Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
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.
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.
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!
Have you heard? The release candidate of 1.0 dropped just a few days ago. It looks very interesting.
!!!
I had missed that. Thank you!
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.
Well we can’t live without a modern Total Annihilation, so effectively that means we can’t live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?
Loved TA as a kid. Played it for countless hours on GameSpy and EA Zone. Will definitely give this a try, thank you!
Sweet! For others coming by, here’s the official trailer:
That link doesn’t seem to work for me 🙁
I picked up KdenLive for video editing and it’s pretty freaking good imo
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.
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!
Emulation Station Desktop Edition (ES-DE) is probably a good alternative gaming frontend similar to Playnite
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
I might take you up on that, thanks for the offer!
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.
Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.
Speaking of tagging, keep an eye on TagStudio
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.
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.ymlfile, 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.ymlThen just run
docker compose pull && docker compose up -devery 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.
My choice is
screenon 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.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
In that same vein, give zellij a look! I use it pretty constantly whenever I’m sshing in a nominatim server
screenis liketmux, 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
tmuxbutscreenis usually installed on the systems I’m working on.tmux is a modern screen replacement.
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.
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
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.
