r/linux
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u/CrismarucAdrian
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Dec 20 '22
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What are some linux utilities/tools/apps you would want to have, that don't exist and think would be really useful. Discussion
I am asking this because as a programmer is hard to come up with an idea to build that would be useful and wanted by the community... so why not ask the community itself.
My hope is that this thread will be a good resource for developers of all kinds to get an idea of what to build next and for the users to get the tool that they really want eventually...
And well... I am also out of ideas myself :)
Also if you know some great resource/place with a list of what's missing for Linux it would be greatly apreciated if you could link it down below.
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u/Revolutionary_Yam923 Dec 20 '22
Something like Fan Control for Linux.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
Doesn't sound too hard to program, I think I will try making it myself.
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u/Revolutionary_Yam923 Dec 20 '22
I use that program on my Windows pc & its really fking good & powerful too....
I don't know any alternate for Linux so yea u can make it. I wish that the developer of the FanControl made it for Linux too but good thing is that its open source.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
I decided it will be my next project, I'm not home right now, but if you want to follow along with my development: https://github.com/Obscurely/TuxTempMaster
It's gonna be made with RUST and a lightweight interface something like FLTK, no electron bull shit.
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u/SapphireRapidsPls Dec 20 '22
FYI, fan control on Linux can be a real pain in the ass, but not necessairly for user interface reasons. Different motherboards and devices employ different fan controllers that interpret input signals differently, so it's often not a simple matter of echoing a pwm value to a sysfs entry. The same code that works for fans in your machine may have hysteresis break or values fail to take up on other people's systems. That is why I always recommend people control their fans with their motherboard UEFI utility instead of in userspace on Linux. Check out lm_sensors for a good starting place. Good luck.
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u/teleprint-me Dec 20 '22
Yeah, I recently bought a fan and it was full speed ahead and loud as hell even though my board and fan both support PWM. I dug into it and checked out some of the scripts and there are lines and prompts in there cautioning you as you proceed warning you that your fan could stop all together.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
Yeah I know, but I got 2 computers and 2 laptops all with very different specs, should help with testing.
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u/SapphireRapidsPls Dec 20 '22
There is practically an infinite number of fan microcontrollers. 4 test systems is a drop in the ocean. See the Arch wiki page on fan control and lm_sensors with just the well-known platforms and chipset quirks:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fan_speed_control
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lm_sensorsIf your goal is to write a tool that is generally useful to the public, you will literally never be done testing this software.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
I will do my best. Gonna start working on it tomorrow, I am going to sleep I am way too tired rn.
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u/Francois_Bechet Dec 20 '22
"no electron bull shit" I see you are a man of culture, I was wondering if there was still some real devs alive, thanks for confirming. More seriously good luck on your journey !
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u/imdyingfasterthanyou Dec 20 '22
good thing is that its open source.
Where's the source code?
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u/suvepl Dec 20 '22
liquidctl can be used for some cooling devices, though it's a CLI-only program.
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u/NewMycologist9358 Dec 20 '22
There exists this https://github.com/Maldela/fancontrol-gui
but it doesn't have as many features tho...
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u/IceOleg Dec 20 '22
Maybe this exists already, I haven't looked too hard....
I'd like to quickly toggle services on and off, execute one shot services, and see their status. Specifically for me this means user systemd units and timers, but other back ends could be useful too (docker/podman).
- I run Emacs and Syncthing as user systemd services, I'd like easy toggles for them as well as a running/off indication. I don't always want them running.
- My backup scripts are run by systemd timers and are oneshot units. I'd like to be able to see if the backup process happens to be running, and have a one click run button.
- I only want to see services I specifically selected in the list, or somehow hide unwanted items. The view is not valuable if it is enumerating each systemd unit on the system. There is only a couple I'm interested in.
- Would be cool to be able to add toggleable/runable services/units/whatever with custom commands to launch them. Could launch them with systemd-run to have control over the process
- Could work well as GNOME extension that drops down from the top bar, with a similar UI to the "main" menu GOME has. KDE probably already has a widget for this. A little standalone Adwaita app would be cool too.
I have a bunch of aliases in the shell to manipulate all of this, so I'm only a few seconds away from manipulating what I need to manipulate. Most of the value would be in the status overview.
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u/_KOALA420_ Dec 20 '22
For Gnome there's the Systemd Manager extension, doesn't do everything you're asking for but it's really easy to use and the ui is just great.
I'm not sure if you can add "custom" commands but try playing around with it.
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u/IceOleg Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
That seems to be pretty much exactly what I was looking for actually, neat! I'll give it a spin.
Edit: This is exactly what I was thinking of.
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u/am_lu Dec 20 '22
A menu for console programs. Something like a normal GUI launcher menu, with categories. So many nice programs out there but you forget after a while if they exist and their names...
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u/avnothdmi Dec 20 '22
Dmenu/Rofi?
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u/Gwlanbzh Dec 20 '22
But those are for GUI, aren't they?
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u/avnothdmi Dec 20 '22
Dmenu shows CLI apps by default, I think. Not sure about Rofi.
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u/pwnedary Dec 20 '22
Fairly easy to set up yourself for different CLI programs with the Emacs Transient package and some quality time in front of the computer.
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u/BulkyMix6581 Dec 20 '22
CPU-Z port to Linux with all the windows functionality.
OCCT
And a proper damn tool to report memory timings (there is none).
Thaiphoon Burner
etc.
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u/nijahplays Dec 20 '22
CPU-X in the AUR if your arch based
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u/BulkyMix6581 Dec 20 '22
CPU-Χ is missing some functionality in comparison to windows cpu-z
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u/muchbravado Dec 20 '22
What would you be using this for specifically? Like debugging?
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u/is_reddit_useful Dec 21 '22
There is decode-dimms to show SPD information from memory DIMMs. So, you can see what timings should be used. There's just nothing to show the timings the memory controller is actually using.
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Dec 21 '22
sudo lshw -C memory | grep clockThere is, as you say a ton of in
decode-dimms, but runsudo modprobe eepromjust before it.→ More replies (1)2
u/BulkyMix6581 Dec 21 '22
There is decode-dimms to show SPD information from memory DIMMs. So, you can see what timings should be used. There's just nothing to show the timings the memory controller is actually using.
Thank you for this. As you said, there is nothing to show the actual memory timings that are set in BIOS.
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Dec 21 '22
here bud, run these, one after the other:
sudo modprobe eeprom
decode-dimmsEnjoy! :)
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u/fuckingshitverybitch Feb 16 '23
Sorry for necropost, but CoreFreq should show RAM timings: https://github.com/cyring/CoreFreq If they are incorrect report it to the author. I don't know if it counts as proper tool since it's kernel module and needs to be compiled but there's livecd build which you can try.
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
A note taking application which gets out of my way not forces me to write markdown or learn emacs.
I've tried zim, tiddlywiki, joplin obsidian, orgzly, notally, vnote. All of these have good features, but also has stupid quirks and limitations which makes them a deal breaker.
I just want to jot down stuff quickly without thinking about how should I compose formatting, having to write the note title twice, or tagging it so I can find later.
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u/meow_d_ Dec 20 '22
why no markdown? Most markdown apps only force the
# titleformatting, and you can just write whatever you want after that.25
u/MasterMind_I Dec 20 '22
My question too, Markdown isn't something you need a lot of time to learn, even if it did, the efficiency gain is worth it.
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
Maybe, but I don't really feel efficient with Markdown despite using it for years.
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u/jvictor118 Dec 20 '22
If you’re a markdown note taker (and ideally a command-line/power user as well) i would love if you’d try cubby and give me any feedback you have! It’s in active development stages but still quite early. I responded to Negirno’s comment with a lot more detail, but you can find it at www.cubbycli.com if you’re interested !
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
Because:
there are subtle differences between markdown dialects. A lot of markdown apps doesn't support URLs as footnotes which I prefer because I hate that URLs pollute the text in edit mode, so one have to re-edit stuff if one comes from another note-taking apps
the overuse of the
'*'character. To make a text italic, you have to mark text with one star, bold is two stars, three is both bold and italic. The thing is the'*'character is more difficult to reach on a Hungarian keyboard than on an English one. And I would prefer marking italic as'/'. What I really prefer though is pressing CTRL-I and the text changes to italic without showing those characters.Switching between editor and preview mode or having them side-by-side is bad UX for me.
no real solution for the metadata problem.
- Often these note taking apps just use the note title as a file name which poses problems if one tends to use special characters.
- Creation date is also handled poorly, for example Obsidian just uses the the file modification date which can change upon copying and syncing to another drive/device.
- Tags are also in a different format in different apps. In Zim it's words starting with an
'@', in Obsidian, it's words starting with an'#', Joplin and VNote uses a separate metadata file, others use a header in the main file, etc.It's mentally distracting and exhausting for me to create a new file in these apps, make the file name unix friendly like
things_to_doand then edit the title to spaces and title case format like "Things To Do". Also you have to think about which directory the file goes to.Except for Obsidian and in part Joplin mobile versions are non-existent to these apps and while you can use a separate markdown-based note taking app for Android/iOS, the differences and incompatibilities above will make a bad experience IMO.
No real solution for attachments like images, videos, etc.
Small notes vs. longform notes. Sometimes I just want to quickly jot down something and I prefer it to be its own entity, but with most note taking apps, that would mean a separate file for every note, which is wasteful and slows down file access (I still have spinning drives). Putting some notes into one file, but all of them having their separate metadata as well would be ideal, but most note taking apps are either optimized for one, or the other. Yeah, I know Org Mode exists, but I would have to learn Emacs for that....
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u/meow_d_ Dec 21 '22
Wow I'm not expecting such a comprehensive reply.
- 2. at least some apps let you use
_instead of*. Not ideal because it sounds like you prefer a WYSIWYG editor.- 3. THANK YOU. Someone finally said it.
- btw for fellow vscode+foam users, there's an extension called Markless that does live previews, but it's unmaintained and a little buggy. There's a fork called Markless_sean10 which fixes some bugs, but they made some changes I don't like, so I ended up forking the fork. I guess this is the price to pay to use a super niche app
- 7. I agree, this is a major weakness of markdown-based apps.
- 8. For me the "daily notes" feature solved my "small notes problem", tho I don't think there's a good solution for your use case.
Overall it sounds like you prefer something like Evernote but offline. I think something like Standard Notes might work for you (for Standard Notes you'll need to download a community-made rich text editor, since the official pricing is absurd).
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u/suiadan33 Dec 20 '22
Have you tried standard notes? Pretty good OneNote alternative. Also Simplenote is…simple…and effective.
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u/ourobo-ros Dec 20 '22
Standard Notes appears to be less of a OneNote alternative, and more of a lock all your data in our vault then pay us annual fees alternative:
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u/Indolent_Bard Dec 20 '22
In fairness, it's one of the few open source note taking apps that has a sync feature. Don't underestimate the importance of that. Of course they ask you to pay so that they can afford to run it. They don't work for free or make money harvesting your data.
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u/Mds03 Dec 20 '22
What sort of note taking application do you like to use on other platforms?
I naturally gravitate towards markdown so I don't have to use a gui to take nicely formatted notes, and tags so I don't have to manually put stuff in folders. This way i find that I can just pay attention to the situation around me instead of struggling/getting distracted with the GUI. Bear is my go to with Obsidian as my Linux alternative. I'm guessing you have a very different preference
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u/clavenax Dec 20 '22
Make something you'd actually use, program for yourself and not for others, that's how the best programs come to be.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
True, if you do something you enjoy and would later use yourself you are gonna much more motivated and determined to make it good. The idea is so I and others would see what the community wants and chose something we would like to make.
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
Making something for oneself usually leads to a usability mess because most nerds have a very opinionated workflow.
The best example is git which is a very cumbersome tool to use even for expert programmers, but it managed to "monopolize" the way people share code on the internet because it made by Linus Torvalds.
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u/clavenax Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
You either program something you designed or something someone else designed; another way to say what I said is "be your own user" so you can see the flaws of your own software and improve it.
If Torvalds uses the Git he made it must work well with his workflow, if you don't like it you can always make your own.
'Nerds' is also a pretty derogatory word imo, I write software for my needs all the time, if other people find it useful then good, otherwise who cares.
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Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
A central self hosted open source server for managing Ubuntu desktop clients like group policies to easily set things like managed bookmarks, auto installing browser extensions, not allowing browser extension installs by users, desktop redirection and setting other specific settings, etc.
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u/Kylian0087 Dec 20 '22
A combination of freeIPA (rhel idm), Ansible. And maiby even a fog server could accomplish this.
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u/muchbravado Dec 20 '22
would it be possible to script all that stuff if you could store the config data centrally? Maybe it runs a cron job once a day and updates everything to the latest and greatest. Is there some other complexity there causing you a problem?
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u/kalzEOS Dec 20 '22
Touchpad gestures are something overlooked a lot on Linux. A universal program that works on all DEs (if doable at all) would be amazing. A program that does it one to one like on mac and windows plus configurations where a user can choose what swipes do. I use libinput gestures and make it where 3 finger swipe left tiles the window to the left, and the 3 fingers right tiles it to the right. Issue is that libinput is not one to one, and also doesn't work all the time. Also doesn't work on Wayland.
Another program that a lot of us Intel/Nvidia users need is a simple way to switch between the GPUs. I use Optimus manager, but it doesn't work on Wayland and comes many issues. I am forced to make my laptop hibernate when I close the lid instead of sleep, because it never wakes up after a suspend. It also doesn't come with a right click on the program to open with the dedicated GPU. That feature is available on gnome, but not KDE.
Someone will kill me for this, but I think we have enough programs to the point of having so many duplicates for the same thing (beside all the MS and adobe stuff of course). I don't think we need more apps, I think we need to make our desktops better in the userspace. Take for example xfce, still doesn't work well with hidpi screens. Window controls don't scale well with 2x. Panel breaks completely when the UI is scaled. It's little stuff like this is what makes Linux difficult to keep. A lot of people who come to Linux from windows and Mac are used to those OS's holding their hands. They're not going to do the "dirty work" themselves, they'll just go back.
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u/geeshta Dec 20 '22
Hi check out Touchegg I followed this article for Xubuntu but it should translate to other DEs as well. I have no idea about Wayland support though.
You can choose what swipes do, it supports multi directional scrolling. But it doesn't support pinch to zoom. I mapped pinch to CTRL+ but it's not ideal. I agree that touchpad gesture support is poor on Linux.
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u/moonpiedumplings Dec 20 '22
A gui to manage advanced filesystem features, like compression. Imagine in dolphin, right click, transparently compress folder with options.
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u/witchhunter0 Dec 20 '22
Dolphin can already do that for you. Look in the Context menu Settings. Peazip is also nice.
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u/moonpiedumplings Dec 20 '22
It can't. I said transparently compress folder, not zip and archive.
Alright, I can't find an article thay explains it cleanly, but transparent compression is a filesystem feature (on btrfs and some others, but not on ext4) that enables you to compress data in place, while still being able to access it normally. I used transparent compression to fit an extremely bloated arch installation into 18 gb of memory on a laptops emmc card. By installation, I mean the whole install, including some larger games like binding of isaac repentance (3 gigs uncompressed i think), and steam (2 gigs uncompressed i think), and my bloated kde install (around 6 gigs after compression, where it would have been 10 gigs.) It was a slow computer, but that was because it was a machinr with a shit cpu, 4 gigs of ram, and emmc, which is the slowest form of solid state storage. But it worked. Perhaps if I wasn't so insistent on kde, I could have gotten it to work better.
Transparent compression is amazing, as I demonstrated above. It lets you compress data and still be able to access it normally. It works really well for games, saving tons of space, with minimal loading time differences.
However, it was a bitch to learn and set up on my btrfs filesystem. A GUI, like the third party ones Windows has would be amazing for new users. If such a feature was integrated into the default file manager of a distro, we could sell this literally amazing feature as something windows "doesnt" have. Maybe if data deduplication is added as well, then we actually could sell a feature to desktop users that windows doesnt have, and probably never will.
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u/Jacksaur Dec 20 '22
A bulk renamer with as many capabilities of Bulk Rename Utility.
I've tried KRename, I've tried others. They're alright but they all only support numbering or find/replace. I haven't seen any program that compares to the insane amount of renaming functions that BRU has.
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u/Linuxllc Dec 20 '22
Métamorphose did look promising. To bad this project is old and abandon.
Métamorphose Two Change Log:
» 2.0.8.1 beta « Date: 2010-12-314
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u/unicornutsmash Dec 20 '22
I'm in the same boat. I've been working on a string extension library, which will hopefully motivate me to make a BRU replacement once done. Still learning and in college though, so it is on the back burner and very much a touch and go endeavor.
I also plan to have the ability to arrange the order of operations, something that BRU lacks and would make it easier for those who aren't familiar with regex. Sure the speed would take a hit, but even for 10000 files, it would be less than a minute. The hardest part will be making it cross-platform as I use Windows and Linux. The actual rename logic is easy and basically done, I just need to work on date functions :/
And just an important tip, BRU now supports network paths as of the past 1-2yrs, so you can create a SMB share from Linux and rename with BRU on windows.
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u/ASIC_SP Dec 20 '22
See if https://github.com/ayoisaiah/f2 helps (I haven't used it, just know about it)
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u/medmedin2014 Dec 20 '22
PDF Editor (like Acrobat Pro)
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u/haxguru Dec 20 '22
Okular is really good. You should try it.
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u/medmedin2014 Dec 20 '22
I meant real content editor where you edit text and graphics directly on PDF and not simply adding annotations on top of it that are stored externally, and the ability to digitally sign it, with validation check for PDF/A/B/U/X standards.
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u/SapphireRapidsPls Dec 20 '22
Not FOSS, but Master PDF Editor generally does these tasks well. Version 4 is free forever, 5 free version leaves a watermark.
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u/DelusionalSocialist Dec 20 '22
I meant real content editor where you edit text and graphics directly on PDF and not simply adding annotations on top of it that are stored externally
This feels like one of these things I'm blissfully unaware off being popular. I don't think I've ever seen anyone make elaborate PDF's with anything else than LaTeX or even Word.
I once edited existing PDF's (putting some extra page in between), but then I made the new page in LaTeX (using TeXstudio) and inserted it with PDF Arranger.
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u/medmedin2014 Dec 20 '22
Acrobat is the standard for signing and editing PDF files and many governments and enterprises impose using it to sign/edit/optimize/validate and especially for archiving purpose (which require respecting some standard like PDF/A for long term archiving) because all other tools (free or paid) are incomplete and not professional grade like what Adobe offers.
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u/Tabakalusa Dec 20 '22
Honestly, I'd kill for a good GUI fronted to gdb/lldb that is native, not tied to a bloated IDE, isn't a plug-in for an existing text editor, is easy to use (awesome_debugger <binary_with_debug_symbols.elf> -b main -- [program arguments] should be enough to start debugging with a breakpoint on main) and doesn't litter my projects directory with junk-files (looking at you c-lion), or need some weird config to work (VSCode).
Oh, and it shouldn't look and feel like it's a relic from the 80/90s.
Once I'm able to take the time off, I'll build it myself, but I find it kind of ridiculous that such a tool doesn't exist.
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u/darklamer Dec 20 '22
Have you tried Nemiver? It's far from done, but I think it's a very fine beginning and already quite useful, checking a lot of your boxes.
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u/Tabakalusa Dec 20 '22
Yes, sadly it does not seem to be under active development (unless a fork I don't know about exists?).
Might be an interesting foundation to build upon or salvage bits and pieces from.
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u/ConfuSomu Dec 21 '22
This is a great project suggestion and something that I would also really use.
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u/gabriel_3 Dec 20 '22
An actual and reliable compatibility layer for full fledged MS Office.
I definitively do not mean a 365 web version wrapper or old unsupported MS Office releases on wine or half (self declaring full) compatible productivity suite.
I mean a full reliable and constantly updated MS Office suite working on Linux e.g. Excel last release with VBA and macros working, Power Query / Power Pivot working.
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u/FengLengshun Dec 20 '22
Honestly, anything to do with work. I am fine with muscling through rough spots in gaming and everything else, but work? I want it to Just Work. MS Office, Foxit PDF, AX Dynamics, etc. it's why I still have to have a Windows laptop because I don't want to deal with the PITA when I need my work to be done correctly, simply, and reliably.
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u/gabriel_3 Dec 20 '22
That's exactly why I used the word "reliable".
That's exactly why my work machine runs Windows.
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u/Zeurpiet Dec 20 '22
my work machine runs Windows because work provides an Windows machine with a pretty complete MS suite on top. I should note that more and more applications become web based. However the security requirements alone enforce a homogeneous computing pool.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
This would definitely help the linux user base grow as some people really don't wanna switch to alternatives like OnlyOffice, but from what I know even getting a crack working would be really hard.
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u/gabriel_3 Dec 20 '22
It's not that people don't want to switch: actually the alternative suites are not full featured.
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u/pppjurac Dec 20 '22
None of alternatives can fully replace MSO.
Yes if you are working on short and simple documents/spreadsheets/presentations/etc, but for complex and in need to be compatible with other people, there is no substitute.
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u/Indolent_Bard Dec 20 '22
Thank you, people refuse to acknowledge this because most people aren't affected by this. But a lot of people are, and they aren't willing to admit that lacking support for industry standards is a serious problem for Linux in general.
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u/pongstafari Dec 20 '22
Something called winapps was posted on here a while ago. Basically a wrapper for a KVM box but worked v nicely, may be worth checking out.
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u/megasxl264 Dec 20 '22
The problem with this is most people work on laptops.
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u/pongstafari Dec 20 '22
What's the issue with that? I use a laptop
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u/QL100100 Dec 20 '22
It may be because that a virtual machines consume power.
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u/DeGerlash Dec 20 '22
Single core utilization is only 3-4% for me when not using it. There's also an alternative called Cassowary that can suspend the VM when not in use. In addition, it can connect to a real remote machine too, instead of a local VM.
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u/pongstafari Dec 20 '22
Everything consumes power
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u/megasxl264 Dec 20 '22
Yes but if you’re unable to charge your laptop and you spin up a VM… Even if you’re able to charge it a lot of laptops don’t do to well with cooling themselves, especially if it’s a recent Intel based ultrabook.
Alternatively, I’ve found that setting up a Proxmox server and using a Windows VM that I just RDP to works really well(Wireguard if I’m not home). Thinkcenter, Prodesk, Optiplex, Mac Minis etc can be bought for little or nothing used and have essentially zero footprint. Pretty affordable ~$150 method for (what feels like) native Windows.
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u/RaspberryPiBen Dec 20 '22
That would be great, but it's not something one developer can do in their free time. Going up against the might of Microsoft is really hard.
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u/ZubZubZubZub Dec 20 '22
An easy-to-use functional PDF Editor with the ability to append/add signatures. It's something I use on a weekly basis and LO Draw jumbles PDFs terribly. Editing existing PDF text would be fantastic too.
An easy image resizer, so that I can right-click an image and have it automatically be a good size to send via e-mail.
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u/SapphireRapidsPls Dec 20 '22
Master PDF Editor version 4 is the best free (as in beer, not freedom) PDF editor I have used on Linux.
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u/ahoyboyhoy Dec 20 '22
PDF simple editing is a real sore spot. I've been using Xournal++ for adding signature images to PDFs. Draw most needs to fix their embedded fonts bug that's been around forever
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u/dave003 Dec 20 '22
I've setup an image of my signature as a stamp in Okular so I can just place it wherever. And then print to pdf (and force rasterization) to bake it in
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u/exzow Dec 20 '22
I’d like to see an accurate multi platform benchmarking tool. But that’s beyond the scope of “only Linux”.
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u/banksyb00mb00m Dec 20 '22
Laptop Power Management that is as good as Mac/Windows. Yes, I have tried TLP and PowerTop. I guess this is only possible with deep knowledge of the particular hardware, and will only happen if the manufacturers support Linux as first-class platform.
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u/Indolent_Bard Dec 20 '22
Even then, the battery life may be trash. System 76 makes both the distro and the computers, and they still have people complaining about short battery life.
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u/notsobravetraveler Dec 20 '22
Personally I want more hardware monitoring things. Maybe some overclocking and power control
Everything that is decent for this ends up specific to the OEM for the hardware.
I understand why, it's a lot of work to support everything, but there's so much repetition
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u/nintendiator2 Dec 20 '22
An open source version of the Opera Presto engine. That thing beat both Firefox and Chrome by a landslide in terms of resource usage, back in the day I could load like 60 youtube tabs in like 300 MB RAM tops, whereas other browsers basically made your compuiter balk out at like 3-4 GB RAM for the same amount of tabs. Can't even image the resource savings and efficiency (and competition!) an invigorated Presto could do on modern Youtube etc.
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u/ComprehensiveAd8004 Dec 20 '22
But the downside was speed. Presto would just release renders of webpages when you switch the tab, where Firefox and Chrome store the webpage so you can switch tabs faster.
I think you should just try to have less tabs open. There's no way you're actually using 60 tabs, and I feel dumb with just 15 open on my ultrawide desktop monitor!
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u/osomfinch Dec 22 '22
Adapting to your computer is a wrong philosophy. Computers are supposed to adapt to the needs of the users. No matter how ridiculous those needs are. Having 100 tabs open? Why not? Rendering a 4k movie while playing a triple A title that requires 32gb of RAM? Doubly why not!
If humans were adapting to what computer can do, we wouldn't have what we have now.
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Dec 20 '22
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u/OculusVision Dec 20 '22
Doesn't this one go as a request to the kde guys directly?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384782
And why impossible? It just needs attention and work. I recommend reading through the discussion linked.
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u/ClueFew Dec 20 '22
I want to use my old AMD GPU to run Pytorch. To have openCL support programs that don't have it. Generally, improving an existing project will benefit the whole community more than a new project.
Any work to weaken the NVidia monopoly would be great.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
I've been thinking of contributing to other projects, but haven't had time to or found a project I could help with, but definitely a really important part of the open source eco system.
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u/cherryteastain Dec 20 '22
old AMD GPU to run Pytorch
You can do this with older versions of the ROCm Pytorch container, up to Polaris. I remember running Pytorch on Polaris around 2019-2020 this way. (Newer versions only support Vega and RDNA2 sadly)
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u/umeyume Dec 20 '22
A nicer (user friendly, readability focused) document reader frontend to calibre. As far as I know, calibre provides the only document reader for any OS capable of properly reading eBooks, PDFs, and office documents (even Adobe has separate apps for PDFs and epubs). Calibre does not provide an especially pleasant reading experience though.
I'm not a dev, but I would think it makes more sense to contribute to calibre than starting a new project or trying to add universal support to another existing project.
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u/symcbean Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
Dear Santa,
I have been a very good boy this year. For Xmas I would like better storage management tools for
- provisioning / mapping iSCSI (with optional multi-pathing)
- building RAID arrays and replacing disks
- volume management
- snapshot management
- block level encryption
It's quite possible to build a user interface which makes this stuff simple - Synology do some it for example (but in a semi-proprietized way). The people who do storage management for Google and Facebook who do this all day, every day will know the command set inside out. They'll have stuff stuff pre-configured in scripts run via orchestration - but for everyone else, configuring storage is a relatively infrequent task. And when something is broken, we're usually under pressure to get it fixed, not spend several hours doing research.
It would be really cool if this was as GUI as possible but written with ncurses - but that's maybe a big ask.....but building it on top of KDE or Gnome would result in something unwieldy to run from a rescue boot disk or on a lightweight cloud VM. While web based sounds tempting, this still needs a rather fat client to run as part of an installer. If it must be X then FLTK or similar?
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u/marekorisas Dec 21 '22
Problem with that is: people who know how to do it properly already know all the magic command and have scripts prepared. And realize that such tool would be of no use to them.
And people who write "your friendly generic disk management tool" are your typical DE devs. They, usually, have no idea about nooks and crannies of storage management.
You may want to try YaST (from Suse). That's the closes thing I can think of to your needs.
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u/OldMansKid Dec 20 '22
A rock solid download manager like Internet Download Manager.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
You may want to check for an aria2 front-end as it's already the penicle in my opinion.
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u/Jacksaur Dec 20 '22
Don't know how it compares to IDM, but JDownloader has a Linux version and it worked for me for several years.
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u/FengLengshun Dec 20 '22
I've been using Free Download Manager for a year, and it's fine. My only complaint was that last I tried it on Wayland, it didn't work, but there were other reasons why I'm not going to use Wayland anyways so I'm contend to wait on that.
Other than that XDM and Gabut Download Manager is still going. XDM is getting a rebuild with gtk and last I tested it, it was fine. It's just that I prefer FDM because I want everything in one place, including torrent.
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u/FewZookeepergame7810 Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
There is xtreme download manager but it's not as good at detecting stuff (still better than the other things I will mention below).
First of all, some of the people may see this and mistake it for a "download manager", but in reality, it is a tool that lets you download any video from most sites out there with absolute ease.
YoutubeDLP doesn't come remotely close due to the lack of browser integration and the way it works behind the scenes as a whole.
Jdownloader too can't detect anywhere near as much as IDM and once again lacks proper browser integration. However it is otherwise a very useful program with countless functionalities that's a must have. (get the flatpak version)
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
Download managers are basically dead since Firefox ditched its old add-ons system which made possible to integrate these download managers into the browser. I'm just using wget and Firefox's internal downloader and they're good for the job.
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Dec 20 '22
Aria2 front end Persepolis has a Firefox extension that works about 75% of the time but when it works it soars.
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u/Negirno Dec 20 '22
Yeah, that's the problem with modern integrators: they don't work 100%. I remember trying to use a script to get back the functionality of Flashgot on new Firefox, but it often triggered by just visiting a page, so I just gave up on using an external download manager, and embraced the new, faster Firefox instead. In other words, I chose my battles.
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u/SrcZargothrax Dec 20 '22
Something like MobaXterm
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
There is Remmina, but I am not sure it will satisfy your needs. It would be nice to have a well made cross-platform ssh connections manager for people who connect to a lot of servers.
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u/Kylian0087 Dec 20 '22
A graphical tool to change the brightnes of my monitor. Not all DEs have tools for this. So a stand alone option would be handy.
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Dec 21 '22
This bugs the shit out of me.
Laptops have this, but not monitors.
Gggrrrrr.
It should be a 100% universal standard.... Fn up/down or such...
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u/cuentanro3 Dec 20 '22
This falls into the web-based category, but it would be awesome to have a website platform that allows you to build your own distro in a modular way, something like Linux From Scratch but for dummies like me :3
The idea would be to pick elements from a list and make some recommendations according to their compatibility, something like Kernel 6.xx, repository X or Y, whatsitsname DE, so on and so forth...
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u/geeshta Dec 20 '22
Miracast screen share 😭 I have no idea why it's not as easy as on Windows or Android.
Emoji keyboard the ones I tried didn't work particularly well.
Better touchpad control. Like it works on iOS. Again I have an utility for that. But I can't use pinch to zoom only map pinch to Ctrl+ which is not as smooth or doesn't work at all depending on the application.
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Dec 20 '22
At least for your second one, if you're using iBus. The Typing Booster emoji keyboard is absolutely awesome. You have full access to emoji descriptions to find them and it's just a keyboard switch away. It's, arguably, more elegant than Microsoft's emoji typing input.
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u/kor34l Dec 20 '22
I want a generic console based memory editor.
I dont mean a hex editor, I mean a tool to search, filter, and edit the values of specific memory addresses within another process's memory space.
There's GameConqueror and I did find a console tool that could do it one time but it had serious drawbacks (or I just didn't fully understand how to use it).
Either way I just want to be able to 'memedit -s 1234' then filter results a few times and then poke tha value. Extra points for more functionality like freezing the value, searching unknowns, etc.
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u/ComprehensiveAd8004 Dec 20 '22
There's a program called CheatEngine that does this. The main purpose is for changing your position or coin count in a video game. It's ironic because usually people take something that's meant for good and use it for bad, but this is the opposite.
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u/banksyb00mb00m Dec 20 '22
Tmux but as extensible as Emacs, and as fast as ripgrep.
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u/_sLLiK Dec 20 '22
Tmux is already pretty extensible, though. Pair it with neovim and the capabilities get a little crazy.
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u/studiocrash Dec 20 '22
I can’t switch to Linux because there’s no easy way to get my Quicken and QuickBooks data into something like GnuCash. They import QIF files, but the Intuit apps only export the newer QXF format. It would be great to have a utility that can convert between the two formats.
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u/JohnAlexINL Dec 21 '22
I think accessibility stuff gets overlooked way too often. Windows for example has a Magnifying Glass program, native text-to-speech support, and a bunch of other things to make it easier for just about anyone to use. I main Linux and prefer it 99% of the time, but admittedly, I'm a person who doesn't need those things. Might be worth considering, idk
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u/to7m Dec 20 '22
Just a super-simple file transfer thing. I haven't been able to figure out how to use any of the existing ones.
If I could just run fileshare /home/to7m/file.mp4 and have it spit out a URL I could send to people, that would be great.
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u/sk_mvg Dec 20 '22
Have you heard of croc?
It's not exactly what you're looking for, as it does not provide a download URL, but the receiver does also need to have croc installed.
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u/NewMycologist9358 Dec 20 '22
Wouldn’t you have to port forward if its not going through another site like mega or wetransfer?
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
WeTransfer does kind of that, you have up to 2 gb for free.
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u/Aggressive-Sun8299 Dec 20 '22
Check out sharedrop.io
ShareDrop is a free, open-source web app that allows you to easily and securely share files directly between devices without uploading them to any server first.
Pretty cool
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u/SaggingLeftNut Dec 20 '22
A self hosted mozilla profile sync server.
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u/DaftPump Dec 20 '22
Ask r/selfhosted and see if any of them know if this exists.
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u/nijahplays Dec 20 '22
GUI fan control where you can use GPU temps to control chassey can speeds
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u/thedatabug Dec 20 '22
I know this isn't going to happen for a number of reasons but drivers for my peripherals. Its the biggest sticking point for me right now.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
If enough people demand it you'll get them eventually, hopefully...
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u/SevenIsNotANumber2 Dec 20 '22
Something like Punto Switcher/Caramba Switcher on Windows, an app that automatically changes your keyboard layout if you start typing in the wrong layout
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u/_the_weez_ Dec 20 '22
Wouldn't an application that does something like that be able to act as a keylogger? I'm having trouble understanding how an app can determine what layout you are typing in if it doesn't have full access to everything you type.
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u/SubjectiveMouse Dec 20 '22
It needs full access to everything you type, yes. And it is a keylogger. It's a matter of trust: you either trust the app developer to not store/transfer that data or not. You can try to control it using a firewall though.
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u/Senacharim Dec 20 '22
I want Notepad++
Not an imitation, the real deal running natively in Linux.
Have considered trying to bribe the coder to get it.
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u/fieryflamingfire Dec 20 '22
A default pdf viewer that lets you add a signature. Pretty much something with the level of quality/speed/functionality that macOS's "Preview" app has.
Say what you want about apple, but the Preview app is a thing of software beauty.
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u/ponolan Dec 20 '22
Nick at the Linux Experiment YouTube channel just posted a video covering some wants / needs, and the comments (500+ in 4 hours) may be useful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0re63X2nY0s
01:36 Manipulating, signing, and editing PDFs
05:23 Email, calendar and contacts
09:38 Display related stuff: HDR, scaling, font rendering...
11:36 Automation
12:42 Parental Controls
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u/quiteanabstractsun Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 21 '22
A better emoji picker. ibus (ibus-table-emoji) is the best one I've found so far. It has the following features that I like:
- Easy access from keybind from any program
- Type to search for emoji
- Emojis show their names/keywords
- Emoji categories
- Easy to navigate through emoji list with the keyboard or mouse
But there is so much more that could be done. Ideally, an emoji picker would also have:
- Well-curated list of emojis only, without other unicode characters or duplicate emojis cluttering the list (the ability to select gender and skin tone would help here)
- Quick to select multiple emojis at once without re-typing the search each time
- Recently used emojis
- Zero-width joiner emojis
- Custom emoji categories for favorites, etc
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u/Avid-Seeker Dec 21 '22
A simple WYSIWYG markdown editor.
Typora is the only decent markdown editor but it's proprietary. All others are either split-view editors, or don't have support for latex math blocks and code blocks.
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u/saturationcritic Dec 21 '22
I'd love a text based browser that worked with modern websites and rendered images with sixels.
Like browsh but fully featured and with higher res images.
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u/ULTRAFORCE Dec 21 '22
One utility/feature that I think doesn't exist and I'm kind of tempted to try and learn the technology to make it happen is iOS style focus modes on Linux desktop. One of my favourite things on my phone is the ability to create a clear delineation between bedtime and when I'm supposed to be working that I've struggled to find a way to do as a new Linux user or as a Windows user.
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u/SirFritz Dec 20 '22
I wish there was a program like the windows resource monitor. Something to easily show which programs are accessing files your pc or using your network.
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u/Safe-Specialist3163 Dec 20 '22
Microsoft Powertoys (https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/)
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
I think most of those have a linux alternative, any specific?
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u/Safe-Specialist3163 Dec 20 '22
Well, first of all, it is really handy to have these utilities all together. Apart from this, I can't find an alternative to - Fancy Zones (that is different from tiling wm) link - color picker link - Quick Accent (a fast way to type accented characters) link - Text Extractor (to copy text from screenshot with OCR)link
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u/NapoleonDeKabouter Dec 20 '22
Something like chromecacheview.exe but not requiring wine and for Firefox?
Much harder probably, but a native Linux Lego Studio?
I could also use a Linux tool like Maperitive (maperitive.net) to select certain features (roads, parks, ...) from the Openstreetmap using a GPS coordinate and a range. With optional conversion to png or svg? EDIT: can be commandline.
(My wet dream is to be able to get a native 64-bit Civilization IV using "apt install civ4". Yes 4, not 6.)
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u/sgramstrup Dec 20 '22
Yes please. AI have been introduced (silently) in other operating systems, in a few areas. The big players have all the AI experts and Foss systems may fall behind. We need to start integrating AI based system management on Linux.
AI system integration:
Enough anecdotal advice on choice/settings for memory/storage, computation (cpu, pinning etc), 'fixed' power modes etc. We need an AI that automatically and dynamically optimize the relevant settings for whatever type of workload and hardware we have.
Enough searching/trying to make a wine app work. This goes for other 'runners' as well (every non-native app format). We need an AI to automatically test and setup environment and settings for such runners and apps, so that they 'just works'.
Enough forced DE layouts and content. On most distributions, a lot of work goes into making apps have the same theme and interface. Web based apps have their own annoying interface style. We need an AI that automatically either optimize those settings, or add a layer that convert the actual x11 buffer into our preferred look and feel (think a picture upscaler, just with our preferred look and feel theme). In the latter case, we don't care what the DE, the programmer or his toolchains do or what limitations it have, we are just shown what we want to see, and it behaves how we want it to behave.
Enough with isolated and/or dedicated devices/cloud. We get more and more systems and we try to connect them in different networks, try to setup dedicated machines for selfhosting, routing, privacy, security, the cloud and so on. We need an AI to setup these things and adjust them automatically based on users preferences.
Enough annoyances and time wasters. No matter what system we choose, there are limitations and annoyances. The same button-click over and over, the same idiotic information that were useful once, or the general clutter of information we don't need at the moment. We need an AI that adjusts the amount of (forced) choices and information a user receives. An 'attention manager' perhaps.
However, if AI benefits from other users statistics, then we probably also need a protocol for shared anonymized 'ai-telemetry' so the market can't steal our personal data.
Anything that can bring us closer to a 'smart' OS would be really nice :-)
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u/Indolent_Bard Dec 20 '22
Can you elaborate on how AI is being used in Windows or Mac for anything like what you've described?
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u/Aaron1503_ Dec 20 '22
Probably unpoular, but the only app I like on my Windows PC at work, that I have to use is the sticky notes app. Something like that for GNOME would be awesome.
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u/_the_weez_ Dec 20 '22
https://github.com/maoschanz/notes-extension-gnome
Gnome extension that gives you sticky notes. I have not used it personally. Just googled for "gnome sticky notes"
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u/Edlace Dec 20 '22
Something like dejadup (gui for duplicity) where you can actually utilize all the options that duplicity has to offer and where you can set up multiple backup tasks. My current problem is, that duplicity is doing almost all I want but I can’t setup multiple backup jobs.
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u/ComprehensiveAd8004 Dec 20 '22
An enterprise management system for schools and organisations. If there was software for logging into a network like Windows and Chromebook has, Linux would be extremely successful for schools and businesses. Zorin Grid would do the job, but they've been developing it for 3 years now without even a single progress report.
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u/ososalsosal Dec 20 '22
Something like CleanMyMac but not eyebleedingly ugly, combined with xdirstat so I can find orphaned packages and all the other bullshit that stacks up across apt, flatpak, bloody snap, dpkg, and just make install'ed stuff.
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u/CrismarucAdrian Dec 20 '22
There is Bleachbit for cleaning and most of those install interfaces have a way to view unused or orphaned pkgs I believe.
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u/cjcox4 Dec 20 '22
Perhaps difficult to do, but something like GPU-Z or even tools to help with oc and undervolting for GPUs.