What lesser known free and open source software do you use daily to improve your life?

Definitely Syncthing.

Great app to sync my phone with my laptop.

It's also great for sharing files with friends/family. I gave a couple of friends a folder address, and we all just drop shit in there that we want the others to see.
- Are you self hosting?
I have an extensive syncthing set up but I find the mobile app a battery hungry
- Syncthing-fork which fixes battery drain issue and others as well. I'll just leave this here for your battery needs: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid/
And so many other things. I've also used it for "cloud saves" back/forth from my desktop to my steam deck on games that don't support them for various reasons. Dyson Sphere Program being one, because the files can get quite large.

Lemmy

(applause)

Fuck Lemmy. I'm only here because there is nothing better (yet)
- 668 comments in 1 month. It means you like the content of lemmy
- Why?

Firefox. Fuck chrome amiright

The funny thing is that when Chrome was first released, I was pretty excited that open source web engines were becoming more widely adopted.

Whatever one thinks of the current dominance of Chrome, I vastly prefer it to the time when Internet Explorer 6 had >90% market share. Open standards and FOSS technologies really are a winning cause even if the end products aren't always FOSS.

Kde connect on my phone (iphone) and laptop.

Recently installed Linux (Nobara to be specific) and I'm amazed this isn't talked about more. It's so useful! Windows is seriously missing out not having a program like this built in.
- Microsoft has released something similar for Windows. I believe it's called Windows connect for phone? But it does exist.
- They do actually. It's just Android only. I'm also on windows as well
- It does, it's called "your phone". In my experience it works more reliably as it uses the cloud, though you still need local WiFi for some reason, it also has screen mirroring, which KDE lacks. However, testy privacy and lacks a bunch of handy tools which KDE connect has
I love the idea of KDE connect, but its over featured and buggy.

Most times I'm trying to send a file, the computer I'm sending to is not visible which requires me to goto that machine and reset KDE Connect. I can't send more than one file or KDE Connect crashes and resetting it on Linux is a proper pain.

Plus I just want to use it to transfer files, yet there is no universal setting for the app, thus I have to turn on/off the features I want per device. And when KDE connect randomly forgets a device and I need to re-pair it I have to disable everything again.

At times Bluetooth file transfer is easier. But then I use it on my iPad, where the app can't work unless its open and in focus. But the alternative is a great big middle finger. Its fantastic and I will deal with the KDE jank.
I gave this a brief try but it seemed clunky in a gnome environment. Should I give it another go?

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else's money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That's just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

Thank you for the detailed reply and the explanations to (mostly) all the jargon :-)

Sweden is also doing a lot of deprecation of old telephony systems, those that I know of is that 2G and 3G are going away by 2025.

The less tech debt we pass onto future generations, the better.
- In the UK at least, the POTS (Plain Old ...) copper phone lines carry an electrical current as well as signals and can power the handset. There are certain guarantees about this so that in an emergency your phone will still work so you can dial 999 (our original emergency number) or 112. Our fire regulations require something like 30 minutes before things should start failing. In the real world, you get out immediately and use your mobile.
  
  We have an emergency alarm monitoring system used by businesses. Its generally known as "Red Care" which was a brand run by BT (British Telecom). You have a small device connected to a phone line (and powered by it) and it will monitor your fire detectors and building access control systems and a 24 hour manned monitoring centre will notify you in the event of an emergency. Nowadays, these devices will use your wifi and internet connection. Sometimes: old school is best.
I love Wireshark but I hate every day I have to open it up :D
- I know what you mean. You've already read a load of log files on behalf of an "engineer" who seems incapable of doing it themself. You've also eliminated DNS and NTP and laughed at suggestions relating to SFC /SCANNOW. Then you roll up your sleeves and plug into the Matrix ...
For the past week and a half of a networking fundamentals class I just finished Tuesday, we were learning the basics of Wireshark. So far the biggest problem I've found with it is that I couldn't find a version for Linux so I could use it on my laptop (couldn't get it to work on wine either).
- Which distro do you use? Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Gentoo have packages and I've no doubt that most others do too. On Linux you should not have to go to random websites and download stuff and faff around - use the built in distribution packages. If you are not sure what you've got try this at a command prompt and read the output:
  
  $ cat /etc/os-release
  
  As a last resort, you can run tcpdump on nearly anything and dump to .pcap, transfer that and then open that in Wireshark. Note that modern Windows has a OpenSSH client and server available so getting files around via scp is a doddle. Windows can even do NFS too and there is of course Samba - but CIFS/SMB can be tricksy.
- There's also a flatpak package for it. Wireshark On Flathub

I'll try to keep this to lesser known apps:

Catima (saves barcodes for gift cards, gym memberships, etc so you don't have to worry about the physical card)
Cofi (nice timer for active guidance through coffee brewing recipes)
10,000 Sentences (a language practicing app that doesn't have a mildly threatening owl 😉)
OSMAnd+ Mapillary, Overlay Maps, and 3D Features (seriously, the best. I only use Google maps to get around traffic these days since, unfortunately, Magic Earth doesn't work very well in my area)
Obtanium (as a gateway to lesser known software, no shipping to an app store required!)
RethinkDNS (an absolutely amazing piece of software that gives you fine-grained control of the domains your apps are talking to. A bit of a battery sync but it's been a game changer for me. On my GrapheneOS setup I use it in the Google sandbox to reduce the amount of data scraping servers my Google apps can talk to)

Cofi seems quite nice! I've already installed it as it seems much better than me using the standard Android stopwatch! Thank you for sharing!
10,000 Sentences is new to me!! I’ll add it to the list of apps that I’ll eventually use to learn a new language. 😏

LibreWolf, a privacy-optimized fork of Firefox
Mull, hardened Firefox for Android.
EteSync with self-hosted Etebase, an end-to-end encrypted solution for syncing calendars and contacts.
Molly, a hardened Signal fork for Android.
Accrescent, a secure, alternative app store for Android. Still in an early stage of development though.
UnifiedPush, a privacy-friendly notification system.
LibRedirect, a browser extension that automatically redirects you to private frontends for privacy invasive websites.
movie-web, a web app that let's you watch any movie/tv show for free. I highly recommend it.
Seal, an amazing Android app for downloading videos. YTDLnis is an alternative.
Cobalt downloader, a website that let's you download basically everything imaginable from the internet. All kinds of posts, photos and videos from various social media platforms and many other websites.
Linkwarden, a bookmark manager that can be self-hosted. Also check out Omnivore and wallabag.
ArchiveBox, a self-hosted app for archiving websites.
Tube Archivist, a self-hosted app for archiving YouTube videos/playlists/channels.

(I love downloading and archiving stuff lol)

great finds, is this list curated anywhere?
- No that was just off the top of my head
- It's right there lol
Is EteSync free? It seems to be offering trials and paid plans.
- That's for their cloud hosting. But the self-hosted variant is completely free.
How trustworthy is movie-web in terms of anonymity?
- Depends on you, if you don't trust their proxies, you can deploy your own. movie-web is basically just a search engine (with a pretty good and user friendly UI/UX in my opinion) that pulls content from other sources.
- Compared to torrent, i would say it's more "anonym" since you connect to a server instead of other pc.
- As with all these things: do it behind an always-on VPN on a dedicated device.
This is fantastic! Just started switching over to Librewolf and Mull. I discovered xBrowserSync in the process, which is a great way to sync browser bookmarks. https://www.xbrowsersync.org/
- If you only use Firefox-based browsers, you don't actually need the extension. You can simply enable Firefox Sync in the LibreWolf settings and it's end-to-end encrypted by default.

Joplin for notes, and Rclone drastically improves any cloud services.

Rclone is awesome! It lets you mount cloud storage to directories. It even supports encrypting any backend, so you can use cloud storage privately.

Gadgetbridge lets you connect and get data from supported smart or fitness watch without manufacturers app. Completely local.

Borg for backup. I'm really surprised it's not more widely known. It's an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

As an add-on (sort of) to Borg, I was told about Vorta yesterday and installed it to run scheduled, encrypted backups of my local machine to an external drive, but you can also ssh to a remote server if you wish. Works like a dream.
- Borg, Vorta, Star Trek is everywhere. Why did they name these for the evil guys? Could have named it "The Sisko", everyone know he is infallable.
restic is better.
- There's also Rustic. It uses the same repository format as restic. It already has some pretty neat features and since latest release a ton of built-in backends.
I use Kopia because it's cross platform (don't know much about Borg so perhaps if is too). Works really well with little interaction.

Paperless has taken me from various stacks of important documents strewn around my apartment, to having all of these things nicely organised and searchable.

Absolutely second this. Its been a game changer

pivpn for wireguard setup:

https://www.pivpn.io

newpipe and libretube for youtube:

And the entire Fossify app suite in Android:

https://www.fossify.org/

scrcpy for connecting to my Android screen from my laptop:

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

kde connect for general android/laptop connectivity:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

The Fossify apps do look pretty slick.

Shotcut helped me get rid of the heavy, bloated Premiere Pro.

Have you used Davinci Resolve? Curious how it compares to that.
- Resolve isn't open source. But Kdenlive might be a good alternative, it has more features than Shotcut.
- I haven't. Too much for my needs.

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

RiMusic basically saves me about 6 bucks a month from spotify subscription lol
Droid-Ify much better interface to F-Droid
Grayjay newpipe but with much better ui, worth nothing is developed by louis rousmann
NixOS not necessarily improve my daily life but i've been having a really good time trying it recently

Grayjay isn't open source
- Actually you're kinda right, their own license doesn't allow commercial redistribution (kinda similar with CC:NC) which make them not open source. I personally have no problems with that though.
- I think it is: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
- It is open source. But the license is not foss at the moment. They expresed their desire to make something that send revenue to creators

rclone - you can use cheapest cloud or s3 provider and sync encrypted data. Syncthing - sync across devices.

Logseq pkm note taking/outliner https://github.com/logseq/logseq Syncthing https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing Omnivore, Pocket alternative https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore Bypass Paywalls Clean browser addon https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

Open source AI models and tools like HuggingChat, Whisper

+1 for Whisper. Also, I use Piper for the reverse (text-to-speech).

Android

Audile like SoundHoud and Shazam but open source

Funkwhale a federated cloud community music streamer app

Innertune find new songs from YT Music

Open Video Editor edit videos

Heliboard successor of OpenBoard

Tubular successor of NewPipe

ZipXtract a zip extractor

Wger fitness app

Please just a reminder, consider contributing to these apps developers.

ShareX
Fan Control must have for windows 10/11. FOSS

Together with the ShareX extension (FF and Chromium), using with FileCoffee (setup script), a killer app

(FileCoffee isn't OpenSource, but i recommend it as one of the most private host and sharer (images, multimedia, video, documents, presentations, text.....), 100% free (account (free) optional), made in the EU (Netherland), best replacement of Imgur, which is a little less than spyware.)

I use also

PicView

Crow Translate

Portmaster

Double Commander

Proton VPN

And to turn off the bad habits and sniffings of Windows

Hellzerg Optimizer
- Cheers for recommendations.
  
  I use:
  
  proton VPN
  
  Portmaster
  
  Wintoys = Windows debloater (I also have another tool that has almost all debloaters for Windows)
  
  Xnviewer = image viewer (will be checking out the one you’ve suggested)
  
  CopyQ (Clipboard manager)
  
  Start11 (Not open source but a good tool for taskbar customisation)
  
  QuickLook (selecting a file or folder then pressing the space bar, you can view a document, video, folder, or song without having to open it)
  
  HotKeyP - App launcher (I turn off all start-up apps and use this tool to launch all the desired apps with a single hotkey)
  
  Flow Launcher - I can’t use Windows without Flow Launcher; it’s my universal search engine for everything.
~~Wow, it's not even in nixpkgs. Not very known at all.~~

Oh, it's a windows app. nvm

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Loop habit tracker app on android: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

They are in the google play store and f-droid i believe

OpenWrt
Syncthing
VeraCrypt
KeePassXC
GNUCash

I switched from Mint.com to the FOSS Money Manager EX for desktop a while ago and couldn't be happier.

I use DokuWiki for my personal wiki. Very easy to use.

I just moved to Notion but Dokuwiki was my go-to for well over a decade.
I've switched to BookStack. It's a different take on a wiki, but pretty good concept.

ddcutil is a daily driver for me, lightweight, hyper compatible, full monitor control. I primarily use it to lower brightness at night but also constantly switching inputs with simple macros so I can share multiple monitors with multiple systems.

Barrier: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Edit: Input Leap looks like a promising KVM replacement for Barrier, thanks for sharing!

To save people some times : Barrier seems to be an app meant to control multiple devices with the same mouse and keyboard. You need to install the software on all the machines for it to works.

You can then bind a keyboard shortcut to switch device. You can also bind it if you put your mouse at the and of a screen.

Take care you all
- To save them some more time: Wayland isn't supported yet, unfortunately.
I think Input Leap is a fork that works on Wayland
I love Barrier but need it to work with wayland.
- Check out Input Leap

KDE itinerary. Keeps track of all my train tickets, airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc... all offline. This is quite handy, especially for via rail in Canada as often internet can be sketchy when you need to bring up your tickets.

Immich is the must for self-hosting photos. Bye Google.

Immich is awesome but has flaws. My workflow has improved with syncthing instead.

Main flaw of immich is being container's deployable only which hurts for various reasons, and devs priority are different from mine (that's unacceptable/irony).

Jokes aside, immich is the best app out there to replace google photos.

But immich require containers and some basic features like sub-path support and in general folder/albums recognition is not there and not really planned clearly for the future.

My favourite program is CherryTree notes. It's a hierarchical notes app which supports hyperlinking between nodes and to external files, URLs etc. I pretty much use it to organise my whole life! You can have it encrypted and make your own theme as well.

Stremio. A free Netflix-like UX for streaming bittorrents.

movie-web is another cool web app for streaming movies/tv shows
- That link is a 404

Kotatsu and Mira, both on F-Droid. Kotatsu makes it easier to read manga without a subscription and you can add your own DRM-free manga. Mira is similar but adds anime and K-drama streaming as an option as well.

Even though I am subbed to Crunchyroll, having an option to watch if I have to cancel to save money, that's very helpful.

Recently, UnifiedPush where I can (currently just Megalodon for Mastodon sadly) as an alternative to using Google's push notifications.

linux

I like the energy, but this doesn't qualify as "lesser known"
- okay, reroll. uhh... firefox?

Secure file sending: croc
Dedjplication: Czkawka
Sorting tool: Phockup
OCR: OCRmyPDF

Next cloud and only office. Bye bye google drive

Jellyfin bye bye Plex and Netflix

How are you hosting nextcloud with only office? I’ve tried multiple times to get Only Office working with Nextcloud, and while I can get Nextcloud up and running, Only Office never properly works for me. It always weirdly edit locks files and doesn’t allow basic functionality.

Android

Podcini
deku sms
carrion
linksheet
florisboard beta
gptassist
grayjay
[mastodon, lemmy, peertube] redirect
markor
german only: kleine wettervorschau, öffi
saveto... + shelter/island
wormhole, localsend: sending files over internet or local wifi (when creating a hotspot it works without wifi too)

Is it just me that can't get carrion to work? I download the databases, set it not to silence unverified calls (cause every call seems to be unverified) and I still miss all my calls cause it silences everything.
- It doesnt silence calls for me...
Podcini looks very similar to AntennaPod, what are the differences?

Is DekuSMS similar to Silence?

Could you share a link for wormhole?
- Podcini is a drastically modernized fork of it.
  
  DekuSMS is the same princible but updated, Silence is not maintained and should not be used.
  
  https://gitlab.com/lukas-heiligenbrunner/wormhole

I use the Unison file sync tool to keep backups of all my important files on flash drives and servers. For mobile devices I do use Syncthing because MTP is painfully slow and taking the SD card out of the device to plug it in is too much of a hassle, but I would rather use Unison.

Why do you prefer it over syncthing?
- With Unison syncing is a manual process, I run it and it tells me what's changed on each side and I can make changes as appropriate. Syncthing is a bit too automatic for my taste and its conflict resolution is a bit more involved.

I got a Brother embroidery machine only to find that making anything other than the most basic patterns required a very pricey proprietary program. Thankfully I found Ink/Stitch, an open source plug-in for InkScape. It's still a little rough around the edges, but after getting used to its foibles, it's very capable with the right amount of elbow grease. The main dev is active and very helpful in their issues.

Hammerspoon. Pretty necessary Mac software to make it work the way you want.

SC-Controller, although it seems to have been abandoned.

Gpodder-adaptive

I live and die by Simplenote. It's one of the apps I'm in multiple times per day every day of my life.

https://github.com/nomacs/nomacs

QGIS

Powerful mapping and geographic analysis software.

GraphCalc

I've tried other calculators & just keep coming back to this one.

ChimeraOS. If you have a non-steam gamerdeck, I recommend backing up the Windows 11 install and replacing it with this outright. It's based on the Steam Deck OS and makes the process of selecting a game much faster because Windows 11 is bloated as shit.

I used to use [a Windows 3.1 shrink-wrapped software package] that offered notepads and appointment calendars. Then I switched to Linux. That was 16 years ago. To take the place of the Windows application, I had to write my own list-maker from scratch. Today, there's a new python3-pyqt5 version (under GNU General Public License) of my script for Linux and Windows desktops to help maintain the equivalent of index-card files. Obviously this is not something you'd use just to be like everybody else. I use it because I don't really know how others handle their everyday lists and I can't think of an easier way. If you, too, suspect it ought to be easier than it is, it may be. Please look at Tonto2. Thanks.

Ete-Sync

Do you self-host Etebase?
- Yup :)
Isn't it unmaintained?
- Development isn't super active, but there's still occasional commits to update dependencies and what not. If no security vulnerability has been discovered it doesn't need more than that since it works given the existing feature set.

It's niche as hell, but Syncplay lets you sync up the playback of video files through VLC or MPV player as long as everyone has the same video file stored locally. Better quality then steaming and works on low bandwidth connections.

uget download manager, aves mobile image viewer

coffee keeps display awake

Space sniffer. Best and most underrated program to help clear your computer storage from random shit

Is space sniffer FOSS?

I thought it was closed source. In a similar vein, WizTree is a modern version of space sniffer. It's significantly quicker.
- Ah shit I thought the title was free or open source 🤦‍♂️

I'm looking for an alterntive to this for windows. If anyone knows people lemme know.

Firefox's inbuilt reader would cut some of the crap
- It’s not just a reader for web browsers; you select any text and press the hotkeys, and it takes you to a different window where you can read without any distractions.
  
  Here is a preview of it (First app): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPPTZ2nX1C0&t=20s