What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
Mine is kdeconnect which does what local send does plus so much more.
- using phone to control laptop
- getting phone notifications send to your pc
- can browse phone's storage directly from pc
- find my phone function
Kde connect is great, iv always thought about using it but never got round to it as im current using a wm instead of a desktop environment. If i was to switch to a desktop environment kde would be my first choice as it has so many features.
I've had issues with it for file sharing, so far that I'm sticking to LocalSend, but I really need to explore KDEConnect further, as I haven't explored the rest of its features.
GSConnect works great for GNOME too.
There's also a still in-development rival for GNOME, Valent. And it's a native program and not just a shell extension. I prefer it, and maybe it even has more features.
I found it to be more than I needed. I still have it installed, but use localsend more often
Lemmy
It's been a bit over a year for me, otherwise this would be the answer.
Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I've tried before has really worked for me.
Bitwarden or KeePassXC is my favorite too :)
Hello fellow bitwarden user! I also self-host my server with vaultwarden
Vaultwarden is what really makes this solution great!
If you're in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you're doing and click that link.
Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it's so much better than your standard internet citation generators.
Don't forget to share the intel with your classmates!
Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs... with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.
I wish i knew about this during my degree
it's the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there's a great open source version of the tool.
This, logseq, and PKM in general for me. I guess it's not really "can't live without" because I hardly know where to start, but the possibilities for organizing my mess of a brain are enticing.
It would probably help to have a project to work on and actually use the things rather than diving too deep into PKM conceptually... Really wish I knew about them in school, though.
It's actually recommended by a lot of profs now where I am, which is really nice
They overhauled the UI recently and it looks nice and modern too
Is Desmos open source?
Apparently so! https://github.com/desmosinc
Where's the source code for the first one?
On GitHub
Jellyfin and the .arr suite.
It’s absolutely incredible and I am so greatful to anyone with the skillset and dedication to develop and maintain things like these.
Currently playing with Proxmox and HomeAssistant too.
Hat of to all of you legends involved in FOSS
Same. I'm still primarily a Plex user for the player (it's just easier for sharing libraries with everyone) but I love the arr stuff. Just got readarr setup for audio books and audiobookshelf for the player which is really nice.
Probably my favorite feature of the arr suite is in Radarr and list subscribing. I've got mine connected to some good letterboxd lists along with things like tmdb popular to keep my library up to date with recent stuff. Also there's some podcasts I listen to like The Rewatchables. I just subscribe to the lists of movies on letterboxd and I can easily keep up with the podcast.
Make sure you get a reputable VPN to avoid issues with any "questionably acquired" content.
HomeAssistant, it's such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.
It's just an amazing piece of software.
My favorite thing I've done with hass is put a color-changing light bulb by my front door. It's connected to the weather forecast. I know what the weather will be at a glance without a website or going outside. (Where I live, it's not always obvious when I'm gonna get rained on.)
Truely a nice one. The community around it is quite cool as well.
Oh nice I was wondering if there was like an all in one place to put my shitty automations. I’ve been oddly fixated on automating my blinds.
Pretty cool, I use it as well. Works with basically everything thanks to the big community.
I just wish it allowed for proper programming of the automations. I despise the YAML-as-code hack they are using. I get it, it's much easier to offer a GUI editor for such a format. It feels very limited and cumbersome compared to regular programming though.
Has anyone done any greenhouse automation with hass? I don't know where to start.
Yeah, as far as FOSS I almost actually can't live without: HomeAssistant controls my spring pump to the cistern so that the pipes don't freeze.
Jellyfin. Use it daily. Dropping more and more atreamjnf services, it's been awesome.
Honorable mentioned to Revanced.
What apps do you use revanced for? Maybe it's just me but the two apps I use haven't had new revanced versions in 6+ months.
YouTube, mostly. Twitch.
I just installed Jellyfin on my Raspi 4 and I'm not happy. It's so laggy and slow I can barely use it. What is your setup?
A Raspberry PI should be fine for direct play, but it doesn't really have the processing power to transcode. Check to see which mode you're in.
If you want the ability to live transcode, you'd probably have better luck with an old laptop or PC with a dedicated GPU (Even the lowest end ones have the same video encoding hardware in each generation, I use a GTX 1050).
on a pi you'll have to transcode the media for Direct Play beforehand. Pretty much anything that's not in h264 aac format will lag
Your pi is the problem if you are trying to playback incompatible H.265 content or stuff with incompatible subtitles like SSA-subtitles in anime.
My advice (if you can) get a mini-pc like a NUC (used or new) and do everything you did on the Pi.
Besides that, watch tutorials on how to set it up properly or take your time to get docker to know. With docker you'll just need to set up video permissions and the rest is taken care of by the container.Not a raspi, but I had similar issues on my opensuse HTPC which turned it to be related to issues with (or missing) media codecs in Firefox.
After (re)installing all of them, it worked like a charm.
I have Jellyfin running in a container on my little home server. I've never tried it on a RaspPi so I can't really speak to its performance there.
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
- Open source client and server.
- Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
- Cross-platform feature parity.
- Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
- Easy notes syncing.
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
- Ability to publish notes.
- Decent UX.
Lol love the use of references. So glad you posted this. Looks fantastic.
I am using Logseq and the organization is basically the only thing not working for me. I will try this out.
I really tried making Logseq work for me but even if they added some kind of organization/hierarchy, I still had performance issues with my limited notes (just testing things, didn't want to go all the way in), and various copy/paste drag and drop UX issues that made the experience frustrating.
I started using Zettlr after Obsidian and i am pretty happy with it (besides one or two little things). I'll also look into Notesnook
Currently im using standard note but id love to give this a try. I first heard of it from techlore
Can you self host this yet?
Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without
Seconding this. Legitimately better than Google photos in a lot of ways, even if you don't care about the data ownership aspect. If you've ever been annoyed at how Google Photos handles face detection / grouping, you'll love Immich.
Thirded. Immich has no right to be as good as it is after such a short time. Completely took down my google photos, finally, and I still have face recognition, word search and automatic backup from my phone.
PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.
It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!
And if you haven't used it in a while, we recently made a blog post giving a rundown of the changes leading up to our most recent major release.
Mine will probably be Bottles.
The team behind that application did a fantastic job. Wine was due for something much more user friendly like this. And integration with Proton, allowing 3D acceleration is the cherry on top.
Great choice, i prefer bottles over wine for that reason
Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.And here I thought this is running with the Android subsystem in a limited environment utilizung "plugins" as the packages.
That sounds so coolOh my god, that's amazing. I'm getting on something that can be rooted posthaste, but in the meanwhile...
Not to mention that with proot, you can even run kernels greater than that native to your phone.
anlinux feels like junest but configured it with gui and vnc , I might use it someday.
That sounds fucking awesome
Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:
Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)
cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)
VLC (media player that plays almost everything)
media player that plays almost everything
What doesn't it play?
I discovered that VLC isn't so good at playing .flv files. This are video files that are saved in the Adobe Flash Video container format. I have some episodes from cartoon series which I downloaded years ago. Sometimes there are no playback issues with VLC, but sometimes the audio track is delayed. For this reason I have installed IINA, but I like VLC's user interface better.
The Stargate SG-1 DVDs for some reason. All others I tried work fine.
Banjo
It's not good at displaying anime fansubs if they have complex typesetting. I have to use MPC-HC + madVR. Sadly those fansub styles are a dying breed...
Corrupted files
I didn't know cobalt.tools was OSS. cool!
- URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
- PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.
I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.
+1 for urlcheck and add Rethink firewall for me
This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
Well we can't live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can't live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?
I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it... and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too...so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.
Loved TA as a kid. Played it for countless hours on GameSpy and EA Zone. Will definitely give this a try, thank you!
Sweet! For others coming by, here's the official trailer:
- Voyager --> feddit for android
- Fossify --> essential apps for android
- syncthing -- > more use cases than i thought
- paperlessngx --> finally going digital
- obtainium --> get android apps directly from their github
I am still learning and try to replace my stuff with open soure software
Some good recommendations. Im using voyager now to type this :P syncthing is so versatile. I have my devices sync my rom save files so i can pick up and play retro games and carry on from the same place across devices.
+1 for Fossify, great set of apps.
Aegis as an authentication App
Aves as gallery
Proxmox bare metal hypervisor for homeserver
try out Gallery (yes, it's really called just "Gallery"), I've found it to be the best one out there, even better then aves
Thx for the tipp just installed it for testing
Ill look into the first 2, I've never heard of them. Proxmox has always interested me, once i get myself a home server i was going to try it out.
Just installed proxmox on a 10+ year old ThinkPad with an i5 and home assistant runs much quicker now
You can run proxmox in a VM and have it run VMs to try it out. It also works on standard desktop hardware which is what I running it on.
Used Aegis for Years but manual backups became tedious.
Ente auth is my new one for anyone who wants E2E Sync!
I didn't discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn't budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I've gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we're sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
As a GIS person all I can is ...fuck yeah. I'm for better or worse deeply embedded in the ESRI world but I've started dabbling in FOSS GIS software and honestly it's all damn good. I don't understand how ESRI charges what they do. Also, FME is amazing if you haven't tried it yet (not free or open source) but awesome for quick visual development and data ETL.
We've been using QGIS at my company for almost 8 years at this point and I really love it. The python integration and deep plugin repository render it head and shoulders above ESRI. Although I admit for enterprise solutions many will still require the turn-key solutions esri offer.
I use this for architecture and it's saved me so much time
Not discovered last year but ffmpeg.Crazy how many tools it can replace and how many usecase it has
What exactly is FFMPEG an alternative to? I keep hearing people mention it, but I've never stopped to look into it until now.
I tend to do some very basic video editing just to put an image with an audio file so I can upload my music to YouTube. This can do what I need it to do? To what degree can this replace a video editor with a full graphical interface?
Edit: Nevermind. I definitely misunderstood what the tool was at a fundamental level. Got it now.
Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack
*chef's kiss*
Add a private torrent indexer and/or Usenet and it's perfection.
There's also Homarr for those who prefer a nice and easy frontend to install the arr suite and more.
Syncthing
Syncthing; it's a modern miracle
What is it?
Similar in function to google drive or onedrive or other cloud sync services but everything is kept local, more performant, and non-intrusive. Each device keeps your chosen synced folders up to date with other devices. You choose what is synced with each device on a foldee-by-folder basis.
I use it to sync my password manager database (keepass) and my notes app, among other things. So all my devices have the password database up to date and i can use the same password manager accross them.
It also provides version control optionally. I use obsidian for notes so if i screw up i can revert to the prwvious revision as a complex 'undo' option.
Works on major platforms including android, Linux, windows, and i assume apple stuff.
It syncs things.
No but really, it’s Pretty freaking cool A tool you can use to automatically sync data across multiple OS with minimal interaction from you.
It synchronises files between machines. So you could sync your home folder for example or just backup games that don't support cloud saves
When I learned about it first time I thought it sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it is just that good.
Last time I tried it, it choked on anything over a million files. Is it better now?
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
Thank you for reminding me of this one! I keep forgetting to try it out
Oh wow! Every now and then I feel like I needed something like this. Thanks!
Freetube.
Once they added quick playlist functionality earlier this year, it was over for YouTube for me.
At this point it has everything I need and could only use small QoL improvements to be absolutely perfect for me.
I also prefer freetube to the containerized web hosted softwares like Invidious because I sit at a personal computer all day.
Ad and sponsorblock integration is sweet too
I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.
But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust
Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.
Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.
It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.
For those looking for an interactive variante, check out ncdu: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncdu
I use dust all the time at work, it's fantastic.
I use gdu
Looks nice.
My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I've been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.
It's not quite as point-and-click, but I'm using Docker for that because Yunohost kept messing up updates. Most server apps will have some instructions on how to run them in docker, especially a
docker-compose.ymlfile, so you don't have to rely on the Yunohost team to package said app.The way I do it is that I put each suggested compose file in their own file, and import them in my main docker-compose.yml file like this:
version: '3' include: - syncthing.ymlThen just run
docker compose pull && docker compose up -devery time you change something or want to update your apps, and you're good to go.Software updates in particular are waaaaaayyy easier on Docker than Yunohost.
This has uncovered my shameful Linux confession lol - I don't understand Docker at all. I think I'm reasonably okay with Linux stuff, I can put an Arch install together without using the archinstall script, I got NixOS up and running without too much trouble etc. but I just can't get my head around how Docker is supposed to work for some reason.
I don't know if Tailscale counts because it's mostly open source (with options to run your own server), but I use it constantly to connect to Home Assistant and Jellyfin on my home server, as well as pairing it with NextDNS (pihole is possible for those that want to go that route) for ad blocking and Mullvad to use them as an exit node.
You can selfhost it with headscale (the server). It's really simple to set up and use. I'm also considering moving to zerotier because a) it's completely opensource and b) the wifi management software I'm looking into (openwisp) has native integration
I haven't used tailscale to know how well it works but as a current zerotier user I've been considering moving away from it.
I actually love the idea and it's super simple to set up but has some very annoying pitfalls for me:
- It's a lot of "magic". When it fails to work the zerotier software gives you very little information on why.
- The NAT tunneling can be iffy. I had it fail to work in some public WiFis, occasionally failed to work on mobile internet (same phone and network when it otherwise works). Restarting the app, reconnecting and so on can often help but it's not super reliable IMO.
- Just recently I've had to uninstall the app restart my Mac, reinstall the app to get it to work again - there were no changes that made it stop, it just decided it's had enough one day to the next and as in point 1, it doesn't tell you much over whether it's connected or not.
Pretty much all of the issues I've had were with devices that have to disconnect and re-connect from the network and/or devices that move between different networks (like laptop, phone). On my router, it's been super stable. Point is, your mileage may vary - it's worth trying but there are definitely issues.
Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.
I've had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.
And something like this can be used as the docker server to hold the repository
I'll go with FreeCAD. I've known about it for a while and tried it about 5-10 years ago but have given it another look as I try to get back into CAD stuff and hate the restrictive licenses of commercial products. It has come a LONG way and is far more intuitive to use than it used to be.
That is great to hear, definitely seemed like FreeCAD was REALLY basic in the past, but there is such a big gap for a really fully featured FOSS Cad software!
Have you heard? The release candidate of 1.0 dropped just a few days ago. It looks very interesting.
!!!
I had missed that. Thank you!
Revanced
Proxmox, if that counts, life changing.
Same. I went from one overly complicated Debian install to two dozen neat and self contained VMs that do one thing each. I even tricked a Windows VM into not knowing that it's a VM, so I can game with anticheat games.
Home Assistant. I only installed it to help me control my solar/battery but I ended up putting other things on it and fell down a rabbit hole.
That's how it starts. Before you know it you'll be buying no-name smart bulbs from Ali Baba and investigating custom firmware for full local only control.
Have you done other home automation that you could compare it to?
Not really. Only the odd thing on a brand's app, which isn't really comparable.
Linux and godot
DeltaChat.
It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Sends downsampled pics, videos or push-to-talk audio by default. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too, as a file.
Integrates with Jitsi Meet to connect video-calls.
It's available on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free-email-address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/ ), or use your own existing email address.
Elegant and robust.
Really cool! An interesting concept well executed. Sadly has the same problem every new messenger has - barely any users.
But that's hardly their fault.
Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,
Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.
I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me "this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!"... admittedly they didn't know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point... they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn't know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.
Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah... Syncthing isn't a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device... and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism... COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.
Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing's GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!
Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.
spotDL. Searches YouTube to download whole Spotify playlists, or individual songs, and includes artwork and metadata.
Interesting....
Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.
My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.
NetNewsWire is amazing. I just wish they had a browser version I could use on a non Mac device.
Adding to RSS.
I use FreshRSS to sync to Readably over Fever API.
Works very well!
RSS reader are a game changer. Ill have a look at this one. At the moment im using fluent reader
Nuclear and RiMusic are great so i dont need spotify/YTmusic or something.
proxmox really made me enjoy selfhosting again.
I remembee nuclear for the convincing testimonials shown on their website
Those testimonials are hilarious, I love that kind of self-deprecating humor (or the confidence to stand up to critics).
FREE and open source
"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:
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Kvaesitso, search focused android launcher. I used to really like nova launcher's local search and navigated my phone mostly using that. But once gensture navigation became a thing I had to stop using nova and replicate the experience in Samsung launcher with various local search apps that were lacking in comparison. Tried to go back a couple times once gestures with 3rd party launchers got better but found my old setup still too ugly and sluggish to go back to. Recently I randomly came across Kvaesitso on fdroid and it was everything I ever wanted out of a launcher.
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Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.
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Kid3, audio file tag editor. It has much better workflow/automation than mp3tag that I used in windows, and it seems if you spend some effort on it you could add more automation to make it even better.
I wish one of those search based launchers would implement a t9 keyboard for searching apps so I could replace Appdialer (which isn't open source)
Kvaesitso is such a good launcher, have yet to find something which is better.
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Gotta be my Synology NAS. Although the hardware isn't free. The software is open source.
I moved always from every cloud storage provider to my own private cloud instead! Could not be happier!
My wife loves it too!
Edit: Sorry! Looks like some parts of the Nas is open. Not DSM itself.
I sold my Synology NAS as soon as I found out, that I can't change the underlying software (DiskStationManager). It wasn't open source and the hardware was dependent on that propriatary software. As soon as they decide, that your device is too old, they drop support and you are left with an unsecure brick.
And you are saying the software is open source. Did I miss something? Did something change?
My bad I think. Looks like some parts of the Synology Nas is open source but not DSM directly.
Any advice for a near (tech) illiterate newb on what to get? I only recently switched from using a patchwork of like 2 dozen different google drives to store all my stuff to a single nextcloud account through hertzner. But it costs per month, and that's always risky with my finances. Would love to learn how to do it myself, but don't know where to start. If it matters, I got the 5tb plan, and have 5 people on it (self included).
Is this a new thing? AFAIK, Synology used to be open source, but then went closed source several years ago. Which is, when the Xpenology project was born.
Since when is Synology software FOSS?
Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.
My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.
I think Jellifyn does. You can also set up watch partys. Navidrome is lighter and more responsive tho.
The TIC80 fantasy console. It's like Pico8 but open source.
Pico8 is not open source? TIL. That's so odd.
It's not but tic80 is honestly a bit cooler anyways.
Yeah, it's not. Leads to weird situations on Linux handheld where you paste in your purchased binary if it's compatible, or you use an emulator like fake08 that has good, but not perfect, compatibility.
Would be awesome if they offered an alternative forge & chat so they aren’t locked entirely to proprietary software for communication / contribution. 😔
Yeah I'm also not a fan of discord but tbh nothing super interesting happens on the discord. Most important discussion is on GitHub. I know that's also not open source but it's at least publicly accessible and indexable.
I'd love to see a tic80 community gain some traction on Lemmy.
Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.
For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.
t I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with
great I had heard about superproductivity from techlore but I brushed it off
could you please tell what seperates it from planify though?
QGIS
Now that most of my friends and family are using it, I'm on Briar Messaging every day. Since there are no central servers, is entirely encrypted, and runs on the Tor network, I think it is probably the most secure messaging platform out there. It also has private groups and forums but I am not yet involved in any of those outside of a couple of small ones that are just for sharing family news.
Briar is really cool. Sadly, I don't know anyone who uses it and it's not on ios
There is a desktop app. I am hopeful with EU cracking down on Apple will eventually result in Briar becoming available on that platform. I am working on an idea to connect people on Briar for use of the private groups and forums so you might check back with me in a few weeks to see where that's at.
My choice is
screenon the CLI. It's an old one, but I just learned about it this year and it's been amazing helpful doing complex, long-running tasks via SSH.In that same vein, give zellij a look! I use it pretty constantly whenever I'm sshing in a nominatim server
screenis liketmux, right? So you can split your CLI, open a new window/tab to open more Bash/Vim instances?tmux is a modern screen replacement.
Yep! You can have multiple named screens, log them all individually, and they'll keep processes running even if you disconnect. Never used
tmuxbutscreenis usually installed on the systems I'm working on.
Screen is great, i used it for a long time to keep my Minecraft server process running on a raspberry pi. I recently just switched from screen to tmux
Screen is great! My favorite though is
byobu, a pretty screen
That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).
Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.
It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern "media library" interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).
I want to like Kodi, but Jellyfin just has a less obtrusive interface
I can live without Logseq but for work and keeping a log of how that worked (other than bash history) It's really useful
Amazing journaling/personal information managment software. I love that once you understand how it works, you can journal however you like and it "maps" out how your connect concepts. Not exaggerating when I say it helped me piece a lot of concepts and personal themes together
Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like "Press T to open up trainer menu".
Unfortunately it's not available (natively) on Linux. I've used Lutris but I don't believe it has the same customization options. I don't think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven't tried to customize it in several years. I've gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It'sFOSS article about it here.
Emulation Station Desktop Edition (ES-DE) is probably a good alternative gaming frontend similar to Playnite
I don't think that supports desktop games beyond source ports like Quake and Diablo though
Thank you!
I'd never heard of this until your comment, and tried a few others, but as someone with LOADS of emulators and games across multiple services this is amazing. Ive just finished setting it up.... I hadn't saved this post so went trawling to find this post just to say thanks!
conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.
conduwuit is a fork of the less "energic" conduit.rs software, and both are maintained by the community, not by the Element people, like Dendrite.
Some great apps on here, downloading some of the suggestions to try out
I second local send :)
For some reason it never works for me, can't locate the other device I want to send to/from.
I had to once refresh like three times. But it works for me from fedora laptop to android or iPhone and vice versa. Its great app!
I’ve seen that on one windows machine with a weird network sharing issue.
Locate command. I know it's a command in thw terminal but since I had to apt install it I'm adding it here.
I absolutely love it.
If your distro uses apt, install aptitude and enjoy a nice TUI for all your package management needs…
ZFS. It's come so far, and it has so far to go. but it's a good concept for sure.
This was the year I tried out Darcs & Pijul. With conflicts being less problematic & easier to collab without patch order mattering, you gotta wonder why all of this effort is still put into bolting stuff atop Git instead of moving on & helping the tooling in this space.
Second place would be Movim as a decentralized social media platform built atop the XMPP server you are already running.
orange pi running samba as a file server. it's behind a wireguard vpn.
huge improvement in my quality of life.
LaTeX and maybe NixOS with hyprland (both for the first time)
Check out Typst and its flake! Really nice, a lot simpler than latex.
Image Toolbox Its a photo editor with everything you need. Its really really powerful and so fleshed out. Everytime I use it, I discover something new. The only sad thing is, that I can't donate in XMR otherwise I've would of donated. If you have an android, download it and try it. It's a must have on any phone imo.
Audiobookshelf. I've started using it this year, and I've listened to it every day except for a single day since I started lol. Its amazing to keep track of my podcasts and audiobooks. My only complaint is the app doesn't do autoplay for podcasts but headset media controls work, and the web client autoplays podcasts, but my media controls don't work. Even with those minor complaints, its an amazing tool that I don't know how I'd live without again.
Magic Wormhole - it's been around awhile but it's super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.
Ditto clipboard manager and altsnap with the Hot-click and fancyzone style controls
Seconding AltSnap although I use normal controls with an Alt key bound to a mouse button. Special shoutouts to "Action menu" for all the cool stuff it lets you do and "Windows list" which is just a better version of Alt+tabbing if you have multiple monitors.
I'll take a slight tangent to this topic and talk about FOSS software I've recently had to give up that I really really miss: Autokey. Autokey is a rough equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows, it can do anything from on the fly text replacement (type teh and it will correct to the, or type *date and it fills in today's date) right up to firing whole Python scripts. it doesn't work on Wayland (apparently there are security features that prevent it from working the same way it does on X11?), and I've yet to find a replacement for it that does.
Klipper, for 3d printing. Most of current manufacturer use it as primary software for their printers.
Jami, a p2p zoom replacement I am looking to use.
I discovered this more than a year ago, but Fuzzel.
I just wrote about the new release here:
https://mark.stosberg.com/feature-packed-app-launcher-and-fuzzer/
NetBird- tail scale but fully open source with web hi, built in or bring your own auth, clients for pretty much everything, and really powerful network separation and segregation functions, along with posture checks and tons more.
Netbird does some things better than Tailscale. But honestly tailscale is just so much better. It takes a much more "it just works" approach which for our office we much prefer. It was so much more fiddly and just awful.
Netbird also kept pissing me off because we'd have a route to the office, and if you're in the office it would just kill all network traffic as it tries to go to itself instead of the default gateway and just never works. Tailscale kinda has the same issue, but it doesn't end up in an endless loop it just routes all your traffic in the office through the VPN.
Timelinize... description from GitHub: Organize your photos & videos, chats & messages, location history, social media content, contacts, and more into a single cohesive timeline on your own computer where you can keep them alive forever.
There's also Delta Chat, FairEmail and DEFINITELY LOCALSEND.
KeepassXC, Syncthing, Orgmode ecosystem.
croc
Nothing. Discovered mine long before.
