this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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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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[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 2 points 28 minutes ago

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

[–] piranhaphish@lemmy.world 1 points 45 minutes ago* (last edited 44 minutes 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.

[–] floatingpin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 4 hours ago (3 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
[–] rayhem@lemm.ee 2 points 1 hour 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.

[–] vaionko@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 hours ago

Cool! Though I'll probably still use krunner for this

[–] SilverShark@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

This looks amazing and I need to have it in my life. Thank you so much for sharing

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 hours ago

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

[–] Gelik@feddit.dk 10 points 5 hours 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.

[–] meekah@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

Steam added an excellent screen capture feature to their overlay, but I like being able to capture my screen anytime, not just when playing games with the steam overlay.

gpu-screen-recorder is the perfect tool for this, you set up a command to run at startup and the software records the last X minutes in the background, with barely any hardware utilization. Add a hotkey for another command that saves the recorded clip to a file, and boom, simple and efficient replay recorder. I'm honestly surprised this app wasn't mentioned yet.

[–] FlappyBubble@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I would say Rymdport (https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport). It's a GUI for the magic-wormhole tool (another recommendation in itself). It let's you easily and safely transfer files to another computer.

[–] Unmapped@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

I use Localsend to send files between my computers. Also to family and friends if they are local at the time. I keep seeing magic-wormhole mentioned on Lemmy. Do you know if wormhole is better somehow? Is it worth me trying it?

[–] FlappyBubble@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

Very different tool. Magic-wormhole is dead simple, works over CLI and requires no setup. It's not dependant on computers being within the same LAN. I wouldn't use it with non-technical people. For users with some skill Rymdport is an option for them to interface with magic-wormhole. The tool is great for transferring secrets when setting up computers for example.

[–] Flatfire@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

Biggest difference is that wormhole will pass traffic between devices on different networks as long as both are routable. So it's not limited to a local network connection.

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server.

[–] minibyte@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You’ve heard of it for sure, but shout out to Audacity. I used Cool Edit Pro for years before having to switch to Adobe Audition. The UI in Audacity feels surprisingly familiar and it does what I need it to do.

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago (4 children)

I believe audacity was forked over issues with privacy or something like that.

[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

I just removed it's network access from the flatpak, I don't make extensive use of it but it's really handy to have at hand

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[–] Nemoder@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ocenaudio for audio editing. It's not FOSS but it's native, simple to use, and doesn't have backend library issues I kept having with audacity.

[–] kurcatovium@lemm.ee 5 points 4 hours ago

Try tenacity, it's audacity fork, available on flathub. I have good experience with it.

[–] arsCynic@beehaw.org 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

AutoKey automation / word expander tool.

  • I reconfigure ALT + i/j/k/l to ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts.
  • It expands abbreviations of one's choice like "gCo" to git commit -m '
  • One can assign scripts to abbreviations and hotkeys. E.g., when I press CTRL + Shift + [ it surrounds the selected text with a tag:
text_selected = clipboard.get_selection()
text_input = dialog.input_dialog(title="Wrap with a tag.", message="E.g., type cite to get <cite>x</cite>.", default="")
keyboard.send_key("<delete>")
clipboard.fill_clipboard(f"<{text_input[1]}>{text_selected}</{text_input[1]}>")
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+v")

I'm likely not even harnessing AutoKey's full capabilities and it's already absolutely indispensable for being a huge time-saver and annoyance reducer.

- -
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

[–] r_deckard@lemmy.world 11 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

ffmpeg - www.deb-multimedia.org . I edit podcast videos for distribution to subscribers. High-quality video produces very large files but if they're only going to be watched on laptops, tablets, and phones, I can throw away a lot of bits without noticeably affecting quality on a phone screen.

And nothing does that better or faster than ffmpeg.

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