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.
Localsend is rad, super useful: https://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.
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.
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.
FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.
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.
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!
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.
Oh cool that’s good to know!
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.
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 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
I didn’t know that. Should I be using a fork instead? Name or link?
The name of the fork is: Tenacity https://tenacityaudio.org/
The developers of the fork have a detailed history explaining why the fork happened: https://tenacityaudio.org/docs/_content/Introduction_and_Motivation.html
Their mastodon account https://floss.social/@tenacity
I don’t know the details, I’m afraid. That’s just my memory.
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.
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.
Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.
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.
Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:
Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.
Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.
Fair point
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:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications
- in other distributions, these packages normally have the same names.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.