Linux

The one thing I desperately want for Linux is BetterTouchTool. That one piece of software alone plugs SO MANY gaps in how to navigate macOS, but Linux has nothing like it. Not that I've yet found, anyway.

GUI for Pipewire configuration. Being able to reliably change the sample rate and buffer size without having to mess with config files would be nice.

Three finger drag in Wayland, a new gui for opensnitch where i can isolate network activity by app like little snitch 

GUI for managing fingerprints/PAM that allows complicated or at least some customization with PAM such as requiring password on first login then allowing graphical fingerprints for sudo, unlock and other prompts with fallback to password.

Qt version of cool GTK software: Nicotine+, Ardour (ahahah), Lutris, Cartridges

Qt software I would love to see graphically improved: QuodLibet, Falkon, Qbittorrent, KeePass

Others: PeerTube client, Syncthing client, Ardour+Kdenlive fusion (a good Video DAW is my wet dream), Lemmy for desktop

A standalone utility for decoding QR codes that will work on a desktop. All I want is to be able to put a picture of the code in and get whatever text it was concealing in a little text box where I can read it, and C&P it if it's useful to do so. If something like this exists, I've never been able to find it, although there are seemingly dozens of programs for generating QR codes.

A real Photoshop replacement. GIMP is cool, but ain't it. I have yet to find ANY software that can replace PS. I've even tried using multiple programs to replace PS, and it just doesn't work. I fucking HATE Adobe.

I don't have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you're interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.

A universal uninstaller.

Now that Ubuntu has apt, snap, ~/bin, flatpak, appimages, etc, when I want to disable, update, or, uninstall an app, I can't quickly figure out where it is or how to do that. So a program that starts with 'which appname' or something more clever to find it, which also told you what type of installation method it was and then let you remove it with the next action.

For example I had Desktop Docker installed which was garbage, and I didn't remember how I had installed it. In that case you couldn't use 'which' because that's not the name of the executable, so you'd have to design something smarter that could search .desktop files or whatever.

Good luck with your project!

• ImageMagick
• Ghostscript
• Pandoc
• LittleCMS (CMS: Color Management System)
• Wireguard
• Rclone

I wish Scratch was more powerful, kind of like Flash was back in the day, so that it would be easier to make more complicated things with it. I feel right now if you want to make a somewhat real game it gets too hard too quickly because you need to work around the limitations.

I'd be happy to see one more email client option. Using Geary now - nice ui but very limited in features. Been through quite a few in the past.

For a bit of mindfuck check kdialog : Tool to show nice dialog boxes from shell scripts

Maybe the shell truly is enough BUT in some cases, say you want to help somebody who for some reason doesn't want the terminal, you can bring the bare minimum of UI to give utility. My favorite example is the file picker e.g kdialog --getopenfilename "*txt" | wc -l as most CLI commands do support a filename as input.

I understand why it doesn't exist because it's pretty niche and a shitload of work, but I wish there was a a really good dedicated 2D animation software similar to Moho Pro or Toon Boom Harmony on Linux. That's one of the only reasons I'm still keeping Windows around.

Also as a side note, don't trust Toon Boom. I bought a perpetual license from them that was super expensive, and then they switched to a subscription model and turned off my perpetual license.

Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/

Pursuing feature parity with Calibre would be a long journey, but we have to start somewhere

Paint.net for Linux. Most of my experience with making art digitally came from paint.net and there's not really a good alternative that doesn't require me to recreate my workflow from the ground up (Krita).

Pinta is technically an option, but it's missing many of the features that modern paint.net has.

For now, I have to make do with a VM to run it.

Some QT or Cosmic takes on Pika Backup. The maybe unrealistic dream would be some new non gtk photo dam that ignores editing all together and hands off files as needed to an editor like vkdt. Kinda like Adobe Bridge.

A comicbook viewer that is lightweight and supports .cbt well, without slowing to a crawl depspite it being a simple tar. Just needs to have pic-for-pic and webtoon (attach at bottom) modes.

Btw, why is the nonsensical format .cbz (zipping already compressed images) the default? And why is such a simple format always in electron GUI?

WinSCP is a Windows tool I use at work to send files between machines and I wish there was linux version. Programs like Dolphin are similar but I always manage to find something I can do in WinSCP that I can't do in the linux alternatives

Edit: commenters just pointed out a bunch of potential solutions I wasn't even aware of, so I'm probably just dumb please carry on

GNOME

It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be. Extensions break with every update. There seems to be no long term plan with it.

Honestly, bring back unity.

A nice editor for both Markdown and reStructuredText with minimal dependencies, which allows to change seamlessly editing between rendered text and source text. Like one has a tab for source text, and one for rendered text, and can change and edit both tabs.

Gollum wiki has something similar but it could be better. Maybe even having two panes side-by-side, left source, right rendering, and one can edit both and / or flip them.

Also, I think one could find a ton of small useful improvements in Zim Wiki. I use it all the time to gather and structure information on poorly documented stuff, which is very often needed when working with legacy software, and it is great and extremely useful but not perfect.

I wish there was a graphical or CLI option to add a Linux drive to etc/fstab.

I wish Stonesense was better and more stable. Im just glad it is still maintained though.

(a tool to view dwarffortress's forts)

I wish Divvy/WinDivvy worked on Linux. There are similar alternatives, but none that duplicate the functionality.

A graphical 'advanced' package manager for Qt / KDE. Something to replace Muon which is/was the KDE equivalent of Synaptic but no longer available in Kubuntu. Discover shows you apps (both snap and apt), Muon showed packages with all sort of relevant technical information (source, dependencies, 'reverse dependencies', installed files). I guess everything Synaptic/Muon does is also available through the various apt subcommands but there is value in a decent GUI to bundle those individual commands and their output.

• Bulk unarchiver or a frontend for ffmpeg (using existing tools, both get very messy when special characters or multiple directories are involved)
  • Existing ffmpeg GUIs have had fixed lists of formats and options, making new or obscure ones inaccessible. There also needs to be an option to export the command based on GUI selections so the user can learn if they choose, or fix the command if something isn't right.
• Adding the little details of Windows File Manager (i.e. Format dialog, search by attribute like MP3 bitrate) to some existing Linux file manager
• Mounting of network drives in Linux graphical file managers: many of them handle it through gvfs, which for some reason insists on mountpoints with long directory paths and special characters, breaking compatibility with various utilities
• Extending Linux Mint's libadapta to further restore theming in libadwaita apps. This I am personally looking forward to contribute to as more programs move to libadwaita and disrupt the look I've painstakingly set up for my desktop.