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.
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
Happy to test if you do.
Three finger drag in Wayland, a new gui for opensnitch where i can isolate network activity by app like little snitch
GUI for managing fingerprints/PAM that allows complicated or at least some customization with PAM such as requiring password on first login then allowing graphical fingerprints for sudo, unlock and other prompts with fallback to password.
I think this a pretty good idea. There’s a few other ideas below as well that are like settings tweaks or ui for them, it might be cool to build out something kinda like what opensuse has with a bunch of settings put into a graphical app.
Qt version of cool GTK software: Nicotine+, Ardour (ahahah), Lutris, Cartridges
Qt software I would love to see graphically improved: QuodLibet, Falkon, Qbittorrent, KeePass
Others: PeerTube client, Syncthing client, Ardour+Kdenlive fusion (a good Video DAW is my wet dream), Lemmy for desktop
Qbittorrent desperately needs an easy way to change font size for us blind motherfuckers.
If you use the web UI, you can adjust the zoom in your browser.
WebUI has had exploits in the past, I wouldn’t use it unless I had to.
I was gonna say QuodLibet. Strawberry is great but I really liked QL back in the day.
Oh yeah, a reliable Android Syncthing client would be awesome after the debacle with Syncthing-Fork lately.
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.
Holy shit, it actually does! Wish I knew that before, ty!
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.
What qualifies as “using them wrong”?
Anytime they’re not printed. If it’s not printed, use a link. It makes no sense. I cannot scan a QR code on my phone with my phone.
Fair enough. Sometimes it seems QR users assume everybody has two devices.
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.
zbarimg decodes them on CLI.
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.
I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.
This is some sage advice thank you. I’m guilt of always starting something super difficult and then going back. My first couple qt projects were forcibly scoped because I had actually end users I needed to keep in mind and that helped immensely.
I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.
That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.
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.
Krita, after som tinkering, has replaced it for me, but I’m not a Photoshop power user either.
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.
Graphite is getting there
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
Absolutely
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
Yes you can. This would remind you that itis an appimage and then delete it
- ImageMagick
- Ghostscript
- Pandoc
- LittleCMS (CMS: Color Management System)
- Wireguard
- Rclone
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.
I wish Scratch was more powerful, kind of like Flash was back in the day, so that it would be easier to make more complicated things with it. I feel right now if you want to make a somewhat real game it gets too hard too quickly because you need to work around the limitations.
Check out turbowarp, an ultra fast reimplementation of scratch.
I’ve seen games that only worked in turbowarp.
Custom editors are probably needed.
On mobile check out OctoStudio.
For a bit of mindfuck check kdialog : Tool to show nice dialog boxes from shell scripts
Maybe the shell truly is enough BUT in some cases, say you want to help somebody who for some reason doesn’t want the terminal, you can bring the bare minimum of UI to give utility. My favorite example is the file picker e.g
kdialog --getopenfilename "*txt" | wc -las most CLI commands do support a filename as input.This is the KDE take on yad/zenity, no?
Looks like, I’m not familiar enough to spot obvious differences.
Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/
Pursuing feature parity with Calibre would be a long journey, but we have to start somewhere
What features does the Windows version of Calibre have that the Linux version not have?
Begging the question?
Sorry, I don’t understand what that means in this context. When I switched from Windows to Linux,I didn’t notice any difference in Calibre.
Your question, “What features does the Windows version of Calibre have that the Linux version not have?” cannot be answered without accepting an unargued premise: that the windows version has more features than the Linux version.
No one was saying that, so your question is begging the question.
That is what begging the question means in the uk, unless I’m mistaken.
Some context, which you may or may not be aware of, that makes the original comment funny, is that recently, Calibre, which had been a very boring piece of software, has started including a bunch of AI features. So there are some new forks that intend to make a drop in replacement for Calibre without the unwanted features.
I’m not debating with you. I was trying to understand your post.
Do you understand now?
I’ve moved on emotionally.
Your question, “What features does the Windows version of Calibre have that the Linux version not have?” cannot be answered without accepting an unargued premise: that the windows version has more features than the Linux version.
Nope, it simply asks (or even expresses genuine curiosity) about a subset of features on windows which might be missing in Linux version. That’s if you want to be super logical and fussy about things. If not, you could have just answered or moved the discussion in any relevant direction you would like. That was always allowed.
Ironically, you kinda did answer it, at least in part, by mentioning the AI slop bloat. Why hide your answer behind a wall of being a jerk, though? I can only speculate. Too little sleep, too many old Rationality Rules videos? :-) Thatt’s none of my business; I just hope you feel better now.
It assumes the windows version has features the Linux version does not have, which is a question in bad faith, and difficult to answer. Hence “begging the question”.
WinSCP is a Windows tool I use at work to send files between machines and I wish there was linux version. Programs like Dolphin are similar but I always manage to find something I can do in WinSCP that I can’t do in the linux alternatives
Edit: commenters just pointed out a bunch of potential solutions I wasn’t even aware of, so I’m probably just dumb please carry on
I’m not sure what WinSCP has what linux SCP hasn’t? I guess WinSCP is a GUI tool?
I do a lot of scp to send files between machines (even mac<->linux).
Filezilla?
It’s a GUI tool that lets you see both filesystem side by side and drag and drop items to transfer them
Can’t you already do that from Nautilus with bookmarked sftp locations?
I’m not commenting to discourage other tools from being made, just curious if there’s some aspect of that process that isn’t already easy to accomplish on Linux with existing GUI tools, or if you’d like to be able to do it differently is all.
Have you seen the current version of SSH Pilot? Close enough perhaps?
I’m intrigued.
Do you recall something in particular?
FWIW, I usually just connect to a ssh location from within Nautilus.
FAR manager (clone of Norton Commander) might be worth giving a look. Not a GUI, though, it’s TUI but responds to mouse.
On Debian,
sudo apt install far2land then runfar2l.BTW, to add ssh-agent authenticated scp connection, press F11, go to NetRocks and create connection. in the dialog you’ll need to select the protocol to
scpand then auth method in “protocol options”. you can edit an existing connection by going back to the connection “directory” and using F4 on the connection. Once you connect you can copy/move files back and forth.Along with scp it supports eg. smb, nfs and davs.
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?
Okular? Iirc it opens cbt and the likes fine.
Lightweight much?
All things must become electron do not resist
