Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
I switched to niri about a year ago. It’s perfect for those who like tiling WMs but want a more natural flow, without constant window resizing.
Niri with waybar, fuzzel, and tessen give a pretty complete desktop.
Lemmy
Syncthing; it’s a modern miracle
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.
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
GSConnect works great for GNOME too.
There’s also a still in-development rival for GNOME, Valent. And it’s a native program and not just a shell extension. I prefer it, and maybe it even has more features.
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!
This isn’t exactly “can’t live without,” that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
Jellyfin and the .arr suite.
It’s absolutely incredible and I am so greatful to anyone with the skillset and dedication to develop and maintain things like these.
Currently playing with Proxmox and HomeAssistant too.
Hat of to all of you legends involved in FOSS
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!
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.
My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.
Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I’ve tried before has really worked for me.
Bitwarden or KeePassXC is my favorite too :)
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!
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.)
