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.
Please when sharing wikipedia links remove the m. as the browser will decide if it wants the mobile version anyway. Thanks!
Someone may have mentioned this, but Syncthing changed my life.
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 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 inAwesome TOTP app that can import your Aegis Authenticator database, which then you can keep in sync with your phone and desktop.
Super handy.
Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I’ve ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.
qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.
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!
It doesn’t require a github repo, you can use any personal git repository. I personally have set it up with a selfhosted gitea instance. I also assume you could setup a git repo on the device.
