What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
1y 9mon ago by lemmy.ml/u/Shape4985 in asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
Mine is kdeconnect which does what local send does plus so much more.
- using phone to control laptop
- getting phone notifications send to your pc
- can browse phone's storage directly from pc
- find my phone function
Kde connect is great, iv always thought about using it but never got round to it as im current using a wm instead of a desktop environment. If i was to switch to a desktop environment kde would be my first choice as it has so many features.
I have kdeconnect on my i3wm.
Iv never tried it on my wm. Ill dow load it and give it a shot.
I tried the iOS beta until it expired. Didn't know it ever made it to the app store.
It used to be considered a security risk back in the day. Maybe it just a security "unknown"
I've had issues with it for file sharing, so far that I'm sticking to LocalSend, but I really need to explore KDEConnect further, as I haven't explored the rest of its features.
Wait kdeconnect is Foss?! Can I fix the atrocious gui myself?!? 😂
That application rules but it looks like butt on my workstation.
May I suggest valent?
I'm sure they'd welcome a pull improving the UX! https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kdeI think the implementation of the protocol is pretty well isolated from the UI, so pretty radical UI changes should be relatively easy
I just may...
Yeah no complaints on functionality! It's great!
GSConnect works great for GNOME too.
There's also a still in-development rival for GNOME, Valent. And it's a native program and not just a shell extension. I prefer it, and maybe it even has more features.
I found it to be more than I needed. I still have it installed, but use localsend more often
Lemmy
It's been a bit over a year for me, otherwise this would be the answer.
Bitwarden or KeePassXC is my favorite too :)
Hello fellow bitwarden user! I also self-host my server with vaultwarden
I wish i knew about this during my degree
it's the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there's a great open source version of the tool.
This, logseq, and PKM in general for me. I guess it's not really "can't live without" because I hardly know where to start, but the possibilities for organizing my mess of a brain are enticing.
It would probably help to have a project to work on and actually use the things rather than diving too deep into PKM conceptually... Really wish I knew about them in school, though.
Is Desmos open source?
Apparently so! https://github.com/desmosinc
It's actually recommended by a lot of profs now where I am, which is really nice
They overhauled the UI recently and it looks nice and modern too
Where's the source code for the first one?
On GitHub
Jellyfin and the .arr suite.
It’s absolutely incredible and I am so greatful to anyone with the skillset and dedication to develop and maintain things like these.
Currently playing with Proxmox and HomeAssistant too.
Hat of to all of you legends involved in FOSS
Same. I'm still primarily a Plex user for the player (it's just easier for sharing libraries with everyone) but I love the arr stuff. Just got readarr setup for audio books and audiobookshelf for the player which is really nice.
Probably my favorite feature of the arr suite is in Radarr and list subscribing. I've got mine connected to some good letterboxd lists along with things like tmdb popular to keep my library up to date with recent stuff. Also there's some podcasts I listen to like The Rewatchables. I just subscribe to the lists of movies on letterboxd and I can easily keep up with the podcast.
Make sure you get a reputable VPN to avoid issues with any "questionably acquired" content.
Just use Usenet.
I've never been able to figure out how to use usenet. Do you have any suggestions on how to get started?
I know it's reddit but this is a good guide. https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/18q7r0f/usenet_starter_guide/
Beyond that DM me for indexer invites if you seriously go down this path. Happy to help with any technical questions as well!
I've been very happy with a couple of indexers that I have paid for. I haven't needed to really jump into the invite only world. There really is A LOT of content available easily. I'm sure more niche content might need more select access, but for me I haven't gotten there. There was one Charlie Brown I have on VHS that took forever to find a better copy of, but I did eventually get a better version.
Any suggestions? I currently have a nord subscription but it's about to run out and I'm considering moving.
Mullvad is the gold standard
Proton
Mullvad is good like the other guy said but Proton has port forwarding, which if you don't wanna be a HnR jerk you wanna do
Only some countries need VPNs. If your country doesn't care about piracy (e.g. Italy, Spain or Eastern Europe) just don't bother paying for a VPN.
HomeAssistant, it's such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.
It's just an amazing piece of software.
My favorite thing I've done with hass is put a color-changing light bulb by my front door. It's connected to the weather forecast. I know what the weather will be at a glance without a website or going outside. (Where I live, it's not always obvious when I'm gonna get rained on.)
Truely a nice one. The community around it is quite cool as well.
Oh nice I was wondering if there was like an all in one place to put my shitty automations. I’ve been oddly fixated on automating my blinds.
Pretty cool, I use it as well. Works with basically everything thanks to the big community.
I just wish it allowed for proper programming of the automations. I despise the YAML-as-code hack they are using. I get it, it's much easier to offer a GUI editor for such a format. It feels very limited and cumbersome compared to regular programming though.
Yeah, as far as FOSS I almost actually can't live without: HomeAssistant controls my spring pump to the cistern so that the pipes don't freeze.
Has anyone done any greenhouse automation with hass? I don't know where to start.
Jellyfin. Use it daily. Dropping more and more atreamjnf services, it's been awesome.
Honorable mentioned to Revanced.
I just use plex since I have lifetime plex pass
I also have a lifetime plex pass and still switched to jellyfin because it's so much better IMHO.
Explain
What apps do you use revanced for? Maybe it's just me but the two apps I use haven't had new revanced versions in 6+ months.
YouTube, mostly. Twitch.
I just installed Jellyfin on my Raspi 4 and I'm not happy. It's so laggy and slow I can barely use it. What is your setup?
A Raspberry PI should be fine for direct play, but it doesn't really have the processing power to transcode. Check to see which mode you're in.
If you want the ability to live transcode, you'd probably have better luck with an old laptop or PC with a dedicated GPU (Even the lowest end ones have the same video encoding hardware in each generation, I use a GTX 1050).
Or a somewhat recent Intel Computer, maybe around 2017 onwards or even older. It can absolutely be a low-tier device As long as the processor has Intel Quicksync it'll be a breeze to do live transcoding. No dedicated graphics necessary!
I remember how the jellyfin documentation specifically recommends against RPIs since they have no hardware transcoding. I personally use a 4th gen i3 in a mac mini and it can do what I want, though I don't use it heavily.
This. I have an LG Oled TV that can nearly trascode everything so I didn't allow my user to use transcoding and forcing it to do direct play (there is also a plugin for it). Works like a charm. The only thing not supported are VobSubs but otherwise I had no issues.
on a pi you'll have to transcode the media for Direct Play beforehand. Pretty much anything that's not in h264 aac format will lag
Your pi is the problem if you are trying to playback incompatible H.265 content or stuff with incompatible subtitles like SSA-subtitles in anime.
My advice (if you can) get a mini-pc like a NUC (used or new) and do everything you did on the Pi.
Besides that, watch tutorials on how to set it up properly or take your time to get docker to know. With docker you'll just need to set up video permissions and the rest is taken care of by the container.
He'll, even an Intel based thin client would probably be enough. You can get them on eBay for like 30 bucks, which is about as much as a pi costs. You'll probably have to replace the ssd though. That'll set you back an additional 30 bucks.
Not a raspi, but I had similar issues on my opensuse HTPC which turned it to be related to issues with (or missing) media codecs in Firefox.
After (re)installing all of them, it worked like a charm.
I have Jellyfin running in a container on my little home server. I've never tried it on a RaspPi so I can't really speak to its performance there.
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn't like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt "right". I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It's only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn't initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
- Open source client and server.
- Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
- Cross-platform feature parity.
- Doesn't fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq's lack of organization.
- Easy notes syncing.
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It's about to be 2025, if the tools you're picking up aren't E2EE, you're letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn't matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
- Ability to publish notes.
- Decent UX.
Lol love the use of references. So glad you posted this. Looks fantastic.
I am using Logseq and the organization is basically the only thing not working for me. I will try this out.
I really tried making Logseq work for me but even if they added some kind of organization/hierarchy, I still had performance issues with my limited notes (just testing things, didn't want to go all the way in), and various copy/paste drag and drop UX issues that made the experience frustrating.
I started using Zettlr after Obsidian and i am pretty happy with it (besides one or two little things). I'll also look into Notesnook
Currently im using standard note but id love to give this a try. I first heard of it from techlore
Can you self host this yet?
Nice, I checked earlier on mobile but couldn't find it. Not sure why. Thank you!
Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn't imagine storing all my images without
Seconding this. Legitimately better than Google photos in a lot of ways, even if you don't care about the data ownership aspect. If you've ever been annoyed at how Google Photos handles face detection / grouping, you'll love Immich.
Thirded. Immich has no right to be as good as it is after such a short time. Completely took down my google photos, finally, and I still have face recognition, word search and automatic backup from my phone.
PCSX2. It's an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2's native resolution doesn't do the graphics of the PS2's best games justice.
It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!
And if you haven't used it in a while, we recently made a blog post giving a rundown of the changes leading up to our most recent major release.
Love PCSX2. I play a lot of old games as they have a charm to them and no micro transactions
Same! Have you played the Ratchet and Clank original trilogy? The old games have this special charm to them that I don't really see in the newer games of the series.
I haven't played that game yet! But there's an excellent wiki which allows you to check each game's compatibility. It looks as though the game has some issues with visual glitches when rendering in hardware mode. In software mode, it is rendered more accurately but the resolution cannot go beyond PS2 native.
I haven't played much of the older ones, but I really enjoyed Rifts Apart. It's beautiful, but it's also mechanically super polished and fluid, and while the storytelling isn't really my style, I think they do it reasonably well.
Mine will probably be Bottles.
The team behind that application did a fantastic job. Wine was due for something much more user friendly like this. And integration with Proton, allowing 3D acceleration is the cherry on top.
Great choice, i prefer bottles over wine for that reason
Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone's functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.
With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude's repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.
And here I thought this is running with the Android subsystem in a limited environment utilizung "plugins" as the packages.
That sounds so cool
Oh my god, that's amazing. I'm getting on something that can be rooted posthaste, but in the meanwhile...
Not to mention that with proot, you can even run kernels greater than that native to your phone.
anlinux feels like junest but configured it with gui and vnc , I might use it someday.
That sounds fucking awesome
Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:
Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)
cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)
VLC (media player that plays almost everything)
media player that plays almost everything
What doesn't it play?
It can't go back one frame at a time yet has no problem going forward at the same pace.
Pathetic.
Are there any FOSS apps that can do this? MPV can move frame by frame but moving back is so unusably slow.
Depends on the machine and.. maybe other things. I used to think that, too, but on my current machines I can step backwards just fine.
It's probably a much more intensive operation requiring processing a lot of the file from before and throwing away current buffers or something.
OpenShot. But that's a video editor and not a conventional video player per se.
I discovered that VLC isn't so good at playing .flv files. This are video files that are saved in the Adobe Flash Video container format. I have some episodes from cartoon series which I downloaded years ago. Sometimes there are no playback issues with VLC, but sometimes the audio track is delayed. For this reason I have installed IINA, but I like VLC's user interface better.
Thankfully, vlc's audio offset function is very easy to quickly adjust and save. As long as the audio delay is consistent you can adjust it pretty quickly.
Weirdly enough I often find things playing back better in IINA than VLC even though as I understand it they're basically the same under the hood. I also find the reverse occasionally as well.
The funny thing is that said .flv files could be played with VLC without any issue at the time I acquired them. I downloaded a bunch of cartoon episodes in this file format back in 2010 (?) when once-click-hosters like Megavideo were a big thing then. I was able to play them with the then current version of VLC without any problems.
Since then there were several updates with VLC and some time along the way it suddenly didn't work that good anymore. I might add that this file format is not very common today (it was, when Adobe Flash was still around), so today there might be no incentive to maintain any old codecs for these type of files any longer.
When it gets worse with dwindling playback compatibility I probably have to acquire these files with a more recent file format (e.g. .mp4) in the future.
You can convertí the files in another playable format with Handbrake, probably you Won't need Change the codecs of the files only the container and the conversión will be fast than reencoding all
You can, but it's a lot of number crunching time to convert a bunch of files like that, as opposed to just using a different player.
Yep, but if it only he need to remux then is less time than reencoding.
Yes, this would be an option (that I did not think of). But I assume that it would be easier to download the same file in another file format, as there will be probably an improvement regarding the video resolution (480p versus 1080p or higher).
I Think so.
It also in more recent years had an update that messed with it's vcd playback ability. Don't remember exactly the problem but I had a rip of an old vcd and was pleased that it played it back no trouble, and even from the original disc too but then a couple of years later it changed so I had to do something to extract an mpeg2 stream or something to get it to work and it from then on had audio issues that had never been there before.
The Stargate SG-1 DVDs for some reason. All others I tried work fine.
Banjo
It's not good at displaying anime fansubs if they have complex typesetting. I have to use MPC-HC + madVR. Sadly those fansub styles are a dying breed...
Corrupted files
Need to keep Cobalt Tools in mind. Was looking for something like that.
How does it compare to yt-dlp?
Warning, I might be wrong:
yt-dlp seems to be operated with command lines, whereas cobalt is a user interface in an opened browser tab. You paste the link of the desired video or audio source into a search bar and you can toggle different settings (bitrate, file format, video output size etc.). The desired file will be appearing as a download into your download folder.
Ooh nice - if it is indeed a UI it would be perfect for my grand-aunt. We went through many such alternatives, but all stopped working after a while
You might be lucky: there is a gui availiable for yt-dlp on GitHub. I just looked it up. The descripition reads:
Graphical interface for the command line tool yt-dlp, which allows users to download videos from various websites, including YouTube. It is designed to be more user-friendly and accessible for those who are not comfortable using the command line.
Link: https://github.com/dsymbol/yt-dlp-gui
Edit/addition:
There are online services availiable (for instance https://yt5s.com/en173)that basically do the same as Cobalt.tools. I assume that they don't put any emphasis on privacy tho.
I didn't know cobalt.tools was OSS. cool!
- URLCheck: Bring back the "open link with..." functionality of android with so many more features
- PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.
I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.
I just checked out fWallet and it doesn't support importing random PDFs so that's a huge downside to me since a lot of events I attend only send a PDF with barcodes/QR codes.
Oh I only thought about the .pkpass use case, as that's what I've been using PassAndroid for, before I switched to fWallet.
I actually tried fWallet first but it couldn't import my .pkpass file at the time and it didn't show any errors so I just gave up. I might try it again next time I have a ticket.
Hmm, that's weird. It worked just fine for me. I even tried it with a file that I exported from Apple Wallet, it worked just fine in fWallet.
+1 for urlcheck and add Rethink firewall for me
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 game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can't live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?
I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it... and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too...so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.
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 🙁
Immich as an alternative to Google Photos, it has all the main features but it's self hosted.
Immich is insanely good. No more needs to be said.
Is it stable yet to use it? I've seen it and it looks promising, but it's also under active development.
- Voyager --> feddit for android
- Fossify --> essential apps for android
- syncthing -- > more use cases than i thought
- paperlessngx --> finally going digital
- obtainium --> get android apps directly from their github
I am still learning and try to replace my stuff with open soure software
Some good recommendations. Im using voyager now to type this :P syncthing is so versatile. I have my devices sync my rom save files so i can pick up and play retro games and carry on from the same place across devices.
+1 for Fossify, great set of apps.
Aegis as an authentication App
Aves as gallery
Proxmox bare metal hypervisor for homeserver
try out Gallery (yes, it's really called just "Gallery"), I've found it to be the best one out there, even better then aves
Thx for the tipp just installed it for testing
Ill look into the first 2, I've never heard of them. Proxmox has always interested me, once i get myself a home server i was going to try it out.
Just installed proxmox on a 10+ year old ThinkPad with an i5 and home assistant runs much quicker now
You can run proxmox in a VM and have it run VMs to try it out. It also works on standard desktop hardware which is what I running it on.
Used Aegis for Years but manual backups became tedious.
Ente auth is my new one for anyone who wants E2E Sync!
I didn't discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn't budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I've gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we're sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
As a GIS person all I can is ...fuck yeah. I'm for better or worse deeply embedded in the ESRI world but I've started dabbling in FOSS GIS software and honestly it's all damn good. I don't understand how ESRI charges what they do. Also, FME is amazing if you haven't tried it yet (not free or open source) but awesome for quick visual development and data ETL.
I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It's expensive, but it's also pretty great. We're actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.
Honestly not a bad way to go about it
They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I'm just giving them the nickel.
We've been using QGIS at my company for almost 8 years at this point and I really love it. The python integration and deep plugin repository render it head and shoulders above ESRI. Although I admit for enterprise solutions many will still require the turn-key solutions esri offer.
I use this for architecture and it's saved me so much time
Tubular then?
Not discovered last year but ffmpeg.Crazy how many tools it can replace and how many usecase it has
What exactly is FFMPEG an alternative to? I keep hearing people mention it, but I've never stopped to look into it until now.
I tend to do some very basic video editing just to put an image with an audio file so I can upload my music to YouTube. This can do what I need it to do? To what degree can this replace a video editor with a full graphical interface?
Edit: Nevermind. I definitely misunderstood what the tool was at a fundamental level. Got it now.
Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack
*chef's kiss*
Add a private torrent indexer and/or Usenet and it's perfection.
There's also Homarr for those who prefer a nice and easy frontend to install the arr suite and more.
Syncthing; it's a modern miracle
I don't think I've found amazing things recently. Things worth using and things better than the alternative and things that are promising to maybe one day be great, yes.
But I'll single out one little thing: dust. https://github.com/bootandy/dust
Dust is meant to give you an instant overview of which directories are using disk space without requiring sort or head. Dust will print a maximum of one 'Did not have permissions message'.
Dust will list a slightly-less-than-the-terminal-height number of the biggest subdirectories or files and will smartly recurse down the tree to find the larger ones. There is no need for a '-d' flag or a '-h' flag. The largest subdirectories will be colored.
It's like a killer combination of du and sort oneliners that actually shows me what I want to know: What's the big stuff in this dir.
For those looking for an interactive variante, check out ncdu: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncdu
I use dust all the time at work, it's fantastic.
I use gdu
Looks nice.
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
Thank you for reminding me of this one! I keep forgetting to try it out
Oh wow! Every now and then I feel like I needed something like this. Thanks!
Freetube.
Once they added quick playlist functionality earlier this year, it was over for YouTube for me.
At this point it has everything I need and could only use small QoL improvements to be absolutely perfect for me.
I also prefer freetube to the containerized web hosted softwares like Invidious because I sit at a personal computer all day.
Ad and sponsorblock integration is sweet too
I don't know if Tailscale counts because it's mostly open source (with options to run your own server), but I use it constantly to connect to Home Assistant and Jellyfin on my home server, as well as pairing it with NextDNS (pihole is possible for those that want to go that route) for ad blocking and Mullvad to use them as an exit node.
You can selfhost it with headscale (the server). It's really simple to set up and use. I'm also considering moving to zerotier because a) it's completely opensource and b) the wifi management software I'm looking into (openwisp) has native integration
I haven't used tailscale to know how well it works but as a current zerotier user I've been considering moving away from it.
I actually love the idea and it's super simple to set up but has some very annoying pitfalls for me:
- It's a lot of "magic". When it fails to work the zerotier software gives you very little information on why.
- The NAT tunneling can be iffy. I had it fail to work in some public WiFis, occasionally failed to work on mobile internet (same phone and network when it otherwise works). Restarting the app, reconnecting and so on can often help but it's not super reliable IMO.
- Just recently I've had to uninstall the app restart my Mac, reinstall the app to get it to work again - there were no changes that made it stop, it just decided it's had enough one day to the next and as in point 1, it doesn't tell you much over whether it's connected or not.
Pretty much all of the issues I've had were with devices that have to disconnect and re-connect from the network and/or devices that move between different networks (like laptop, phone). On my router, it's been super stable. Point is, your mileage may vary - it's worth trying but there are definitely issues.
good to know, thank you for the insights! Tbh Tailscale/headscale has been quite stable, so maybe I'll stay were I am. Or move to nebula because why not? :D
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.yml file, 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.yml
Then just run docker compose pull && docker compose up -d every 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.
For self-hosting purposes, Docker = lightweight disposable VMs that are configured via docker-compose.yml. All important data should be in "volumes", which are just shared folders between the host and the container.
The end result is that you can delete and re-create containers at any time and they should just pick up where they left off from the data that's in these volumes.
Each individual published image has some paths they want to use for that; everything is usually specified in their example docker-compose files.
If you're not a dev, don't even try to understand Dockerfiles, it's not for you.
Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.
I've had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.
And something like this can be used as the docker server to hold the repository
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!
Revanced
Home Assistant. I only installed it to help me control my solar/battery but I ended up putting other things on it and fell down a rabbit hole.
That's how it starts. Before you know it you'll be buying no-name smart bulbs from Ali Baba and investigating custom firmware for full local only control.
Have you done other home automation that you could compare it to?
Not really. Only the odd thing on a brand's app, which isn't really comparable.
Proxmox, if that counts, life changing.
Linux and godot
DeltaChat.
It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Sends downsampled pics, videos or push-to-talk audio by default. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too, as a file.
Integrates with Jitsi Meet to connect video-calls.
It's available on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free-email-address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/), or use your own existing email address.
Elegant and robust.
No spam, because it is a family group for sharing non-public pictures etc.
You'd only get spam if you invited a spammer to chat.
The privacy comes from the E2EE.
I haven't used Signal.
Is your 'registered Signal number' your phone handset number?
From this page:
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318691-Register-a-phone-number
[You are right, Delta Chat uses AutoCrypt, which is OpenPGP based.]
I mainly want personal family photos away from long corporate data retention (and possible leaks) and away from AI scrapers.
Delta Chat covers this.
I'll check out Signal again though, thanks for the recommendation.
Do note, because it's using email, the recipient and sender are not private, along with the time, and probably the relative size of the messages.
The specific content of each message should be private as long as the encryption is done well. I haven't looked at it so I don't know if it implemnts safeguards to verify who you're messaging with (besides using the email address) and I don't know if it uses PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) to protect against a key getting compromised.
Really cool! An interesting concept well executed. Sadly has the same problem every new messenger has - barely any users.
But that's hardly their fault.
My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.
Adding to RSS.
I use FreshRSS to sync to Readably over Fever API.
Works very well!
NetNewsWire is amazing. I just wish they had a browser version I could use on a non Mac device.
RSS reader are a game changer. Ill have a look at this one. At the moment im using fluent reader
spotDL. Searches YouTube to download whole Spotify playlists, or individual songs, and includes artwork and metadata.
Interesting....
Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,
Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxisA modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseqA different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.
LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseqA different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it
My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.
I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me "this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!"... admittedly they didn't know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point... they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn't know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.
Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah... Syncthing isn't a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device... and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism... COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.
Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing's GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!
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.
Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.
Gotta be my Synology NAS. Although the hardware isn't free. The software is open source.
I moved always from every cloud storage provider to my own private cloud instead! Could not be happier!
My wife loves it too!
Edit: Sorry! Looks like some parts of the Nas is open. Not DSM itself.
I sold my Synology NAS as soon as I found out, that I can't change the underlying software (DiskStationManager). It wasn't open source and the hardware was dependent on that propriatary software. As soon as they decide, that your device is too old, they drop support and you are left with an unsecure brick.
And you are saying the software is open source. Did I miss something? Did something change?
I think it's closed source indeed, but their support window is very long at the moment, so while you're right, at least until now they're actually acting responsibly.
It would be easy to unlock the devices for different Software - like ugreen does.
And imagine all the possible backdoors in their software. No one can check, because it is closed source. And this on a device with your most senisble data.
Calling their acting 'responsible' is a huuuge strech.
Yep, my DS415+ is still going strong and fell out of DSM support, so I’m stuck with DSM7.1. However, people successfully converted their xx15+ to a xx17+ model and were able to update to DSM7.2. So there’s no technical reason to not support these older systems.
Also, I had a very bad experience with Synology support when the C2000 bug hit my DS415+. Once this thing dies, I’ll definitely won’t get another Synology.
By your definition no closed source company can act responsibly. If that is your definition, they indeed don't act responsibly, my point is that they appear to ship security updates for at least a decade after the device got released, which seems pretty decent. And they have a good record on quickly responding to any security issues and keeping everything up to date.
So they're doing pretty good. Would it be nice if they go open source? for sure, but for a closed source system, it's currently doing great.
My bad I think. Looks like some parts of the Synology Nas is open source but not DSM directly.
Any advice for a near (tech) illiterate newb on what to get? I only recently switched from using a patchwork of like 2 dozen different google drives to store all my stuff to a single nextcloud account through hertzner. But it costs per month, and that's always risky with my finances. Would love to learn how to do it myself, but don't know where to start. If it matters, I got the 5tb plan, and have 5 people on it (self included).
Here is how I (noobinoob) built my own Nextcloud-Server
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Hardware: I took the old PC from my aunt, no idea about the specs. Added 4 x 8 TB NAS HDD drives and removed the graphics card, the onboard graphic from the CPU was enough. No raid-controller, just connected the hard drives to the motherboard. In future I can add a PCI-Card with more SATA-ports.
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Software: I installed Linux Debian, put my 4 HDD drives in a btrfs-raid1 pool, encrypted them with LUCS, installed dropbear to ssh into my server when it is not started and unlocked yet, installed ddclient to update my domain with my home-IP and followed most (not all) of this guide to install nextcloud. Unfortunately, it is in german, but there are plenty of english intructions out there.
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internet-stuff: I bought a domain (10 Euro/year) and set up DynDNS. I opened the neccessary ports on my router/firewall.
I had to look up a lot of things and failed many many times, but now it works and I am very happy with it - no downtime in the last year. It took about 6-12 months to get there.
In conclusion: Your way (nextcloud on hetzner) is the much better way. You save time and money and your data is more secure.
But if you want to learn a lot of new stuff, building your own server is fun.
I understood some of that! Mostly the things like "a," "the," "and," and other such technical terms. Lol
Is my data more secure on hertzner? I thought self hosting was supposed to be better for that?
It is safer in the sense that, when you selfhost, you have to take care of your own backups. You have to make sure your data is still there, even if two hard drives fail, or your house catches fire and your server burns down. Hertzner is doing that for you.
But you are right of course, from a privacy standpoint it would be much better to have your data on your own server and only send encrypted backups to a remote server like Hertzner.
That makes a lot of sense. I think I'd like to do it, eventually, if for no other reason than I am 33, and I feel like my time to learn this shit is slipping away pretty quickly sometimes, but maybe not for all my important stuff like family pictures. Start small and just make sure i can do it first, once I understand a little more
I started with 30, so not far off. My first step was to try to daily drive Linux. Best decision ever, working with a computer suddenly was fun and exciting again.
I've been daily driving fedora for a few years now, but I never really get deeper into anything than opening Firefox, and a few Gnome extensions. Haha
Is this a new thing? AFAIK, Synology used to be open source, but then went closed source several years ago. Which is, when the Xpenology project was born.
Since when is Synology software FOSS?
Nuclear and RiMusic are great so i dont need spotify/YTmusic or something.
proxmox really made me enjoy selfhosting again.
I remembee nuclear for the convincing testimonials shown on their website
Those testimonials are hilarious, I love that kind of self-deprecating humor (or the confidence to stand up to critics).
FREE and open source
"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:
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Kvaesitso, search focused android launcher. I used to really like nova launcher's local search and navigated my phone mostly using that. But once gensture navigation became a thing I had to stop using nova and replicate the experience in Samsung launcher with various local search apps that were lacking in comparison. Tried to go back a couple times once gestures with 3rd party launchers got better but found my old setup still too ugly and sluggish to go back to. Recently I randomly came across Kvaesitso on fdroid and it was everything I ever wanted out of a launcher.
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Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.
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Kid3, audio file tag editor. It has much better workflow/automation than mp3tag that I used in windows, and it seems if you spend some effort on it you could add more automation to make it even better.
I wish one of those search based launchers would implement a t9 keyboard for searching apps so I could replace Appdialer (which isn't open source)
Kvaesitso is such a good launcher, have yet to find something which is better.
The TIC80 fantasy console. It's like Pico8 but open source.
Pico8 is not open source? TIL. That's so odd.
It's not but tic80 is honestly a bit cooler anyways.
Yeah, it's not. Leads to weird situations on Linux handheld where you paste in your purchased binary if it's compatible, or you use an emulator like fake08 that has good, but not perfect, compatibility.
Would be awesome if they offered an alternative forge & chat so they aren’t locked entirely to proprietary software for communication / contribution. 😔
Yeah I'm also not a fan of discord but tbh nothing super interesting happens on the discord. Most important discussion is on GitHub. I know that's also not open source but it's at least publicly accessible and indexable.
I'd love to see a tic80 community gain some traction on Lemmy.
Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.
For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.
t I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with
great I had heard about superproductivity from techlore but I brushed it off
could you please tell what seperates it from planify though?
QGIS
Your comment seems off, has some references to QGIS (props to QGIS! It made my thesis way better)
great I had heard about superproductivity from techlore but I brushed it off
could you please tell what seperates it from planify though?
oh yes I was commenting to some other post , not sure how It commented it here. My bad
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Thanks, mate !
Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.
My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.
I think Jellifyn does. You can also set up watch partys. Navidrome is lighter and more responsive tho.
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
There is a desktop app. I am hopeful with EU cracking down on Apple will eventually result in Briar becoming available on that platform. I am working on an idea to connect people on Briar for use of the private groups and forums so you might check back with me in a few weeks to see where that's at.
My choice is screen on 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.
In that same vein, give zellij a look! I use it pretty constantly whenever I'm sshing in a nominatim server
screen is like tmux, right? So you can split your CLI, open a new window/tab to open more Bash/Vim instances?
tmux is a modern screen replacement.
Yep! You can have multiple named screens, log them all individually, and they'll keep processes running even if you disconnect. Never used tmux but screen is usually installed on the systems I'm working on.
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
Screen is great! My favorite though is byobu, a pretty screen
I can live without Logseq but for work and keeping a log of how that worked (other than bash history) It's really useful
Amazing journaling/personal information managment software. I love that once you understand how it works, you can journal however you like and it "maps" out how your connect concepts. Not exaggerating when I say it helped me piece a lot of concepts and personal themes together
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.
That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).
Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.
It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern "media library" interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).
I want to like Kodi, but Jellyfin just has a less obtrusive interface
I haven't tried Jellyfin but people's talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn't need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it's not quite the same and does things I don't really need.
Yes, I liked the interface of Jellyfin as a more family friendly media browsing UI but I hate the wasted CPU cycles of transcoding unnecessarily.
"Family friendly UI" is "ultra-advanced" stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)
There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I'm just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.
That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn't really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn't even seem to have the concept of a user.
Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.
conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.
conduwuit is a fork of the less "energic" conduit.rs software, and both are maintained by the community, not by the Element people, like Dendrite.
I second local send :)
For some reason it never works for me, can't locate the other device I want to send to/from.
I’ve seen that on one windows machine with a weird network sharing issue.
I had to once refresh like three times. But it works for me from fedora laptop to android or iPhone and vice versa. Its great app!
Some great apps on here, downloading some of the suggestions to try out
Locate command. I know it's a command in thw terminal but since I had to apt install it I'm adding it here.
I absolutely love it.
ZFS. It's come so far, and it has so far to go. but it's a good concept for sure.
I feel like if Sun had come out on top (instead of fucking Oracle), the tech space might be a better place
If they'd released the x86 version of Solaris when it became clear that SPARC couldn't keep up with Intel and AMD that could have been a possibility.
Solaris was such an amazing OS.
Does oracle own the Solaris code now?
That's my understanding. It's a long time ago but I believe they bought out Sun when they were facing bankruptcy.
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.
LaTeX and maybe NixOS with hyprland (both for the first time)
orange pi running samba as a file server. it's behind a wireguard vpn.
huge improvement in my quality of life.
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.
Audiobookshelf. I've started using it this year, and I've listened to it every day except for a single day since I started lol. Its amazing to keep track of my podcasts and audiobooks. My only complaint is the app doesn't do autoplay for podcasts but headset media controls work, and the web client autoplays podcasts, but my media controls don't work. Even with those minor complaints, its an amazing tool that I don't know how I'd live without again.
Magic Wormhole - it's been around awhile but it's super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.
Klipper, for 3d printing. Most of current manufacturer use it as primary software for their printers.
Jami, a p2p zoom replacement I am looking to use.
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.
Ditto clipboard manager and altsnap with the Hot-click and fancyzone style controls
I switched to niri about a year ago. It's perfect for those who like tiling WMs but want a more natural flow, without constant window resizing.
Niri with waybar, fuzzel, and tessen give a pretty complete desktop.
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.
I discovered this more than a year ago, but Fuzzel.
I just wrote about the new release here:
https://mark.stosberg.com/feature-packed-app-launcher-and-fuzzer/
Timelinize... description from GitHub: Organize your photos & videos, chats & messages, location history, social media content, contacts, and more into a single cohesive timeline on your own computer where you can keep them alive forever.
There's also Delta Chat, FairEmail and DEFINITELY LOCALSEND.
KeepassXC, Syncthing, Orgmode ecosystem.
croc