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.
FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.
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.
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 inunitsis 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
qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.
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.
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 would say Rymdport (https://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?
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.
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.
The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server on a headless OS.
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.
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.
AutoKey automation / word expander tool.
- I reconfigure
ALT + i/j/k/lto ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts. - It expands abbreviations of one’s choice like “gCo” to
git commit -m ' - One can assign scripts to abbreviations and hotkeys. E.g., when I press
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.- I reconfigure
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 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.
Can you expand on these later when you have time?
Check out earlybird as an alternative to trufflehog.
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.
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.
