Taking your ideas for my next linux app

Fredol@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 167 points –

I'm bored and want to practice my Rust skills. I am the creator of open-tv. If you have any idea for a linux desktop app, even if it seems quite complex, I will take it.

170

An app that tracks how much time you spend using each app. Locally obviously. I want this information so I can see how much I should donate to each project each quarter.

This. This is a hole in the market I think.

Windows used to have a similar hidden feature that my friend used all the time to tracking his work projects, but they removed it some time ago.

This is a good idea. It could even be later expanded to a sort of "digital wellbeing" type use case with time limits or reminders on certain apps, etc...

This is a very interesting concept, and I would also like it. Would this even be possible on Wayland though? I know it should be possible on X11, but I'm unsure if the Wayland isolation would entirely prevent a usage tracking program like this from seeing what the focused window is, or seeing the total time a process has spent in the background (depending on what type of usage is being tracked).

I'm attempting to implement this a Hyprland plugin, I could adapt it to work with all Wayland based compositiors/DE's fairly easily. It just provides the stats using a CLI command, I'm not a UI dev xD

Make an app that is a little ASCII potted plant in your terminal and every time you type something it waters the plant and it grows

When nothing happens for too long, the plant withers and starts losing leaves. For each leaf that falls, a random file is deleted in /sbin.

This reminds of a stupid filesystem pet idea I had a while ago. Running as a daemon, it walks through your filesystem and sometimes leaves traces (as files), maybe you'll find it sleeping in your downloads folder every now and then. I thought it was a cute idea, but didnt actually think about implementing it, for obvious reasons, it could go so horribly wrong πŸ˜‚

I lowkey want this, it's like the system equivalent of the screen cat (btw does that exist but with Wayland support?)

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Obsidian 1:1 open source alternative.

I would kill for this. Trying to get logseq, or any other markdown editor to play nice with an existing obsidian vault is a nightmare. And none of them are nearly as feature complete or expandable.

unrestrictive nature of Obsidian is simply top notch.

Is this sarcasm, or did you not understand their comment?

I was talking about the community extension integration, now about editors, I was easily able to switch between them. The one I was having the most difficulty with was Logseq."

LogSeq doesn't do it for you?

Anti Commercial-AI license

nope, logseq is good for canvas and new knowledge base, but doesn't fit for the my existing datalog requirements.

The mention of datalog confuses me. I know it as a programming language. Does it mean something else for you? And what do you mean by "canvas"? I know about painting on a canvas and similar usages as well as the verb "canvassing" for soliciting for votes.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Not the programming language, datalog here is referring to highly interlinked knowledge base,

canvas is logseq whiteboard version of Obsidian, like for mind map or creating data flow/logic diagrams.

How about a Lemmy Client?

I would love a text based ActivityPub client focused on meaningful discussions: threaded view, ability to follow threads or branches, highlight posts based on keywords.

Fragmentation has entered the chat

I simply would like to have a non-browser based Lemmy Client. :/

Are there really none for Linux yet?

I stumbled upon two or so, but they were abandoned early on.

I've just tried building Thunder for desktop and it works fine so far without any tweaks nessesary. In fact I'm writing this comment using this very build.

If there's interest I might be looking into turning this into a proper flatpak.

I've seen a few people in this sub asking for a desktop client, so it seems like something (some) people would be interested in. Maybe reach out to the Thunder devs and see if you can become an official flatpak maintainer (assuming you have flatpak experience and know what you're getting into) if they don't have time to maintain it themselves. You could also maybe get the "desktop" flag added to Thunder in this list if you were to do that, which would help people find it.

how is that fragmentation it'd be a front-end not a whole new software

Fragmentation of front-ends. If every dev works on a their own project, the community gets 0 quality ptoducts. If there are less projects but more devs working on them, the community gets multiple quality products. Now choose what is better

The world needs the ability to sync freetube and newpipe. It's the missing link for both Apps, to be usable from home, to out and about

I agree, but I think something is already in the works, I'll check and probably make something practical to sync the two. It's not really a new app that's needed but a feature integrated into freetube/newpipe

I've been following it pretty closely, and haven't seen any progress as yet. There are many github conversations, but nothing seems to have ever come of it.

I assume the challenge would be having the two different storage formats be able to be interchanged?

I'd like to see a simple, dependency-free, calculator app, written in Rust, using egui. All other GUI calculator apps I've seen so far are unnecessarily heavy, using bloated toolkits like GTK or Qt.

This would be handy for those run a GTK/Qt-free environment, and/or those who just want a tiny calculator app (optimised for the smallest binary size) without any external dependencies. Preferably even compiled using musl, to remove any glibc dependencies - resulting in a simple, small, portable binary that can run on any distro and doesn't even need to be installed.

Eventually, I would like to see this idea expanded to other apps - such as a simple text editor, a simple image editor, and maybe even a simple and lightweight web browser using Servo.

Jesus Christ.

I use the calculator in Ubuntu tor very simple purposes. It was crashing on me every time I opened it.

I tracked down why.

It was trying to get a foreign currency exchange rate file - which I was horrified that you'd think about even having in a calculator.

The reason that was failing? Because I had a VPN enabled.

And it wouldn't even fail gracefully. Nope it would poof, disappear.

The fix is to disable vpn, and disable foreign currency in the preferences.

I was so pissed off. And on the next upgrade the same thing happened, which I'd forgotten all about, so went through it AGAIN!

This was in fact what prompted my search - the Gnome calculator is so horribly bloated, and yeah, it should have no business making network connections, at least not by default - this should be an opt-in behaviour.

Not to tell you you don't need a GUI calculator program, but the only times I needed one was on screen sharing when I had to show someone else what I'm doing.

For all other cases, python in console is the best calculator ever. You don't need to learn Python to use it, and it's most likely already installed in most systems that you use.

A Linux implementation of Microsoft's Powertoys. Having all those utility features in one app would be great.

An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, ...), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.

If you move to OpenSUSE/SUSE you have this via GUI GTK Yast apps. pretty much anything you want to adjust (kernel param, samba, add devices, alter services, etc) is available via GUI

Yeah, but how about Yast for all??? How about taking what Yast does, and replicating it for Debian-based or Fedora- or Arch-based distros? They all use Systemd and they are all pretty similar in everything, except the package manager, package availability, and release cycles.

I wish it was more widespread. I have a debian server, and a NixOS machine besides my OpenSUSE machine. I miss YAST2, it makes everything so easy

Don't think it would be that easy. What Yast does is creating a middle layer between the actual config files and the user. You can look at it, most (if not all) of it is stored in /etc/sysconfig. Yast generates the actual config files out of what is stored there. This can be a headache because editing the config files directly will sometimes lead to them just being overwritten bei Yast again.
This is probably the reason why other distros don't even want to adopt Yast, it would have to fundamentally change how it interacts with the config files.
And the cool new thing is Cockpit anyway, even though it can do only a fraction of what Yast can last time I checked..

GUI app to create/edit/config Samba shares.

Idea 1

I've been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn't completely thumb chewing stupid. I've yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you'd get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.

I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like "take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5" and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.

And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the "journal" apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a "view" mode to see what you've done. Also: Don't be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don't want some light mode Gnome lookin' bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.

Idea 2

Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.

Idea 3

You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This "seems quite complex." The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It's a general purpose engineering CAD system and it's designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can't think in terms of "put a mortise and tenon joint here" you have to think "create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions." And then it doesn't give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn't write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so...I'm not sure why they bother at this point.

I've been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I've thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as "monumental."

How can there not be a good todo app???

Is it just that there's no Linux one but there is mobile?

Maybe with Kotlin Multiplatform someone will get an existing mobile one running on Linux as that would be useful.

I can't imagine it'd be too hard given a todo app doesn't need a lot of Android specific functionality. I'm in the middle of converting my app to target desktop/ios/android and its been going very well and the tooling is improving rapidly.

That or someone might write a nice one as a starter project as Multiplatform from the start to learn it?

I'm after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I've yet to find the thing I'm after.

I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we'd get the occasional "citizen inventor" off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they'd describe their "invention" to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn't work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what's happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.

Also, just searched Mint's software manager for "todo" and came up with this:

TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with...someone. Worthless.

Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as "Endeavour". I'm guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome's PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.

Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome's name that isn't below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn't it.

OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I'm looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren't obvious what they're for with no tool tips and...it's just combative, it's trying really hard to be a pain.

Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a "todo.txt syntax" which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.

Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a "Sign in with Google" button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.

That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn't seem relevant.

I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I've yet to find since.

Just saw your edit. I think I got a better idea of what you meant now with what PalmOS had. Such a shame about requiring an account to use the apps that are available. I get why they might do it if you want to share data across devices / platforms, but if you only want it locally and you're okay with that, they should let you make that choice, especially for desktop apps.

It should also be common or required practice to make note of "Google account required" or something in the app's description.

I'd greatly appreciate a "requires account" on app stores.

Especially on something like Flathub and especially for apps that can plausibly run locally. Like, I kinda know beforehand I'll need an account with Discord to use the Discord app, because it's primarily for communicating with other people. But a todo app? Dafuq does that need the internet for?

So what do you really want when you say journaling your peogess.

Is that something like

Recurring Fitness Run 5k 2 times a week.

As you check it off for number one, it prompts you to leave a note about it? And maybe you can see all your notes by category or chronologically?

Or is the journaling a completely separate thing? I can see how the two might not be done as separate things as you're really getting into 2 wholly different apps.

As I look through Flathub, maybe KOrganizer is the closest thing to what I'm looking for, although it's got KDE's disease of being hideously overcrowded with every possible feature.

I think what I'm after is somewhere between KOrganizer and RedNotebook. I currently use RedNotebook to keep my journal, which in my case takes the form of talking about my day, what I did, what I'm thinking, and sometimes what I'm planning. It has no todo list functionality, but I can use it as a sort of note to self thing, it has a search function that allows me to easily look back. I almost always have it open and running on my computer.

imagine RedNotebook, but with some todo and checklist functionality so that I get today's page, there's a blank page for a journal entry so I can record what I did today, and maybe a separate side pane for daily tasks, maybe several panes stacked vertically for "regularly scheduled" where daily stuff like "change cat's water dish" or weekly stuff like "garbage day" or monthly stuff like "water bill due" could pop up, and it would serve not only as a reminder to do those things, but a record of having done them. And maybe another pane for ongoing stuff, like...say I want to list all the things I want to build in the wood shop this summer; this might not be time based but just a running checklist. It would be kind of cool to be able to look back at that and see when things were added, checked off, or removed.

Lifeograph might be designed for this but 1. damn if I can figure out how it works and 2. it won't stop shining bright white rectangles at me.

Looks like Lifeograph has a 3.0 release candiate which is brand new last month. Maybe they've have made things simpler and added a better theme?

Item1: I would love something along these lines. Honestly, I wish I could configure Thunderbird to be my journal and reference my to-do items programmatically from inside journal entries.

Similar to your wish for first class dark mode, I want light mode to also be first class. Too many apps lately have made dark mode default and the light mode is unusable.

I'm starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I'm just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.

I am one of those gifted folks that enjoy astigmatism. I have tried dark mode and dark themes many times over the years and it just doesn't work for me. The screenshots are gorgeous tho!

Implement a wireless file transfer protocol that works with Apple's Airdrop and Android's Quick Share.

In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.

  1. Create a software tool with UI that allows syncing of a phone with Linux to copy over photos, documents, music etc.

Must work with ios and android

In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.

May I introduce you to LocalSend

LocalSend looks great, but I don't think it captures OP's intention. It would require someone else to download the app if they wanted to receive a file, but OP is asking for something that uses the already existing Airdrop/Quick Share so that they could send a file to someone without them having to install anything. I've had similar wants, as when I've wanted to share something with someone in public that I don't really know, I've just had to upload it to send.vis.ee, but that can be quite slow and inefficient. Something leveraging both Airdrop/Quick Share (that doesn't require you to be connected to the same WiFi network like LocalSend) would be ideal, as those are features included by default on stock iOS and Android (no install required). For instance, there was something similar called WarpShare that allowed you to share something via Airdrop from an Android device to an Apple device (but only in that direction), but its development has stalled and it isn't capable of using Quick Share for Android devices.

1 is great.

for 2: syncthing is exactly this.

I think Syncthing specifically does not work with iOS.

That can be true, I don't know. Apart from that, the suggested app is exactly what Syncthing is.

Oh I know, I use Syncthing on 4 devices for various things, it's really convenient. But my understanding is that iOS is the one major platform that doesn't run it, and the OC specifically asked for iOS compatibility. It is my understanding that iOS isn't open enough to allow it.

Afaik, there is no app to very easily generate GIFs.

  • select images
  • select duration
  • select quality / size
  • generate gif (avif?)

plus:

  • optimized for smartphones

There is switcheroo which makes image conversion easily. It converts to gif as well but only 1 image to 1 gif, not 2 images to 1 gif.

It should be straight forward since image magick contains all neccessary commands for gif creation

A music player for Jellyfin (that support SyncPlay)

doesn't that exist already? I could swear I saw at least 2 on flathub

Only for movies, not for Audio only, and they mostly don't support Sync Play (except for the official Client)

But if I missed one feel free to send me the links!

(I know that Finamp are working on a Desktop version though, but not out now and don't support SyncPlay)

What about a fully featured PDF tool (page deletion, blank page instertion, OCR, edition, conversion, cropping, reorientation, etc...). This is a very missing feature of the linux world, we always have to jump from one software to another. An alternative would be to build the plugins of Okular to allow to make these operations.

Have you checked out Stirling-PDF?

It looks great, but it is far from easy to install... Either you have to compile to use docker! Computer are not made for mathematicians only anymore ; )

There's a docker image already that makes it easy to deploy and use, no compiling required.

Do you know what really doesn't exist?

A pure, HTML only, WYSIWYG text editor. Every text editor out there is either XML, JSON or Markdown based. HTML is the most widely adopted standard ever and is the best for storing content long term. People could write CSS themes, you could even add paged media support.

NVU, Dreamweaver were tried to be like this. Only thing that wysiwyg'ing HTML isn't that easy as one might think, especially nowadays where thousands of web css frameworks exists and every structuring is done via divs.

You could make your own framework, or select/import one you like, but then the app will have way too much parameter, which needs to be configured by the user. It would be a really neat power tool, though.

ps.: Funny thing I was just thinking about wysiwyg editors in the recent days πŸ˜…

Nono. It's just a Writer. Like, Word, or Google Docs. It's easy to do. Like all those Markdown editors, but HTML. For notes, book writing, etc.

A simple GTK4 + libadwaita sound recorder. I know it's probably a 1 day task but we seem to lack a good modern recorder for my favourite DE.

P. S. I smell another downvoted to oblivion moment for liking GNOME

Would you take iced/cosmic or tauri? Or it really has to be a GTK4?

I want it to be a GNOME focused app so it should at least comply with all GNOME Circle rules

Sounds good, I'll consider it heavily as audio/gtk4 would be interesting

I just have a script that wraps pw-record and ffmpeg to transcode to a mp3 file. I'd also like a GUI for it tho

I must admit I do not understand what's going on in the first sentence but I do agree that having a GUI is good

Voice assistant that allows to perform common tasks like setting up calendar events, sending emails, opening apps, etc. Bonus points for "connect to server abc" and the assistant would open the terminal and ssh to abc server.

I desperately want a simple GUI for setting the sample and bit rates for my audio input device. Mine is a Focusrite 2i2 gen 3, but there should be a fairly universal way to do this in Pipewire.

How about a doc editor, not code editor, not m$ word. Just a simple modern doc editor.

We really don't have a native asciidoc editor, not even one. Unlike other apps which we don't use it frequently that even electron liked apps' performance are acceptable, doc editor should be built in native.

We have something like https://www.appflowy.io/ and https://www.getgrist.com/, but none of them are native.

A backup and restore utility which allows me to export/restore system settings and installed apps. This would make a reinstalll much less time consuming and allow installs of the same configuration on other computers.

A gtk app for YouTube and/or twitch intended for media PCs would be neat, with controller/remote support and ui optimization for air mice.

I don't like the ux of kodi very much and trying to get it to play YouTube has been a nightmare πŸ˜… a simple app with a decent user interface would be very welcome

A simple intuitive whitelist/blacklist firewall with logging for both inputs and outputs. I shouldn't have to navigate NFT's complexity or write scripts simply to list all the websites I'm willing or unwilling to connect to and their port number. There are silly limitations on all the tools I've tried.

I use a whitelist because my code sucks, and PDF datasheets for hobbyist hardware projects can be super sketchy to download. I have somewhere around 600 entries on my list. It feels like an intentionally obfuscated/overcomplicated issue in OpenWRT and elsewhere from a user's perspective.

I really don't trust local LLM's overall now that they've been shown to have hidden vulnerabilities and would love to have an easier way to monitor an outputs log and sandbox really.

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There's a big lack of a decent RC airplane simulator on Linux. One that you can plug a transmitter in via USB or Bluetooth and go from there. Real flight is the king but it's Windows only.

Clozemaster-style spaced repetition app for languages. It reads a sentence with text to speech, you have to fill in the blank with your target language. Translation can be shown if you're stuck, and you can turn on hints when typing. It shows the words based on the SM-2 algorithm or similar

A gui app that lets you:

  • symmetrically encrypt and decrypt text and files with AES-256 and without any weird formating that would make it incompatible with openssl.
  • generate (without writing to file) RSA-(2048-4096) keys and asymmetrically encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify text and files.

It should be simple without any advanced options or storing any data or credentials or saving anything without asking the user. For example;

For symmetric text:

  • 3 text boxes, 1 for input, 1 for output, 1 for password, encrypt/decrypt radio, 1 button.

For symmetric file:

  • file picker, 1 password text box, encrypt/decrypt radio, 1 button

For asymmetric generation:

  • 2 text boxes, 1 for priv key, 1 for pub key, 1 button.

For asymmetric text:

  • 3 text boxes, 1 for input, 1 for output, 1 for priv/pub key, encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify radio, 1 button

For asymmetric file:

  • file picker, 1 priv/pub key text box, encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify radio, 1 button

This sounds like something a LLM could do. Have you tried it? It could get pretty close.

Not sure if you can use rust to write browser plugins, but I really want a plugin that when you right click a link, you have to option to open the link with javascript disabled. Chrome or Firefox.

An open-source Resilio Sync alternative (not syncthing) that centers around the folder represented by unique hash, without any device management

A basic, local text-to-speech app using home assistant's piper would be great. Feed it a document and have it read the document to you, highlighting along the way.

Would it be possible to clone the snipping tool from windows?

Flameshot pretty much already does this, though perhaps not as elegantly

Something that gives you a reminder after a certain time of using a specific program (a game for example). I wanted to make it on my own but my coding skills are absolute garbage so it probably wouldn't work very well.

A speech-to-text / dictation system geared towards writing documentation.

A graphical SSH client similar to Termius

A gui for a tunneling solution such as rathole or FRP.

Konsole has a SSH Manager. So its one click to Connect. Not sure if that is what you want.

I want something with: a built-in key manager (with optional cross-device sync) SSH tunneling support (dynamic, remote and reverse) snippets simple, beautiful UI.

I'm sure many users will like it.

screen2gif. Peek is really good on the capturing side but it lacks all the editing tools like resizing, changing speed of each frame, removing specific or ranges of frames, inserting frames, drawing on frames, and of course exporting in different formats with very good compression options. I really miss being able to fine tune my gifs without having to open multiple tools or scripts.

I want this, needed to add a demo gif to a Hyprland plugin's README the other day and it was way too complicated.

There is an app called Rethink DNS for android. It is a DNS filter by Mozilla guys. It can also show the DNS queries generated through the system. One can block certain apps, exclude certain app from DNS filtering. It has wireguard support, that means can route certain apps through proxy. It has to be the bast app I ever downloaded. Please can you make something like this for Linux.

If anyone knows an existing alternative please comment. (On arch based distro.)

Sticky notes, but they accept markdown and mermaid syntax

Option 2: a Windows XP Paint clone. Seriously, all the paint clones you can get on Linux, like gnome paint, just don't work properly

I wrote a version of this in Python a few years ago, but it depended on external tools like ffmpeg to work, limiting its portability. The Python requirement was also a major factor for adoption.

If it were ported to Rust, doing the (de)serialisation internally, I believe that it could have far-reaching implications on how we share and consume news:

https://danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/

If you're interested, I presented the Python version at PyCon UK a while back.

Cool project. Perhaps something could be implemented on the fediverse. It might even help prevent people from cropping out credits πŸ˜€.

That's an interesting thought. There's a lot of cases you see where people have stripped a comic's name from the bottom of the image, but that's not really what this project was designed for. Aletheia will guarantee you that the person/company sharing the media is who they say they are, but critically it won't prevent infringement.

The example I give in my talk is that InfoWars could take a BBC news story and say "we made this", but it wouldn't let them modify that story and claim that "the BBC made this". The goal is to be able to re-connect what someone is saying with the reputation of the person saying it, with the hope that we can start delegating our trust to individuals and organisations again.

An actually good alternative to Notion for Linux.

Appflowy might not be there yet, but it is improving fast

Yes I know about AppFlowy and also about Anytype. However AppFlowy feels off for some reason and not as stable. Anytype feels pretty good but it has the issue that you can't store and sync more than I think 1 GB of data. You could self host a sync server but that's extra complicated with that software for some reason. So it's not really a good alternative either. :/

1 Custom GLIBC locale configurator

Pick date format, time format, currency I'm currently using a weird combination of English, German, and Danish and it still doesn't fully do what I want (time is separated with a dot)

2 System hosts manager

Search, detect conflicts or other issues and add new items.

3 XCompose manager

I made something like this myself some time ago but it uses the outdated GTKSharp library and misses several features such as conflict detection. https://github.com/QazCetelic/Composition

4 Package manager

This might be a bit complicated, but it would be really neat to have an app to manage packages that doesn't freeze, crash or fail.

5 Port your app to tauri

I saw you're using Electron, you could port it to Tauri https://tauri.app/

It used to be tauri, but due to a bug in tauri that lasted more than a year, I had to switch to electron. I've been thinking of switching back, but I've got other priorities

A wayland screen recorder. Not everyone needs a complex app like obs. Also, a jellyfin/emby front end maybe?

Like Kooha?

Also, GNOME comes with a pretty great simple screen recorder by default.

As far as I know, SSR doesn't work with wayland. Kooha seems nice though, even if I can't try it (I don't use flatpaks).

A budget app. I'm tired of all the good ones being web apps that spy on you. Multiple accounts, recurring expenses, ability to set goals, there's a lot of features you can implement (or not) depending on how far you take it.

Currently I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onetwoapps.mh which gets the job done but I want similar functionality outside of android.

Frontend for AOL that looks like regular desktop AOL but without all the ads and popups. If only because it's something I doubt anyone would make before the EOL of Windows 10.

A modern UI for ClamAV or a Subsonic Music Streaming client (In gtk4)

A utility to map extruded lines/objects/shapes to STL files. For example, say you have an STL of a curved vase. You want to add a spiral to it. So you place the photo of a spiral on the object. The utility lets you decide where on the STL it'll be placed, then you can decide the extrusion depth (positive or negative).

Possibly including some type of LLM, too. So you can import your STL, then type something like "picture of the Simpsons in the style of ancient Greek amphora vase paintings." It'll appear as line art on the 3D object

Note that I don't need this, myself. You want to work on something interesting, so I thought for a few minutes and came up with this. :)

Maybe meta, but a linux installer for windows that works just like a normal installer on windows. You download the .exe, double click it, it opens a wizard you can walk though, and by the end of the process, after it reboots, you're in a linux distro.

You know what, it could also be for linux, when I think about it... not everybody wants to write on a flash drive, reboot, run through installation, reboot.

The original idea is that non-technical users don't know what an "OS" is. They might search for "windows alternative", "windows replacement", "linux installer" (if they heard of linux), and so on without knowing it's an OS. If they could download something that installed "the linux app" without having to know about partitions, flashing a USB stick, MBR vs UEFI, distros, etc. it could make things much much easier.

  • distro: which flavor of linux would you like (as stable as possible)? gaming (bazzite), productivity (ubuntu), bleeding edge (debian sid?), design, development, expert, security, ...
  • desktop environment: look and feel? more like MacOS (gnome), more like windows 7,8,10 (KDE), more like XP (LXDE, LXQt), Windows 98 feel (XfCE, ....)
  • probably other things, but maybe that's all non-techies care about

The installer could have warnings for configurations e.g "you have an NVIDIA card $model, this has known issues with your display manager (Wayland), would you like to select automatic fix?".

Anti Commercial-AI license

Torrent based software installs and updates, to reduce workloads on Linux servers

A "stupidly minimal" cli package that monitors power usage in real time. Bonus points if it is written in C++, with zero dependencies.

doesn't powertop already do this?

Not really -- it has way too many "bells and whistles" to be called as "stupidly minimal". Then again, what I had in mind was something more straightforward with nothing else than "Current power draw: (number goes here)W. Updates every 3 seconds."

An HDR calibration/troubleshooting tool for KDE.

A port of SignalRGB, or a similar app that allows me to set up RGB using a GUI interface where I can arrange the lights to match my physical setup with my mouse. OpenRGB is too cumbersome.

A proper port of Nvidia Control Panel with no features missing (I especially need the 3D settings screen and RTX video enhancement settings). Or ressurect ATI Tray Tools and add more features for both GPU manufacturers. Nvidia X Server is woefully inadequate.

I'm not sure at all why to use Rust for a desktop app unless it's something super complex and demanding like a browser (the motivation for developing Rust in the first place). Otherwise use a garbage collected language that handles more bookkeeping for you.. Also the GUI toolkits so far aren't written in Rust afaik.

Hmm would a GUI toolkit or even a window system (X or Wayland server) in Rust count?

Otherwise I mostly want libraries and CLI programs rather than GUI ones. Or a kernel module. Like rewrite btrfs in Rust since the C version is still full of bugs after all these years from what I can tell.

Iced is a Rust GUI toolkit which is high level than any existing toolkits including Qt, GTK etc. System76's COSMIC desktop is developed using Iced. I believe Iced will replace Qt and GTK in Linux space in coming years.

Rust is not only for low level programs, but it's a general purpose high level language for any kind of applications. If the OP wants to go high level than Rust, there's always Haskell which is an older cousin of Rust but with more functional and higher level abstractions.

I believe Iced will replace Qt and GTK in the coming years

Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?

In all seriousness, that sounds like an impossible dream, kinda like the "year of the Linux desktop".

The only question I have with regards to Iced is, how flexible is its theming, cuz COSMIC's theming is not that flexible. It's alright, but not the best.

I guess what constitutes a HLL is a matter of opinion but I think of Rust as low level, like C++ with memory safety. Haskell is high level but introduces its own brand of pain. Most of the imho interesting alternatives are on the exotic side. Maybe things will converge after a while.

Thanks for the link to iced. I'll look into it.

I would love a radarr/sonarr style app but for YouTube with sponsorblock built in.

edit: sorry I missed where you said desktop app

"application", not "app". Please don't let phone tech companies enshittify our language.

Enshittify/enshittification must be the most overused and most incorrectly used buzzword going around at the moment. Even more so than "AI".

People shortening application to app is not enshittification.

Application is a pretty cumbersome word, too. "Look for XYZ in your application store", "Go to application view", etc just doesn't roll off the tongue as well.

I was using the term "app" long before smartphones were a thing. That said, "program" was the more commonly-used term for me in the 90s.