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’m trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!
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.
UpNote. I use it like a combination of the gollum wiki described by OP, but I just put everything in there. I have watch and reading lists for things I want to check out, writing projects, notes for TTRPG games, I keep extensive notes on healthcare-related stuff, and so on. I like UpNote because it’s lightweight, has windows, linux, and android apps, and because it has a one-time $25 lifetime membership that does free syncing forever instead of a monthly subscription like most other things seem to. I’ve tried OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian, Joplin, AnyType, and a bunch of others and didn’t like them for various reasons, but UpNote is both pretty small and also has a pretty full-featured editor that can do rich text, all kinds of formatting, media files, etc.
The only thing I’ve run into that UpNote wasn’t ideal for is I started writing a novel a couple months ago and managing the structure and notes and all that got a little unwieldy so I picked up Scrivener. Still wish they had an updated linux client or there was some good, complete, feature-rich linux-native equivalent, but it runs pretty good under wine, so.
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.
Qalc. Best calculator ever hands down
Sorry to thread jack. One little app I miss from Windows is a simple screengrab annotator? Wondering if people have anything to recommend.
Eg to circle some on screen text, add an arrow and maybe add some of my own text.
I cant get my Loigtech KB to screen grab, so I just use the Screengrab app in Mint, which is fine but zero annotation abilities.
I have tried Flameshot but it is a shitshow and doesn’t work properly and is unstable (for me) and doesn’t allow me to put it in the clipboard and paste in say Signal.
I don’t have issues you are describing with flameshot, however a clipboard manager greatly enhanced the copy-ability between apps and certain websites (looking at you JIRA and Slack), including when the source is flameshot.
Greenshot GPL3
…but also Linux.
I think that is a signal limitation not a flameshot one.
Nah, I’ve had no issues pasting from the clipboard into signal, from either the Mint screenshot tool or Flameshot. Not sure what issue the top commenter is having…
digiKam was the first Linux application I encountered that was so polished and useful for what it does that I tried to shoe-horn it into any and every DE I experimented with, as well as installing it onto my windows machines under KDE4Win.
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’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 currently use Immich for photo backup and whatnot. Would you say PhotoPrism is better than Immich?
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.
Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/
Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.
Logseq for notes and task tracking. It’s an open source alternative to obsidian. Life saver for tracking stuff at work.
This. Thanks mate!
I started on Logseq, because I’m a contributing open source advocate. I fully intended to stay with Logseq.
However, it seems to indent everything in the markdown including headings, bullet points and so on. When one loads a document into a markdown editor, one ends up removing all these indents before the document becomes ‘valid’. They’ve made some other unusual design choices that mean the markdown doesn’t read very well in plain text. I used Logseq for a year.
There’s also a difficulty for me with getting help. For some reason Logseq help community seems to be based around the Discuss (sp?). It’s not easy to read because the lines are very short as it’s a messaging platform. The community is very very active though.
I eventually got frustrated with trying to debug my Markdown outside Logseq, and went looking for another vehicle.
Rather distressed, I installed Obsidian. It’s been designed with a more logical approach. To link to a heading in another document, the document is linked in a Wiki-like way (if you’ve chosen that format) with the heading separated by a hash symbol; in Logseq you get an unintelligible UUID plus all that indenting.
There’s a lot of help within the Obsidian community but some of it is locked down in medium paid-for content. However, the hundreds of Obsidian YouTube channels and videos, obsidianrocks and obsidian.md sites are very well authored. AI searches augment the rest, TBF I don’t really use Google proxies anymore.
Even though I’m a personal user, it’s worth it to me to buy a commercial licence to show my appreciation for the work that the two(?) developers have put in.
The plugins use the published API and are all (?) open source AFAICT.
Most of the issues I have with Obsidian are just related to my workflow. I think that there are probably plugins that will solve them.
I don’t expect to be looking for another note-taking app anytime soon and it’s been over a year since I started with Obsidian. Understanding templates opened my world up enormously. I haven’t started data-mining in any meaningful sense yet.
Just my tuppence.
I agree
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.
solaar one of the best gui based apps for mouse settings
KDE Connect
I’ve used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I’m sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone’s lockscreen to pause the music.)
I’m starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.
There’s more too I need to explore.
(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a ‘device unreachable’ error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)
I’ve been using that a lot, but I wish there was a “disconnect” on the phone’s app, rather than keeping a persistent connection.
I just introduced my partner to this a week ago. Trying to slowly convert him into a Linux user haha. It works with Windows 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.
Upvoted for FreeTube.
What do you use to send YouTube links to FreeTube? Personally I’m using LibRedirect https://libredirect.github.io/
I don’t. I just copy the link and enter it in FreeTube directly.
