What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?

Shape4985@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 515 points –

Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.

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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 have kdeconnect on my i3wm.

Iv never tried it on my wm. Ill dow load it and give it a shot.

I tried the iOS beta until it expired. Didn't know it ever made it to the app store.

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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.

Wait kdeconnect is Foss?! Can I fix the atrocious gui myself?!? ๐Ÿ˜‚

That application rules but it looks like butt on my workstation.

I found it to be more than I needed. I still have it installed, but use localsend more often

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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

Zotero

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

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Jellyfin and the .arr suite.

Itโ€™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.

Just use Usenet.

I've never been able to figure out how to use usenet. Do you have any suggestions on how to get started?

I know it's reddit but this is a good guide. https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/18q7r0f/usenet_starter_guide/

Beyond that DM me for indexer invites if you seriously go down this path. Happy to help with any technical questions as well!

I've been very happy with a couple of indexers that I have paid for. I haven't needed to really jump into the invite only world. There really is A LOT of content available easily. I'm sure more niche content might need more select access, but for me I haven't gotten there. There was one Charlie Brown I have on VHS that took forever to find a better copy of, but I did eventually get a better version.

Any suggestions? I currently have a nord subscription but it's about to run out and I'm considering moving.

Mullvad is the gold standard

Proton

Mullvad is good like the other guy said but Proton has port forwarding, which if you don't wanna be a HnR jerk you wanna do

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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. Iโ€™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.

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.

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Notesnook.

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.

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

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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.

Jellyfin. Use it daily. Dropping more and more atreamjnf services, it's been awesome.

Honorable mentioned to Revanced.

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).

Or a somewhat recent Intel Computer, maybe around 2017 onwards or even older. It can absolutely be a low-tier device As long as the processor has Intel Quicksync it'll be a breeze to do live transcoding. No dedicated graphics necessary!

I remember how the jellyfin documentation specifically recommends against RPIs since they have no hardware transcoding. I personally use a 4th gen i3 in a mac mini and it can do what I want, though I don't use it heavily.

This. I have an LG Oled TV that can nearly trascode everything so I didn't allow my user to use transcoding and forcing it to do direct play (there is also a plugin for it). Works like a charm. The only thing not supported are VobSubs but otherwise I had no issues.

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.

He'll, even an Intel based thin client would probably be enough. You can get them on eBay for like 30 bucks, which is about as much as a pi costs. You'll probably have to replace the ssd though. That'll set you back an additional 30 bucks.

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.

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.

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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

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!

Love PCSX2. I play a lot of old games as they have a charm to them and no micro transactions

Same! Have you played the Ratchet and Clank original trilogy? The old games have this special charm to them that I don't really see in the newer games of the series.

If you happen to have easy access to the ROM, how's "Star Wars: Racer Revenge" run?

It's the less popular but more fleshed out spiritual successor to the N64 pod racing game - the PS2's take nailed the physics - the two engines and racer pod are (or at least feel like) three separate entities, and playing in first person view with the engines controlled separately by the left and right joysticks feels fucking magical.

Tried to run it on PCSX2 years ago, but it was one of the few games that meshed so poorly with the emulator that it wasn't playable. I'm guessing the emulator has seen some improvements since then - could definitely use a nice shot of nostalgia.

I haven't played much of the older ones, but I really enjoyed Rifts Apart. It's beautiful, but it's also mechanically super polished and fluid, and while the storytelling isn't really my style, I think they do it reasonably well.

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.

Oh my god, that's amazing. I'm getting on something that can be rooted posthaste, but in the meanwhile...

And here I thought this is running with the Android subsystem in a limited environment utilizung "plugins" as the packages.
That sounds so cool

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.

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?

It can't go back one frame at a time yet has no problem going forward at the same pace.

Pathetic.

Are there any FOSS apps that can do this? MPV can move frame by frame but moving back is so unusably slow.

Depends on the machine and.. maybe other things. I used to think that, too, but on my current machines I can step backwards just fine.

It's probably a much more intensive operation requiring processing a lot of the file from before and throwing away current buffers or something.

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.

Thankfully, vlc's audio offset function is very easy to quickly adjust and save. As long as the audio delay is consistent you can adjust it pretty quickly.

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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...

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Need to keep Cobalt Tools in mind. Was looking for something like that.

How does it compare to yt-dlp?

Warning, I might be wrong:

yt-dlp seems to be operated with command lines, whereas cobalt is a user interface in an opened browser tab. You paste the link of the desired video or audio source into a search bar and you can toggle different settings (bitrate, file format, video output size etc.). The desired file will be appearing as a download into your download folder.

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  • 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.

KDE connect is ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ

Just want to drop in some alternatives, LinkSheet is pretty similar to URLCheck with many of the features, and fWallet in my opinion has nicer UI/UX than PassAndroid

+1 for urlcheck and add Rethink firewall for me

Obviously KDE Connect is amazing but URL check is really great too, pretty much every link on my phone goes through it first

This isn't exactly "can't live without," that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?

Beyond All Reason

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.

  • 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.

Aegis as an authentication App

Aves as gallery

Proxmox bare metal hypervisor for homeserver

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

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Used Aegis for Years but manual backups became tedious.

Ente auth is my new one for anyone who wants E2E Sync!

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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.

I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It's expensive, but it's also pretty great. We're actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.

Honestly not a bad way to go about it

They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I'm just giving them the nickel.

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've known about it for longer but just started using KDE Connect over the last year or so.

It's got some bugs, at least for me. Like sometimes my phone won't connect to my computer or like the SMS feature takes forever to load, but having something akin to Pushbullet but free from enshitification has been really great.

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; 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.

Awesome. I wonder if I can incorporate OneDrive easily. I'm on a family plan and have 1 TB of storage. Maybe there's a way to upload stuff to OneDrive without the garbage of OneDrive.

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It syncs things.

No but really, itโ€™s Pretty freaking cool A tool you can use to automatically sync data across multiple OS with minimal interaction from you.

Oh, is it like a Dropbox but without a cloud?

Yes. You have a "share". That's the imaginary dropbox-like thing. Then you have a folder on some device that you link to that share. All folders you link with that share become the same on any device, intelligently.

For sanity's sake, unless I'm doing something like syncing game map folders across devices but inside a game's special map folder, i keep them all in a folder called 'sync', and name the folders in 'sync' after the share name. Otherwise, things can get wonky. Consistent naming is important imo. With a share called "share with bob" started from a folder called 'bob sync' on sam's end, 'Sam' on bob's end, and they stay that way after anita joins, and she calls it 'bob and Sam' or something. Someone else joins and calls it "buddies". Then, people say things like 'i put it in the sam folder', and it brings up questions.

But with a little bit of organization, it's awesome. Drop a file in a folder, and it's now on the other person's computer too. They move it out, and the file's gone for you.

If the computers can talk to each other (same lan, or proper internet connection) they will. If you have dysfunctional NAT or phones with no public-facing IP that are connecting to each other, just make sure some system can be accessed, and it's all good. You want a cloud backup? Just set up the daemon on a server somewhere, and join the share.

It synchronises files between machines. So you could sync your home folder for example or just backup games that don't support cloud saves

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When I learned about it first time I thought it sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it is just that good.

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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.

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.

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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.

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:

  1. It's a lot of "magic". When it fails to work the zerotier software gives you very little information on why.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

good to know, thank you for the insights! Tbh Tailscale/headscale has been quite stable, so maybe I'll stay were I am. Or move to nebula because why not? :D

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.

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.yml file, 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.yml

Then just run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d every 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.

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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!

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.

Got any recommended sources for someone looking to do the same thing? My home server is approaching 18 years old, was looking to set up something neat and tidy to replace it when it eventually fails. Tricking a windows vm sounds pretty useful too!

I don't have a good primary source, its been a lot of disparate googling. But if you have any questions at all, let me know. I love helping

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.

Cool concept but really sucks if you're the only recipient using DeltaChat. Plus it comes with all the privacy drawbacks of email. And I get tons and tons of spam so anything I actually care about is quickly buried.

No spam, because it is a family group for sharing non-public pictures etc.

You'd only get spam if you invited a spammer to chat.

The privacy comes from the E2EE.

Do note, because it's using email, the recipient and sender are not private, along with the time, and probably the relative size of the messages.

The specific content of each message should be private as long as the encryption is done well. I haven't looked at it so I don't know if it implemnts safeguards to verify who you're messaging with (besides using the email address) and I don't know if it uses PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) to protect against a key getting compromised.

No, you get spam because the email protocol doesn't stop spam. You could create a new email address but then you have to give that to everyone who might not appreciate yet another contact method they have to remember for you.

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure DeltaChat uses PGP, which leaks all of your metadata to your email provider, ISP, and governments. It isnt private but is secure.

These days the best thing you can do is use Signal.

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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.

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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.

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.

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?

I think it's closed source indeed, but their support window is very long at the moment, so while you're right, at least until now they're actually acting responsibly.

It would be easy to unlock the devices for different Software - like ugreen does.

And imagine all the possible backdoors in their software. No one can check, because it is closed source. And this on a device with your most senisble data.

Calling their acting 'responsible' is a huuuge strech.

By your definition no closed source company can act responsibly. If that is your definition, they indeed don't act responsibly, my point is that they appear to ship security updates for at least a decade after the device got released, which seems pretty decent. And they have a good record on quickly responding to any security issues and keeping everything up to date.

So they're doing pretty good. Would it be nice if they go open source? for sure, but for a closed source system, it's currently doing great.

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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.

Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.

Spottube, like Spotify but without the shitty ads, play limitations and tracking.

Every. Day. In the kitchen.

I tried this, it was a pretty cool app. Has it been facing any issues since youtube is trying to block 3rd party apps using their api? My piped app sometimes goes down and i need to wait for an update to fix it

I had a shit time with on my shitty Samsung shit phone, but now have a moto and there are zero issues.

"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:

  • 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.

  • Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.

  • 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)

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My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.

Adding to RSS.

I use FreshRSS to sync to Readably over Fever API.

Works very well!

NetNewsWire is amazing. I just wish they had a browser version I could use on a non Mac device.

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Nuclear and RiMusic are great so i dont need spotify/YTmusic or something.

proxmox really made me enjoy selfhosting again.

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!

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 didnโ€™t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

Anyway, Iโ€™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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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!

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

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.

My choice is screen on 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

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 like tmux, right? So you can split your CLI, open a new window/tab to open more Bash/Vim instances?

Yep! You can have multiple named screens, log them all individually, and they'll keep processes running even if you disconnect. Never used tmux but screen is usually installed on the systems I'm working on.

tmux is a modern screen replacement.

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ZFS. It's come so far, and it has so far to go. but it's a good concept for sure.

I feel like if Sun had come out on top (instead of fucking Oracle), the tech space might be a better place

If they'd released the x86 version of Solaris when it became clear that SPARC couldn't keep up with Intel and AMD that could have been a possibility.

Solaris was such an amazing OS.

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.

Some great apps on here, downloading some of the suggestions to try out

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 haven't tried Jellyfin but people's talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn't need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it's not quite the same and does things I don't really need.

Yes, I liked the interface of Jellyfin as a more family friendly media browsing UI but I hate the wasted CPU cycles of transcoding unnecessarily.

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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 needsโ€ฆ

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.

Klipper, for 3d printing. Most of current manufacturer use it as primary software for their printers.

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.

orange pi running samba as a file server. it's behind a wireguard vpn.

huge improvement in my quality of life.

Jami, a p2p zoom replacement I am looking to use.

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.

CIPP. Its used to manage multiple office 365 tenants so its not really useful to anyone outside of managed service providers. it makes doing shit in 365 wayyy easier than using the Microsoft portal.

https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/CIPP

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.

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.

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I picked up KdenLive for video editing and it's pretty freaking good imo