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.
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.
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.
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
Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.
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!
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
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
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
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 inI 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.
If 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 😅 ).
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.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
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 😉
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.
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.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.
Any benefits to help notes stuff over obsidian or other?
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 love GPU Screen Recorder. It would have been much more difficult for me to switch to Linux if it didn’t exist
qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.
