GNU Stow, definitely. I can’t stress enough how wonderful this app has been for my sanity. I use it to manage my dotfiles and personal data.

I made one dotfiles folder, which contains home, etc and usr subfolders. I put all my configs in it (dotfiles, themes, custom keyboard layouts, etc) in the relevant subfolders, then with Stow I symlink dotfiles/home to /home/username, dotfiles/etc to /etc and dotfiles/usr to /usr, and poof symlinks are created for everything in it. That way all my configs are in one folder, I can sync it to my NAS easily, make it a git repo for version control, and even upload it to github. It’s amazing 🥰 I also made a personal folder which contains Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc, all symlinked to /home/username/Documents and such, so I only have one folder to back up for my personal data. Yes I’m very lazy and hate doing backups 😅

Rofi (or here for the X11 version) : It’s the best app launcher by miles, even if I used a DE I’d still use rofi. But I also use it for a lot of other stuff that it’s much less well known for: the run mode for launching scripts and other executables, the ssh mode for ssh, rofi-calc for a very light and fast calculator that understand natural language, rofi-games as a games launcher, rofi-emoji as emoji selector… Rofi is life, rofi is love, rofi is God.

Libation to liberate audiobooks from Audible. There’s tons of apps to download and un-DRM your files from various platforms, but most only work on Windows. This one does work on linux 🥳

Lots of self-hosted apps for my media server, but they are all pretty well known (Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Komga) except maybe Suwayomi Server for manga (it can sync progress to AniList, and there are plugins to enable downloading from online manga reading sites)

ani-cli for watching anime because I’m a crazy person who grew up with MS-DOS and TUI apps make me happy. Also it’s often more convenient than having to check ten different websites to find the one anime you want to watch only to discover that half of them have been taken down.

yt-dlp to download videos from YouTube. I use wrapper scripts to make it more convenient to use because I’m lazy, but it’s great.

Any benefits to help notes stuff over obsidian or other?

Boxbuddy makes it incredibly easy to use distrobox, a great way to install software that might not be available for your distro, but is available on another distro, or just a way to keep a piece of software in a stable state (like DaVinci Resolve with davincibox).

If you use a “gaming distro”, I’m sure you’ve seen Input Remapper. It’s a neat utility that can create macros for all your peripherals or rebind keys as you like. Want to bind you controller so it works like a mouse? Possible. Want to macro key pressed by using the forward button on your mouse? Possible.

Did you leave Foobar2000 behind when you switched to Linux? Why not give Fooyin a try. It’s a relatively new audio player with aspirations of becoming just as configurable as FB2K. For me replaygain is quite important, and while some other FOSS audio players support it, not many has replaygain generation. And Fooyin does. While also being just as easy to set up and use as Foobar. Worth a look.

GitHub Application Manager (GAM): https://github.com/fmstrat/gam

It’s like apt for installing directly from Github releases. A plug, sure, but I still use it regularly for things like FreeCAD, Cura, OrcaSlicer, and so on.

gnome-network-displays let’s you cast your screen to a wireless display (Miracast) or to a Chromecast device.

It works with KDE no problem and even under Wayland.

It creates a virtual display that can be organized like any other display: unify with another screen or extend the desktop using your DE’s default method/UI. And then it uses standard screen sharing conventions to send content to that virtual display.

I don’t know what kind of dark arts the developer(s) employed to make this possible, but the end result is simple wireless display in Linux that just works! A MUST for using Linux in a business setting.

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

I really like units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.

~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in'
	6 ft + 2.8031496 in

auto-cpufreq to automatic CPU speed & power optimizer to improve battery life for Laptops.

Syncthing for syncing folders and files directly between your devices.

Also whatever software or driver I loaded to make this HP Thunderbolt Docking Station work with Linux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AutoKey automation / word expander tool.

• I reconfigure ALT + i/j/k/l to ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts.
• It expands abbreviations of one’s choice like “gCo” to git commit -m '
• One can assign scripts to abbreviations and hotkeys. E.g., when I press CTRL + Shift + [ it surrounds the selected text with a tag:

text_selected = clipboard.get_selection()
text_input = dialog.input_dialog(title="Wrap with a tag.", message="E.g., type cite to get <cite>x</cite>.", default="")
keyboard.send_key("<delete>")
clipboard.fill_clipboard(f"<{text_input[1]}>{text_selected}</{text_input[1]}>")
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+v")

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

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✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

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