Hi Linux Lemmites. Recently finished up school and started working full time and kind of miss working on personal projects. I’m looking to try to make something in rust and try out gpui if I can figure it out or maybe egui. I also want to make something maybe even a handful of people would actually use as I find that motivating, so I ask what would actually be useful to you?
Edit: thank you all very much for the input, I think that maybe doing something akin to a “settings+” would be a fair target for me for a n initial project. If I make anything interesting I’ll make another post in this sub.
A universal uninstaller.
Now that Ubuntu has apt, snap, ~/bin, flatpak, appimages, etc, when I want to disable, update, or, uninstall an app, I can’t quickly figure out where it is or how to do that. So a program that starts with ‘which appname’ or something more clever to find it, which also told you what type of installation method it was and then let you remove it with the next action.
For example I had Desktop Docker installed which was garbage, and I didn’t remember how I had installed it. In that case you couldn’t use ‘which’ because that’s not the name of the executable, so you’d have to design something smarter that could search .desktop files or whatever.
Good luck with your project!
The GNOME & KDE Platform have a software store with an “uninstall” button?
What platform are you using with Ubuntu?
That works for things that are installed via the app store, but I install things from other sources as well.
I don’t know what you mean by platforms, but if the software I want is not in the app store, I usually go to their website and see how the developers recommend installing it.
Sometimes I download an appimage. Sometimes I download a .deb. Sometimes the developer wants me to wget directly into sudo (yuck) sometimes I have to clone a github repo, rarely these days do I have to download a source tarball and make compile, but maybe I get some old software that works that way.
Sometimes it is confusing because the software I installed (e.g. Steam) has the preferred way from the website different from the version in the app store (Steam-launcher or whatever). The problem is I don’t remember which method I used to install what.
In my imagination, I open the universal uninstaller, and start typing the app. As I type it shows suggestions. If I select it, it tells me how I installed it (downloaded a deb from their website, etc.,) then the next click takes me to the correct uninstall method.
Pretty sure you can just delete appimages
A part of the desktop GUI that opens git forge stuff for installed apps. Like I want to just right click “submit code issue” for an app and have it open a proper templates issue for that given project. Right click and select “see source code” and it pops open my ide of choice. Add some integrations for building and installing forks and branches so I can test my changes in real time.
I wish Stonesense was better and more stable. Im just glad it is still maintained though.
(a tool to view dwarffortress’s forts)
I wish there was a graphical or CLI option to add a Linux drive to etc/fstab.
This is kind of what partition managers do, no?
And CLI-wise, you can just open it in nano… Or where you talking about something interactive?
gnome-disk-utility can. And PySDM.
A graphical ‘advanced’ package manager for Qt / KDE. Something to replace Muon which is/was the KDE equivalent of Synaptic but no longer available in Kubuntu. Discover shows you apps (both snap and apt), Muon showed packages with all sort of relevant technical information (source, dependencies, ‘reverse dependencies’, installed files). I guess everything Synaptic/Muon does is also available through the various
aptsubcommands but there is value in a decent GUI to bundle those individual commands and their output.A standalone utility for decoding QR codes that will work on a desktop. All I want is to be able to put a picture of the code in and get whatever text it was concealing in a little text box where I can read it, and C&P it if it’s useful to do so. If something like this exists, I’ve never been able to find it, although there are seemingly dozens of programs for generating QR codes.
Kde’s spectacle (screenshot utility) does this by default now.
zbarimg decodes them on CLI.
I wrote a little script a while back that would save a temp file with fswebcam, run zbarimg on it to decode the qr, delete the temp file and if it worked it would pipe the output into xclip/wl-copy, otherwise it would try again (up to 8 times).
I hooked it up to a keyboard shortcut and I’ll see the webcam light flash one or two times when I hit it, then know it’s good.
It wouldn’t be a ton of work to also have a popup with the qr value using zenity or something, maybe use the --question and pass it “copy $output to clipboard?”. You could have an --error if all the scan attempts failed.
Feel free to shoot me a pm if you want help.
Ya know I tried for years to make QR codes a thing. Now they’re a thing but everyone uses them wrong and it drives me absolutely nuts.
Should be very possible. Are you on Linux or Windows? Please write me again at the end of the week if I didn’t come back to you.
GNOME
It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be. Extensions break with every update. There seems to be no long term plan with it.
Honestly, bring back unity.
It feels like it never quite decided on what it wanted to be.
Wow, I feel the absolute opposite. Of all the UXes I have ever used, Gnome feels the most like they have a vision they’re committed to.
Not everyone likes it, and I get it’s very different to the WinUX that most others have settled on, but they absolutely have a vision, and they execute on that vision.
Extensions break with every update.
Sort of.
When a new Gnome version comes out, Gnome’s default behaviour is to mark extensions as unsupported. But in reality unless you’re upgrading to the first Beta releases, you’re unlikely to run into that, as extension developers will have marked their extensions as compatible long before the new Gnome version has hit stable and distros start pushing it.
You can disable the check if you like, but hypothetically that could lead to issues (say, if Gnome radically changes the calendar applet, and then you force enable an extension that tweaks the old applet). Gnome, probably wisely, goes with the more stable option.
If you just use the stable branch, you’re unlikely to ever get broken extensions.
Gnome is like the t virus. Slowly trying to devour everything else and convert it to its side by force.
They don’t actually break for the most part, the extension usually needs to be updated to say gnome 49 instead of 48, or you select ignore version on the extension site
They haven’t caused major changes that actually make them break in a while.
Paint.net for Linux. Most of my experience with making art digitally came from paint.net and there’s not really a good alternative that doesn’t require me to recreate my workflow from the ground up (Krita).
Pinta is technically an option, but it’s missing many of the features that modern paint.net has.
For now, I have to make do with a VM to run it.
Oh, it’s marked as “garbage” in the wine compatibility database 😕
The new Gimp 3.0 is quite a lot better than the last versions for digital art. Maybe try it again?
GIMP is still missing a way to draw a circle without some convoluted method. It won’t work for my needs currently.
I understand why it doesn’t exist because it’s pretty niche and a shitload of work, but I wish there was a a really good dedicated 2D animation software similar to Moho Pro or Toon Boom Harmony on Linux. That’s one of the only reasons I’m still keeping Windows around.
Also as a side note, don’t trust Toon Boom. I bought a perpetual license from them that was super expensive, and then they switched to a subscription model and turned off my perpetual license.
Its funny because there is really good animation software on Linux. Problem is its difficult. But what it does is real good!
Kvm/libvirt windows vm maybe? It opens windows apps as linux apps, issue comes with using gpu but toonboom seems cpu and ram intensive?
You would just set it up normally in the vm then open the app through your start menu as you would normally.
Blender and davinci? Prob doesn’t compare, but they run natively ar least.
A GUI for Mozilla SOPS to use it as a password manager.
GUI for Pipewire configuration. Being able to reliably change the sample rate and buffer size without having to mess with config files would be nice.
There’s a few GUIs, none of them very good: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#GUI
I think I’d shoot for something like this for maybe a project 2 or so. I’ve messed a bit with cpal already because I wanted to mess around with doing some basic dsp stuff so I’d love to do a full easy effects replacement with this included. Or alternatively include something basic in the settings project I mentioned a bit higher up
- ImageMagick
- Ghostscript
- Pandoc
- LittleCMS (CMS: Color Management System)
- Wireguard
- Rclone
A comicbook viewer that is lightweight and supports .cbt well, without slowing to a crawl depspite it being a simple tar. Just needs to have pic-for-pic and webtoon (attach at bottom) modes.
Btw, why is the nonsensical format .cbz (zipping already compressed images) the default? And why is such a simple format always in electron GUI?
All things must become electron do not resist
Okular? Iirc it opens cbt and the likes fine.
Lightweight much?
A real Photoshop replacement. GIMP is cool, but ain’t it. I have yet to find ANY software that can replace PS. I’ve even tried using multiple programs to replace PS, and it just doesn’t work. I fucking HATE Adobe.
I’m not an artist by any definition, but I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment of excising the cancerous growth that is the Adobe company out of existence. You may have seen this website before, but have you checked out fuckadobe.com? Alternatives are a little ways down, past the wall of text.
Krita, after som tinkering, has replaced it for me, but I’m not a Photoshop power user either.
I’d love to do something this big in scope eventually maybe a couple projects down the road but I’d definitely want rust to be at the level of my main languages before I delve into that depth. I also would want to avoid the gimp development times it seems it takes forever for stuff over there
Graphite is getting there
Absolutely
I’d be happy to see one more email client option. Using Geary now - nice ui but very limited in features. Been through quite a few in the past.













