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 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 inThis looks amazing and I need to have it in my life. Thank you so much for sharing
Cool! Though I’ll probably still use krunner for this
qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server.
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
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.
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.
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’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 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.
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.
Well, my main reason to use Zim Wiki and Gollum is that all the information stays on my computers -no sync service is needed, I sync via git + ssh to a Raspberry Pi that runs in my home. And this is a critical requirement for me since as a result of many experiences, my trust in commercial companies that collect data to respect data privacy has reached zero.
The differences between Zim and Gollum are gradual: Zim is tailored as a Desktop Wiki, so each page is already in editing mode which is slightly quicker, while Gollum is more like a classical server-based wiki, which is normally accessed over the browser (but by default, without user authentication). The difference is a bit blurry since both just modify a git repo, and Gollum can be run in localhost, so it is good for capturing changes on a laptop while on the road, and syncing them later. A further difference is that Zim is a but better for the “quick but not (yet) organized” style of work, while Gollum is better for a designed and maintained structure.
Both can capture media files and support different kinds of markup, while always storing in plain text. Gollum can also handle well things like PDFs which are displayed in the browser, and supports syntax highlighthing in many programming langages, which makes it nice for programming projects - it is perfect for writing outlines and documentation of software, and I often work by writing documentation first.
It could be helpful if you explain what they do and how they relate to your computing needs. For example, I have been using Linux for over 25 years, and the only name in yor list which I have an idea about what it does is Deja Dup (personally, I use tar for backups, in a simple incremental setup).
I know Strawberry, because I use it too. It’s a music player, forked from Clementine years ago. I find it the best for my use case, as it can handle library by tags, do folder view for separate locations, do tag editing, lyrics and art download, etc. Can highly recommend!
