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.

  • DragonofKnowledge@lemmy.dbzer0.comdeleted by creatorEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    1. xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without “installing” them on the target device, which is great because you don’t have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.

    2. Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.

    3. wdfs - It’s an old project that is patched by this random github user. It’s the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Can rclone mount it transparently? I thought it is more like a one time copy / sync.

        What I mean by that is that the remote storage should look like a normal directory to the rest of the system and any reads and writes should go over the network directly to the remote without occupying local disk space.

        Also it seems to me that you have to write your credentials to the rclone config file, which I explicitly don’t want.

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • SkavarSharraddas@gehirneimer.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.

    For example: ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3 encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3. parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2} then copies each FLAC file’s metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the --xapply option).

    edit: copytags is https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that’s useful for anyone.

    • JamonBear@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      Parallel is great!

      Alternatively your second command can be written as: parallel "copytags {1} {2}" ::: *.flac :::+ *.mp3.

      Also it is nice to exec commands on multiple devices.

  • kaki@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • malfisya@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • klu9@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.)

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • med@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • med@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          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!

    • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I mean if it’s local network I’d use kde connect. It has a bazillion features, but sending files through the normal share button is one of them.

        • aubertlone@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 year ago

          KDE Connect also works on Mac & Windows.

          Definitely should use whatever software you’re comfortable with.

          But I seriously cannot recommend KDE Connect highly enough. It’s a great piece of software

      • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        Thanks… I had no idea this existed. I can now connect to the work remote desktop software with a single window perfectly integrated. This is incredibly helpful. Moreover I can now say I’m using Winapps in order to run Windows App. I guess now they can rename the remote desktop app again to Winapp to go full circle. Or maybe Winamp, just to confuse people. Or just App, to make it impossible to ever troubleshoot.

        EDIT: At any rate, this works really beautifully. It’s a bit of a PITA to set up if you’re having the VM via virt-manager but hell if it’s not as smooth as native.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.

      Keeping your system up to date usually involves invoking multiple package managers.

      As someone who worked build/rel before working OS security: if you’re intentionally breaking Single Source of Truth for software state management, then you’re in for a bad time. This can only delay the inevitable, but the technical debt comes at a high credit cost on top.

      Building an RPM is SO trivial to do, even without some LLM feeding it to you; and maintaining an existing one or rebuilding it to suit another distro or version even more trivial. Save your sanity and avoid out-of-band ‘package’ managers!

    • GFGJewbacca@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      I’d love your list of selfhosted stuff. I’m running a little server with TrueNAS Scale and it’s working really well.

        • Kangy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          I currently use Immich for photo backup and whatnot. Would you say PhotoPrism is better than Immich?

            • Kangy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              It does work really well. Backs up everything, the mobile app works. Though I am having trouble with it auto switching URL dependant on local or remote but I think that’s a me thing

        • GFGJewbacca@midwest.social
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.worksdeleted by creator
          0·
          1 year ago

          Is there any concern to be had with archive warrior regarding legality (like scraping piracy sites)?

          • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
            0·
            1 year ago

            Gemini is kinda a modernized version to the old Gopher protocol. Its purpose is to share hyper-linked text documents and files over a network - in the simplest way possible. It uses a simple markup language to create text documents with links, headings etc.

            Here is a FAQ

            Main differences with similar technologies are:

            • It is much, much easier to write hyper-linked documents than in HTML

            • a server is much much smaller and easier to set up than a web server serving HTML. It can easily and securely run on a small Raspberry Pi without special knowledge on server security.

            • in difference to gopher, it supports modern things like MIME and Unicode

            • There are clients for every platform including Android and iOS

            • also, there are Web gateways which allow to view stuff in a normal web browser

            • unlike Wikis, it is only concerned about distributing content, not modifying files. This means that the way to store and modify content can be matched to the use case: Write access to content can be via an NFS or Samba server, or via an SFTP client like WinSCP or Emacs.

            • the above means that it does not need user authentication

            • the protocol is text-centric and allows for distraction-free reading, which makes it ideal for self-hosted blogs or microblogs.

            Practically, for example, I use it to share vacation photos with family.

            Two more use cases that come first to my mind:

            • When I did my masters thesis, our lab with about 40 people had a HTTP page hosted on a file server that listed tools, data resources, software, and contact persons. That would be easier to do with Gemini because the markup is simpler. Also, today it would not be feasible to give every student write access to a wen server’s content because of the complexity of web servers, and the resulting security implications.

            • One time at work, we had a situation with a file server with many dozens of folders, and hundreds of documents. And because all the stuff had been growing kinda organically over many years, specific information was hard to find. A gemini server would have made it easy to organize and browse the content as collaboratively edited hypertext which serves as an index.

  • misterbzr@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    Ed Along with rlwrap it gives me a very fast and powerful workflow.

    Rlwrap It wraps around a program and gives it the ability to make use ofthe readline lib.

    Screen I use it when I boot without X. Gives a very fast workflow, being able to switch between programs.

    Mpv Multimedia powerhouse. Even works (pretty) well without X, with a framebuffer.

    Ecasound Cli daw. Have several scripts to make a recording on the fly or to be able to jam.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      ed (which is the more frugal, older brother of vi/vim) might indeed be a bit under-hyped. Which advantages does it have for you?

      Funny thing a while ago I had a small side-project for a data collection task in my PDA - a kind of minimal database to record daily stuff. So, a PDA has limited screen space and typing speed, and I tried to make the UI with as little typing as possible. And then it dawned to me that I was essentially replicating ed’s interface!

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      Fun thing by the way, one can use Emacs without X, and then it is like screen - only with an editing window at the outermost shell.

      And also, one can have the same space efficiency in text mode within X: Using the ratpoison or Stumpwm window managers.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.