have a vision, and they execute on that vision.
Extensions break with every update.
Sort of.
When a new Gnome version comes out, Gnome’s default behaviour is to mark extensions as unsupported. But in reality unless you’re upgrading to the first Beta releases, you’re unlikely to run into that, as extension developers will have marked their extensions as compatible long before the new Gnome version has hit stable and distros start pushing it.
You can disable the check if you like, but hypothetically that could lead to issues (say, if Gnome radically changes the calendar applet, and then you force enable an extension that tweaks the old applet). Gnome, probably wisely, goes with the more stable option.
If you just use the stable branch, you’re unlikely to ever get broken extensions.
They don’t actually break for the most part, the extension usually needs to be updated to say gnome 49 instead of 48, or you select ignore version on the extension site
They haven’t caused major changes that actually make them break in a while.
In case they do make major changes, it makes sense to not ignore version on default especially since that also effects older addons.
Also say an addon still works but gets abandoned, if they can’t bother to update just the version, it’s for the best that someone else comes along and takes over seeign that no one is working on that extension anymore, if it just kept working without someone bothering to even update the version? eventually when Gnome did get a major change, it would have no one working on it. So I think it kinda helps keeps extensions developed even if they technically work with a version change.
Gnome is like the t virus. Slowly trying to devour everything else and convert it to its side by force.