Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are two three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.

  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.

      • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thanks… I had no idea this existed. I can now connect to the work remote desktop software with a single window perfectly integrated. This is incredibly helpful. Moreover I can now say I’m using Winapps in order to run Windows App. I guess now they can rename the remote desktop app again to Winapp to go full circle. Or maybe Winamp, just to confuse people. Or just App, to make it impossible to ever troubleshoot.

        EDIT: At any rate, this works really beautifully. It’s a bit of a PITA to set up if you’re having the VM via virt-manager but hell if it’s not as smooth as native.

    • GFGJewbacca@midwest.social
      9·
      1 year ago

      I’d love your list of selfhosted stuff. I’m running a little server with TrueNAS Scale and it’s working really well.

          • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
            2·
            1 year ago

            Gemini is kinda a modernized version to the old Gopher protocol. Its purpose is to share hyper-linked text documents and files over a network - in the simplest way possible. It uses a simple markup language to create text documents with links, headings etc.

            Here is a FAQ

            Main differences with similar technologies are:

            • It is much, much easier to write hyper-linked documents than in HTML

            • a server is much much smaller and easier to set up than a web server serving HTML. It can easily and securely run on a small Raspberry Pi without special knowledge on server security.

            • in difference to gopher, it supports modern things like MIME and Unicode

            • There are clients for every platform including Android and iOS

            • also, there are Web gateways which allow to view stuff in a normal web browser

            • unlike Wikis, it is only concerned about distributing content, not modifying files. This means that the way to store and modify content can be matched to the use case: Write access to content can be via an NFS or Samba server, or via an SFTP client like WinSCP or Emacs.

            • the above means that it does not need user authentication

            • the protocol is text-centric and allows for distraction-free reading, which makes it ideal for self-hosted blogs or microblogs.

            Practically, for example, I use it to share vacation photos with family.

            Two more use cases that come first to my mind:

            • When I did my masters thesis, our lab with about 40 people had a HTTP page hosted on a file server that listed tools, data resources, software, and contact persons. That would be easier to do with Gemini because the markup is simpler. Also, today it would not be feasible to give every student write access to a wen server’s content because of the complexity of web servers, and the resulting security implications.

            • One time at work, we had a situation with a file server with many dozens of folders, and hundreds of documents. And because all the stuff had been growing kinda organically over many years, specific information was hard to find. A gemini server would have made it easy to organize and browse the content as collaboratively edited hypertext which serves as an index.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.

      Keeping your system up to date usually involves invoking multiple package managers.

      As someone who worked build/rel before working OS security: if you’re intentionally breaking Single Source of Truth for software state management, then you’re in for a bad time. This can only delay the inevitable, but the technical debt comes at a high credit cost on top.

      Building an RPM is SO trivial to do, even without some LLM feeding it to you; and maintaining an existing one or rebuilding it to suit another distro or version even more trivial. Save your sanity and avoid out-of-band ‘package’ managers!