this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • 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.

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[–] Everyday0764@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago

this is more a selfhosted thing but i adore it: https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet

you can write your own Javascript functions (will be lua in the near future) and use them directly in the editor.

[–] funkyB@feddit.org 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I don't know if it has been already mentioned but I love bat a lot. It's like the cat command but with colors and line numbers. Makes things a little bit easier.

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

https://actualbudget.org/

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

It's software for budgeting. You can run it entirely local, or set it up as a server. It stores everything in an SQLite dB, let's you import and export CSV files, and it gives you great options for querying and seeing reports on your financial records.

I've got a handful of accounts, so I set up a small python utility to parse the CSVs my banks give me to something actually sensible and readable for Actual. I do that once a month, add a reconciliation entry here and there, and it's all kept on sync very well.

I have one morbid report titled "money pissed down the landlord drain", and it's far higher than I'd like to be. But it's got close to every penny I've ever spent on that bullshit in one place.

[–] Everyday0764@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago

there is also:

https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe

looks promising and it SHOULD support bank connection.

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

OTPClient

Awesome TOTP app that can import your Aegis Authenticator database, which then you can keep in sync with your phone and desktop.

Super handy.

[–] FireIced@lemmy.super.ynh.fr 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Running a TOTP app on desktop seems like a potential security issue. Get a malware on your desktop and you're fucked

I believe the reason we use mobile devices is that they have better isolation and are generally less vulnerable

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 1 points 13 hours ago

You can install it via flatpak and use selinux as well if you need. You can also encrypt and password protect the database, which can also be held in your keyring.

As with any app its up to you to decide and mitigate any perceived risks.

[–] polle@feddit.org 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Do i understand correctly that you can use aegis an your phone and also the same keS with this on a computer desktop?

[–] nayminlwin@lemmy.ml 9 points 22 hours ago

https://ledger-cli.org/

Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 dotfiles folder, which contains home, etc and usr subfolders. I put all my configs in it (dotfiles, themes, custom keyboard layouts, etc) in the relevant subfolders, then with Stow I symlink dotfiles/home to /home/username, dotfiles/etc to /etc and dotfiles/usr to /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 a personal folder which contains Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc, all symlinked to /home/username/Documents and 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.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Have you used chezmoi in the past? Do you know how it compares to gnu stow?

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

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!

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.

[–] Everyday0764@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago

even on windows, far better than the windows thing.

[–] bmancer@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

+1 Any chance you got it working with multiple monitors on kde Wayland? That's seriously my single biggest issue right now

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago

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

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bmancer@lemm.ee 1 points 15 hours ago

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

[–] floatingpin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 36 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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 in
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

I also like it very much. I hope they make a library for it soon, I can't wait to use it to make unit aware calculators.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you don't want to bother with a CLI app and specific syntax to follow, there's rofi-calc, it's super fast to load since it's just rofi and it understands natural language. When I stumbled upon it I found the idea of a calculator that understands you when you type "30 feet in mm" or "10 usd in euros" completely mindblowing. Props to qalc for making it possible

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean the syntax for gnu units is literally the same unit expression used in math. m^2, cm, m/s etc. the ft;in looks weird because it's two units combined.

Your example in it would be units 30ft mm , use -t for terse results that's just the final value.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's definitely usable if you know the right abbreviations to use, and it seems a lot more concise which much be convenient if you're used to the syntax! But I find natural language also has a lot of advantages, especially for converting units you don't see often and have no clue how to abbreviate, like when watching videos that give you measurements in weird units. Plus my brain tends to freeze when something looks like maths, so natural language is easier to use for me (even though I know it's THE EXACT SAME calculation 😅 ).

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Again, you can type feet instead of ft and it'll work. You can write 'feet per second' instead of 'ft/s' and it'll work. Natural language has its benefits but when you have a very simple syntax model then there's less chances of it making a mistake.

[–] rayhem@lemm.ee 13 points 1 day ago

units is 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.

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[–] RedSnt@feddit.dk 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Boxbuddy makes it incredibly easy to use distrobox, a great way to install software that might not be available for your distro, but is available on another distro, or just a way to keep a piece of software in a stable state (like DaVinci Resolve with davincibox).

If you use a "gaming distro", I'm sure you've seen Input Remapper. It's a neat utility that can create macros for all your peripherals or rebind keys as you like. Want to bind you controller so it works like a mouse? Possible. Want to macro key pressed by using the forward button on your mouse? Possible.

Did you leave Foobar2000 behind when you switched to Linux? Why not give Fooyin a try. It's a relatively new audio player with aspirations of becoming just as configurable as FB2K. For me replaygain is quite important, and while some other FOSS audio players support it, not many has replaygain generation. And Fooyin does. While also being just as easy to set up and use as Foobar. Worth a look.

[–] blayd@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

A good Foobar alternative is Deadbeef music player, another one with modular design, replaygain, and lots more. Built on GTK

[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Redshift, it changes the brightness/color on the display bluer closer to midday and redder at night. Twilight is a similar app on android.

[–] iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

KDE includes now a default option in their settings to do this. It's in the Colors & Themes > Night Light menu.

[–] petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 18 hours ago

Gnome too, btw 😉

[–] piranhaphish@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 11 points 1 day ago

GitHub Application Manager (GAM): https://github.com/fmstrat/gam

It's like apt for installing directly from Github releases. A plug, sure, but I still use it regularly for things like FreeCAD, Cura, OrcaSlicer, and so on.

[–] Gelik@feddit.dk 18 points 1 day ago

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.

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