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.
Every day?
- Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
- It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
- It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
- It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
- It’s stable
- It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
- Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
- Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (
rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux. - Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.
I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.
Hooray to Helix!
Interesting. Have you tried Stumpwm as well, and if so, how would you compare it to Herbstluftwm?
That’s one I don’t remember, but I probably wouldn’t have: the config file is in Lisp. Not only is Lisp something I never use anymore, which gives it a high cognitive load, but I don’t particularly care for Lisp-like syntax.
I’m certain there are several less common WMs that I haven’t tried. It’d probably be almost impossible to try every WM every written for X; it seems to be a common hobby project for folks interested in the X protocol.
I did say “almost every”, but perhaps even that was exaggeration. I do think I’ve tried the majority, though.
My differentiator for hlwm, the killer feature, shared by only two other projects that I’m aware of, is that hlwm has no configuration file. All configuration is performed through client commands. Every command interaction that can be performed by a user input - and much that can’t - can also be performed on the CLI. All (?) windowing events can also be monitored on the command line, and therefore scripted. The other two WMs that share at least some of these features are bspwm and river.
+1 for helix. I was new to linux and TUI editors. The vim tutor was a good intro to the concept of modal editors, but needed lsp and syntax highlighting. At the time I struggled a lot with configs, so neovim was out. Helix is just a fantastic, batteries included experience. Approachable for beginners, but feature rich for novices.
Edit: typo, grammer
- Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
For me it’s Perl’s rename, which of course cones in a variety of package names depending on the distro you use. In trying to find a link, I landed on this stack exchange answer that gives a great overview of how the tool works and the different packages available on different distros.
I have to bulk rename files every day, and using regex and the other features of Perl’s rename makes it so much easier to do.
FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.
even on windows, far better than the windows thing.
Last windows I used was 10,and I’ve always found it lacking in the screen capture arena. Full disclosure, I had no idea Flameshot had a windows version.
+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
Gnome has an extension called GSConnect which is their re-implementation of KDE Connect. I have in my tablet and phone, and it’s flawless.
But don’t change yet, give me until the weekend, I’ll spin Fedora with KDE in my laptop, and come back with my experience with FlameShot.
No need to change if that’s what you like and it ends up working.
Flameshot does require some tweaking to work anyway, so I’ll need check if it’s the same in KDE.
Right now https://jeena.github.io/recoder/ which I just released and here is why (copied from the website):
🎬 Why Recoder?
I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, and suddenly nothing worked right. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife’s iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.
😤 Too Much Fuss, Too Many Steps
Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.
My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.
🔄 Vertical Videos? Extra Pain
That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.
✨ Enter Recoder
I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.
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.
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.
100%, super impressed with Ocenaudio.
Try tenacity, it’s audacity fork, available on flathub. I have good experience with it.
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.
Someone may have mentioned this, but Syncthing changed my life.
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.
For doing more complex tasks with git, you could have a look at jujutsu. It is really good and provides most of git’s power in an conceptually much simpler CLI interface.
Thanks for the rec! The anonymous branches and working-copy-as-commit subsuming git stashes is intriguing. I’ll give it a closer look when I have a chance.
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.
Kde connect is great. You can get notifications on pc and read texts fully in messages. I also use it to file share and send 2fa codes.
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!
It’s the best.
Being able to communicate with apple users who are still clinging on to sms with a keyboard is great. I detest typing on touchscreens.
Logseq for notes and task tracking. It’s an open source alternative to obsidian. Life saver for tracking stuff at work.
I tried logseq to manage my notes at work and it just didn’t click with me.
I ended up using QOwnNotes https://www.qownnotes.org/ which might be not as polished, but it is very easy to start with. I don’t need nor want cloud/sync, and since this ones notes are plain .md files in a folder, it’s easy to back up (or edit) externally when needed. I like it for what it does.
Glad you found one that worked for you.
As far as I’m aware, Logseq also just uses .md files. I back those up regularly and I do use the cloud sync. The cloud sync lets me alternate use between my computer and my tablet for work. I could use just one device, but this was a significant advantage for me.
I also keep a separate log for personal work which I can add to via special shortcuts from my phone.
This. Thanks mate!
I agree
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.
Removed by mod
It’s the first time I see a Ban. This must be really bad…
Genocide supporting mod probably disliked the username.
That’s just speculation and accusation without proof. Let us not do this here.
I like game emulation and to manage my ROM library, I use Geode-GEM. It is simple but cusomizable app to manage your ROM based on console and emulator you have.
Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.
Yea this is great ty!
I used eapanso for a few years, but kept running in to issues with it spawning hundreds of versions of itself.
I really miss it though. Would you say it has matured?
I’ve used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven’t encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it’s daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.
Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.
Thanks for the feedback - It was a systemd issue. Something caused it to continue generating slices for espanso until the machine locked up - probably spawned with each terminal. It happened on out of date fedora install 36 (when 41 was out) with gnome on it.
Since then I’ve moved to a window manager for all my machines and would likely invoke it the same way - perhaps now it’s time to revisit!
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.
+1 for qalculate! I use the cli regularly for doing quick calculations while working in the terminal, it’s awesome!
why not
bcthen?Wasn’t aware of bc, it also looks great thanks!
