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.
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.
this is more a selfhosted thing but i adore it: https://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.
https://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:
https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe
looks promising and it SHOULD support bank connection.
Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.
Awesome TOTP app that can import your Aegis Authenticator database, which then you can keep in sync with your phone and desktop.
Super handy.
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.
Do i understand correctly that you can use aegis an your phone and also the same keS with this on a computer desktop?
Yep
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!
I really like
units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in' 6 ft + 2.8031496 inIf you don’t want to bother with a CLI app and specific syntax to follow, there’s rofi-calc, it’s super fast to load since it’s just rofi and it understands natural language. When I stumbled upon it I found the idea of a calculator that understands you when you type “30 feet in mm” or “10 usd in euros” completely mindblowing. Props to qalc for making it possible
I mean the syntax for gnu units is literally the same unit expression used in math. m^2, cm, m/s etc. the ft;in looks weird because it’s two units combined.
Your example in it would be
units 30ft mm, use-tfor terse results that’s just the final value.It’s definitely usable if you know the right abbreviations to use, and it seems a lot more concise which much be convenient if you’re used to the syntax! But I find natural language also has a lot of advantages, especially for converting units you don’t see often and have no clue how to abbreviate, like when watching videos that give you measurements in weird units. Plus my brain tends to freeze when something looks like maths, so natural language is easier to use for me (even though I know it’s THE EXACT SAME calculation 😅 ).
Again, you can type feet instead of ft and it’ll work. You can write ‘feet per second’ instead of ‘ft/s’ and it’ll work. Natural language has its benefits but when you have a very simple syntax model then there’s less chances of it making a mistake.
oh I thought it would work only with the official abbreviations, it’s nice to know!
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.
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
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.
+1 Any chance you got it working with multiple monitors on kde Wayland? That’s seriously my single biggest issue right now
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
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.
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
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.
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.
GitHub Application Manager (GAM): https://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.Aside from ones listed here:
System Tools
- WinApps - Run Windows applications seamlessly integrated into your Linux desktop environment, like native including Adobe products.
- Waydroid - Run Android applications in a container on Linux with full hardware access.
- Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.
- AM (AppImage Manager) - Easy AppImage management for installing, updating, and organizing portable applications.
- Starship - Fast, customizable cross-platform shell prompt with Git integration and status indicators.
- InShellisense - IDE-style IntelliSense autocomplete and suggestions for your terminal.
- Tabby - Modern terminal emulator with tabs, split panes, and extensive customization options.
- Zeit - Qt GUI frontend for scheduling tasks using at and crontab utilities.
- KWin Minimize2Tray - KDE extension that allows minimizing windows to the system tray instead of taskbar.
- Flameshot - Feature-rich screenshot tool with built-in annotation and editing capabilities.
- CopyQ - Advanced clipboard manager with searchable history and custom scripting support.
- Safing Portmaster - Free open-source application firewall with per-app network control, DNS-over-TLS, and system-wide ad/tracker blocking.
Productivity Tools
- DSNote - Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation app for note-taking.
- NAPS2 - User-friendly document scanning application with OCR and PDF creation capabilities.
- Morphosis - Simple document converter supporting PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX and more formats.
- Obsidian - Powerful knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph visualization.
- BeeRef - Minimalist reference image viewer designed for artists and designers.
Media & Entertainment
- Popcorn Time - Stream movies and TV shows via torrent with built-in media player.
- Nicotine+ - Modern Soulseek P2P client for sharing and discovering music files.
- XnView - Versatile image viewer, organizer, and converter supporting hundreds of formats.
Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.
I invented WinApps. http://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… 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.
Thanks for your baby! It’s great.
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
- FreshRSS - Self-hosted RSS feed aggregator with multi-user support, mobile API, and custom tags.
- AudioBookShelf - Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with mobile apps and progress syncing across devices.
- PhotoPrism - AI-powered photo management platform with facial recognition, geo-tagging, and automatic organization.
- Jellyfin - Free media server for streaming movies, TV shows, music, and photos with no licensing restrictions.
- Karakeep - Personal data backup and synchronization tool for maintaining local copies of online content. AI tagging, lists, easy to use interface. Really good stuff, especially combined with a browser plugin.
Productivity, Documents & Task Management
- Vikunja - Task management app with Kanban boards, Gantt charts, multiple views, and team collaboration features.
- Memos - Self-hosted memo hub for capturing and sharing thoughts with markdown support.
- Docker Obsidian - Containerized version of Obsidian knowledge management app for browser access.
- Stirling PDF - Comprehensive PDF manipulation tool with 50+ operations including merge, split, convert, and OCR.
- Paperless-ngx - Document management system with OCR, tagging, and full-text search capabilities.
- LanguageTool - Grammar and spell checking service with support for multiple languages and integration APIs.
Good Deeds
- Archive Team Warrior - Docker container for contributing computing power to internet archiving projects.
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
You could give a try to running a gemini server like agate. It is text + file serving protocol similar to gopher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi
https://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:
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It is much, much easier to write hyper-linked documents than in HTML
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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.
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in difference to gopher, it supports modern things like MIME and Unicode
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There are clients for every platform including Android and iOS
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also, there are Web gateways which allow to view stuff in a normal web browser
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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.
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the above means that it does not need user authentication
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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:
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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.
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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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Morphosis & DSNote
Thanks, upvoting for those two.
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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 😉
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.
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
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.
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.
