It's 2022 and most of us are glued to one internet device or another for 23 hours of the day. So where does your attention go? Software, for this discussion, can mean: apps installed on your laptop/desktop, operating systems, desktop environments/windowing applications, web software/software as a service, apps on a smartphone, etc. - broadly defined.
Use this as an opportunity to spread some love for software that you find helpful, useful, efficient, or rewarding.
Keep the conversation going.
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Ask Soylent: What Software Do You Still Use On a Daily Basis?
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:11PM (1 child)
Best software eva.
Hehe, I said "soft," hehe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @12:45AM
I use that for my hardware. Hehe, I said "hard," hehe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:13PM
On an organic computer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:20PM (5 children)
master race
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:37PM (2 children)
Can't be arsed to deal with all of emacs for the simple things I do, but MicroEmacs does the job of opening just about any file, and it keeps the early emacs key bindings I learned c.1980 --
http://www.jasspa.com/downlatest.html [jasspa.com]
Recommended.
The other old software I run is an early wordprocessor/typesetter from Mark of the Unicorn. Originally it was called Mince[1] & Scribble[2] on CP/M, then with MS-DOS the next version was slightly integrated under the name FinalWord II. It runs beautifully under DosBox and spits out clean simple Postscript. Some of you may know the last version, Sprint Wordprocessor from Borland (Borland licenced the MotU code).
To view and print the Postscript, I used to use an old version of Acrobat Distiller to convert to .pdf. However, SumatraPDF also reads Postscript directly and avoids all the crap that comes with Adobe software these days.
Yes, I'm stuck with Windows (Win7 Pro, set for no more Updates), since my big customer also sends me custom applications that I need to use for work. That customer has lots of redeeming features, so I mostly overlook the fact that they are a die hard Microsoft shop.
1. Mince is not complete emacs...
2. Scribble was a microcomputer version of the more powerful Scribe typesetter.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 18 2022, @01:28AM (1 child)
emacs has so many features I never use. My use of emacs is more like using microemacs.
And there's a new document compiler called scribble. It is probably relation to the one you mentioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @05:23PM
Thank you!! It was easy to find a recent sample Scribble source (input) file:
https://github.com/racket/scribble/blob/master/scribble-doc/scribblings/scribble/acmart.scrbl [github.com]
Commands are similar style to Scribe and MotU Scribble (for MS-DOS) taking the form of,
@bold[text to be made BOLD] Underlying that are font descriptions so the formatter knows to look for the linked BOLD version of the currently selected font...or what to fall over to if there is no BOLD version.
Some history on Scribe here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) [wikipedia.org] looks like this Wiki page needs updating to include the recent Scribble.
Similar applies to many of the commands, for example the desired list format for a long document is defined in a header file and then @tabular[list-items] uses those rules. More examples on the Wiki link above. Consistent formatting through entire long documents happens automatically (and "escape" is available to allow the odd exception).
Many predefined command names seem to be common with the old versions. Personally I find this syntax more readable than the TeX syntax which (from memory) is something like .command and ./command surrounding the text.
I'm going to have to read up on this new Scrible, perhaps I can resurrect some of the long documents (mostly software manuals and books) that I wrote back in the day. One piece that the MotU Scribble lacked was the ability to do multi-line formatting, as required for an equation editor.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Monday April 18 2022, @06:47AM (1 child)
I prefer six, the editor that's installed on every Unix system in existence and that just works no matter where or how you want to use it.
I assume the reason its name is usually given in roman numerals is because of its age.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @05:27PM
Heretic!! (grin)
Disguising the opposition this way will get you no where.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:56PM (1 child)
I figure if I use it daily until I turn 85, I might find something it does better than what it replaced.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday April 19 2022, @04:48AM
No, you won't; Even if you are a teenager with 70+ years until then.
However, if you are lucky, by then CPU and I/O systems may improve to the point where it seems the same.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Sunday April 17 2022, @09:58PM (5 children)
In no particular order.
Firefox
Brave Browser - backup for sites that do not work well with FF.
Konqueror - only Linux file manager I have found that allows splitting the screen into an up/down configuration to allow seeing the full file name
unlike all the rest that go for a side by side view that kills of the ability to see the full file named not sho...ened, morons.
VLC
Gnome Terminal - that piece of junk Konsole will not remember its size and starts out as a tiny little window to be messed with every time it starts.
Thunderbird
Those people are not attacking Tesla dealerships. They are tourists showing love. I learned that on Jan. 6, 2021.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:00PM
impressive text formatting.... then stupid warning by the god damn system about posting too quickly, additional moron heard from.
Those people are not attacking Tesla dealerships. They are tourists showing love. I learned that on Jan. 6, 2021.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:17PM (1 child)
"Ungoogled Chromium".
Was a PaleMoon fan until this asshole http://web.archive.org/web/20220320153629/https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=28003 [archive.org] decided to lock out all the pre-existing firefox extensions. Fortunately as you see in the url, PaleMoonitler ragequit the project and trashed their download websites. The professional, mostly-harmless project founder is still picking up the pieces https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28044 [palemoon.org] .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:20PM
Edit: Fortunate that he quit, not that he trashed the project.
(Score: 1) by zzarko on Tuesday April 19 2022, @05:08PM (1 child)
"Konqueror - only Linux file manager I have found that allows splitting the screen into an up/down configuration"
I guess you did not try Double Commander?
C64 BASIC: 1 a=rnd(-52028):fori=1to8:a=rnd(1):next:fori=1to5:?chr$(rnd(1)*26+65);:next
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Tuesday April 19 2022, @06:51PM
"I guess you did not try Double Commander?"
And I would think you have a reading comprehension problem, from the description.
"Double Commander is a free cross platform open source file manager with two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features some new ideas. "
I said up/down split not side by side all them moron programs do it, leaving you with shortened file names every time.
Those people are not attacking Tesla dealerships. They are tourists showing love. I learned that on Jan. 6, 2021.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:01PM (3 children)
Thunderbird
Gnome
Bash
Slack
Firefox
Feedreader
Git
Make
Python
Clang
Libreoffice
Nextcloud
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:53PM (2 children)
+ nano
+ tmux
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:36AM (1 child)
I've been using GNU Screen for work lately, they migrated to some funky web solution where remote sessions are flakey.
Any compelling features of tmux over screen, other than the license?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:01PM
IMO, basically emacs:screen::vi:tmux
TMUX is the BSD equivalent of SCREEN ; BYOBU is a front-end and provides its own front-end config language which it can convert and propagate into both TMUX and SCREEN.
I threw in the towel on SCREEN and switched to TMUX when I found out I could set colors by using their names rather than a single character like G for bright green or k for black. Stallman may be a strong advocate of the non-proprietary but geez is he opinionated and non-intuitive on .rc/cli commands for his utilities.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:03PM
Chrome on Android/Ubuntu gets most of my time. git, gcc, Qt Creator, VNC servers and clients, Kodi are distant runners up, followed by various Android apps - mostly to access various devices around the house.
Of course the Google assistant is always listening, they probably will suspect me of nefarious plotting if it ever goes dark in my home and phone.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:27PM (2 children)
I use Ari-B-Gone on a regular basis. It scans my Windows Operation System regularly to detect any activity by the dread philosopher aristarchus. According to the shrinkwrapped box it came in, it will seek out any instances of rational thought, knowledge of science or history, and/or anti-conservative ranting, Used in conjunction with the SN BanAritm suite, I never encounter any of these things, and can relax while I use my Edge browser to watch Fox News on my steaming pile service!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @01:15PM (1 child)
I prefer to run Away.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @03:36PM
A good call, the GOP is now run by criminals, liars, and pedos, you might want to sprint.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by drussell on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:29PM (8 children)
If we're talking interactive-type "applications," then a few would be:
WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS)
Paradox 4.0 (DOS)
NewViews 1.4.1 (DOS)
(running in separate DOSBox VMs under BSD with local VNC servers on each instance, also connectable directly using X)
Also, more modern:
gnokii
pico
pine
lynx
Firefox
Putty
Quattro Pro
WordPerfect 10/11 depending on which machine I'm using
More like weekly:
Seamonkey
LibreOffice
Audacity
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fliptop on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:59PM (1 child)
I still use pine for email (alpine) and have since about 1992. There are the occasional emails that are HTML only and difficult to pick out, say, a link that needs to be copy-pasta'd, but it's a small price to pay IMHO. AFAICT none of the modern email clients are as configurable as pine.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 1) by inky on Monday April 18 2022, @06:58AM
i also use pine, to be precise alpine, though my main email client is sylpheed today.
it also doesn't support html emails, and that is probably a feature for me.
copying a link from html email with alpine is very convenient.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 17 2022, @11:50PM
Man, I did my Master's Thesis on Word Perfect in DOS (5.0 I think, it was 32 years ago, so.....) it couldn't handle figures so I left blank space, printed the text, then literally pasted the figure in the blank space and photocopied for the final version.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday April 18 2022, @02:51AM (2 children)
I admire your retrocity :)
Have you seen these resources for WPDOS on modern OSs?
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/index.html [columbia.edu]
As to my own regulars... versions vary mostly depending what was handy when I set it up.
Windows (mostly XP or XP64):
========
RoughDraft (this is what finally stole me away from WP5.1)
SeaMonkey
WinAmp
VLC
Corel PhotoPaint (8 or 12)
LibreOffice
Acrobat
Calibre
WordPerfect-Win (8, 11, or x6)
WinRAR
and regular ol' File Explorer, cuz the alternatives annoy me.
Linux (mostly PCLinuxOS)
========
Chrome
Dolphin
XFE
Kate
LibreOffice
DOS
=======
LIST (Vern Buerg)
DOOM
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dw861 on Monday April 18 2022, @03:39AM (1 child)
Just in case:
https://xwp8users.com/ [xwp8users.com]
However, I've also been running WordPerfect x6 in a Windows XP virtual machine. That is where I do most of my writing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Monday April 18 2022, @05:29AM
Oh, nice. Thank you! From what I've read, WP8 Linux is not a joy to get running. I got nothing but a dumb look the one time I tried installing it. Will have to read this stuff and try again.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Monday April 18 2022, @06:49AM
Visual C++ 6.0 from 1998, still a significant improvement on all of its successors, especially anything since about 2015.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Monday April 18 2022, @01:23PM
WordGrinder: http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/ [cowlark.com] https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder [github.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @10:35PM (1 child)
dwm as the window manager because in all honesty, it's the one that made the most sense to me. For my tablet I use XFCE.
sxhkd for keyboard shortcuts and program launching. I used to bake it all into dwm, but eventually I decided to just have it in sxhkd, and leave all keybinds necessary to dwm in dwm, and that's it.
st as the terminal. A bit of a trend, I like suckless programs. dmenu as well, and naturally with a bunch of my own scripts.
Newsboat for rss, since it was the easiest one to get set up. I tried messing around with elfeed, but I don't really like the "firehose" approach of all news getting dumped on me in one feed.
Neomutt for email. Thunderbird is alright, but it also has a ton of stuff I don't really need. Plus, it's pretty heavy for my aforementioned older tablet. Mutt-Wizard definitely makes it a whole lot easier.
I use nnn and ranger for terminal file browsers (I just switch between them on a whim, pretty much), and pcmanfm as a gui browser should I ever need/want one.
Vim for quick file edits, and Emacs for more serious editing.
mpv as the video player. I accept no substitutes.
I hop a lot between browsers, but my general use case is a "single-use" browser that clears everything on exit, and a persistent one. To that end I use Firefox locked down with Arkenfox's user.js and a few addons as the single-use browser, and qutebrowser with qbpm as a profile manager.
To counter all that software minimalism, naturally I use Discord. However, I do so from a libvirt-enhanced QEMU VM which I give my iGPU (GVT-g is a bit of a pain to get set up but it works quite nice, and honestly, I ain't using it for anything else on this machine anyways).
Now as for that aforementioned tablet, my ideal use case has always been a beefier main computer, and a "dumb terminal" mobile device. To that end I use Steam Link since it's about the best low-latency LAN desktop broadcasting software I've found. I tried UltraGrid but it was more obnoxious to configure, and it didn't seem to want to use my tablet's GPU acceleration. Steam Link Just Werks (just not on OpenBSD, if it did I'd have OpenBSD installed on my laptop instead). If anyone has anything that works better than that, please do let me know, but easy out-of-the-box configuration and its reported very low latency on LAN might be pretty hard to beat (it reports anywhere from 1ms to 3ms latency after exiting, but that could be it just talking about ping. It does feel pretty much instant though so it's hard saying).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @10:31AM
I think I'll give it a try. I was using NoMachine but the latency was a bit much and sometimes it acted up for no apparent reason.
Wi-Fi 7 equipment could improve latency by a few milliseconds. Or even Wi-Fi 6/6E. But you'll need a new tablet.
(Score: 3, Touché) by https on Sunday April 17 2022, @11:08PM
It's nice to be able to read and search my email without tracking and advertising.
Solid second place to liferea, because RSS is still a thing. To be fair, its search is
medicrap, but it's intended for ephemera anyways.Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2022, @11:43PM (1 child)
It's the only thing installed on the host machine, along with VNC, Shutter Encoder (replaced Handbrake)... On virtual machines I run Seamonkey, MS Office 2007, Adobe CS6 (keepin' it local), and of course, kpat
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday April 18 2022, @12:31AM
Mastercam
HSMAdvisor
Beyond Compare
Brave
Steam
Beat Saber
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:57AM (1 child)
/bin/ls
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Monday April 18 2022, @06:56AM
What is your name?
What is your mission?
What are three lowercase letters that are not valid options to the 4.3BSD version of ls?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Monday April 18 2022, @01:06AM (5 children)
I use Xubuntu at home for my everyday stuff, with a Windows 7 PC I don't connect to the internet for a few things. The Windows 7 PC is grudgingly used, I should have bought a refurbished Windows XP PC, and if enough software would work on it I might even still be running Windows 98.
The software list:
Firefox - for all the complaints I've heard, it's the only browser I feel relatively safe using.
Thunderbird - At work I have to use the steaming pile of crap that is Outlook 365, and I always feel as if I have to fight with it to do basic tasks that are a breeze on Thunderbird. A growing problem with Thunderbird is that too many email services are requiring extra authentication that requires jumping through hoops (and I suspect giving up security) to get them to work. No, my email is not more secure sitting on your server no matter how many layers of authentication you claim you have. If I download email to my PC it is a whole lot more secure. I bet advertisers can access my email with Yahoo or Gmail a whole lot easier than I can.
LibreOffice - I've used this or Open Office for probably almost 20 years now. There may be things that MS Office does that LibreOffice doesn't do (so I hear), but I suspect so few users use those features that they can be utterly disregarded.
VLC - Why use anything else? It does anything I need it to do and I keep finding more it does.
Handbrake - Excellent A/V file converter
Synaptic Package Manager - Not a fancy GUI but if you're not using the command line to install software in a Debian based distribution there is nothing better.
Faststone Image Viewer - It works better in Wine now than it did, but it is one of the Windows programs I use a lot. IMHO there is nothing better for fast and quality image editing.
Geegie - I like this for quick image viewing on Linux.
XnView Multi Platform - Can convert .webp's that won't open in standard software to .jpg's or .png's that will.
WavePad - Best simple audio editing software. I occasionally use Audacity when on Linux, but I find I'm better off transferring the audio files to my Windows PC and using WavePad. It's easier and probably better.
GIMP - When you can't do it in anything else and you don't want to spring for Adobe software and use Windows online, there's nothing better, even if it is a struggle to learn.
Leafpad - A very simple text file editor and reader. Similar to basic Notepad in Windows.
KRename and GPRename - Excellent bulk file renamers. One of the great powers of Linux is that you can easily find and acquire software that does at least part of the job, or some things better while another app does other things better. With these two, you can handle any job.
Dolphin - I hesitated to include this, the descendant of Konquerer. If you use KDE, it's included. If you don't, you have to do extra work to get it to do everything you might need. It comes with a file indexer (Baloo) that uses a massive amount of resources and has to be manually disabled. But as a file manager, it is far superior to such pathetic attempts at such as Thunar. If not using KDE, I would suggest also installing PCManFM, to easily take care of the couple things that take extra installs and work to function in Dolphin.
There are also things like GParted that you may not use often, but can be lifesavers when you do need them.
Comments and suggestions welcome.
If anyone has suggestions for a simple video editor I would love to hear them. I'm not satisfied with any of the free (or paid) ones I've tried. Shotcut used to be good, as long as you saved every step, but it went bad (in my opinion) when they changed from GTK to QT.
(Score: 2) by kreuzfeld on Monday April 18 2022, @01:29AM (1 child)
My video editing skills are fairly limited, but for what it's worth I've had good experience with KDEnlive.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 19 2022, @12:37AM
I mostly use KDEnlive now, but I do miss how easily Shotcut used to handle things (if, as I mentioned, you saved after every major step). I don't really do all that much video editing. Occasionally I do a little project, such as when I made a Halloween video for a friend's projector, but mostly I just use it to chop the end off a video game recording when I forget to shut the recorder off after the game ends. Vidcutter was good for that, but it just stopped working.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 18 2022, @06:34AM (2 children)
Video editing? ffmpeg, for basic cutting, splicing, and transcoding. Cropping, too.
Seriously. I really prefer the precision of being able to specify numerically, the exact point to clip a video, rather than struggle with a GUI where you have to handle the mouse delicately enough to move it just one mickey.
I use FreeCAD the same way. Write code to draw what I want, rather than use a mouse.
I like Okular for PDF. More cross platform. Evince for Windows hasn't been updated in ages. Also, in the most recent release, 21.12, the Okular dev team finally standardized the ability to add an image annotation in a way that other PDF viewers can display.
Also use command line PDF tools such as pdfimages, pdftohtml, pdftotext. Sometimes use tesseract to OCR scanned text.
I've long been interested in data compression and frequently use optipng, 7z, bzip2, gzip, tar. Sometimes use peazip. jpegtran --optimize is another handy tool for saving some space.
Firefox.
gcc.
For games, I like SpaceChem, minetest, MiniMetro, and Stardew Valley. Not easy to keep to games that are family and child friendly.
When I work with graphics I use the GIMP and the netpbm suite of command line tools.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 19 2022, @12:43AM
You're probably entirely right, but I don't do it enough to make the effort to learn it worthwhile. By the time I'm editing another video, I would have forgotten everything I learned doing the last one and I have to spend a similar amount of time relearning the steps. Twenty years ago I would have, but now I want most things to work as painlessly as possible.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday April 19 2022, @01:26AM
For "video editing" I tend to just reach for virtualdub, [virtualdub.org]
I can even still use it on my old Centrino-era Pentium-M, Windows 2000 laptops with the good 1680x1050 screens... They're just enough to use for basic video stuff and tough as nails... They (ASUS) used a carbon-fibre composite / plastic resin blend on those M6V series that made them flex less, so less PCB problems, etc. over time so many from almost two decades ago are still working fine.
With plugins and filters, it can manipulate pretty much anything you need for basic editing, splicing and rendering...
+1 For any nice, clean, simple software that Just Works™.
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Monday April 18 2022, @01:12AM (2 children)
Daily driver for all of my servers/laptop/desktop is KUbuntu Linux. Currently waiting for the next LTS release. Of course, since I'll be upgrading from 20.04, I gotta wait till 22.04.1 drops in June.
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @08:49PM
Kate is a great editor, and offers VI-style keybinding with one shortcut. Dolphin meets all my needs for a file manager
For scripting, /bin/sh (dash in Debian/*buntu) or bash for more complicated work, and python (especially jsondiff). wmctrl for simple GUI scripting/automation, xdotool for more complicated work.
LibreOffice is great, better than M$-Office in almost every way, other than missing a few features that some power users need
Was using Evolution for email/calendar, but Thunderbird has gotten better over the years
Otherwise, I use most of the KDE applications for everything, easy to install with Kubuntu
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday April 19 2022, @01:07AM
I had problems using Brother print drivers w/ version 20.04 (Ubuntu) and wound up downgrading back to 18.04. But I will try the next LTS release once it's available.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday April 18 2022, @01:24AM (1 child)
Meh, well, I use my computers for actual work. Off the top of my head, LibreOffice/OpenOffice various versions, Microsoft Office 2003 and some earlier (none of that awful ribbon shit), Paint Shop Pro, OmniPage Pro, various smaller PDF tools, scanner software, Kryoflux software, SuperCard Pro software, HxC (yea, I use those a lot), WinSCP, various compressed archive utilities. Lots of smaller tools that don't get used as often at the moment like an EPROM programmer tool, VLC, WinDVD, ImgBurn, C compilers... Microsoft BOB :P. Not saying what local e-mail program I'm using.
--
Sent from Microsoft Windows 95
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kreuzfeld on Monday April 18 2022, @01:32AM
Could someone be desperate enough to run an exploit that they need to ping all 27 active members of the SN community? I guess anything's possible, but seems unlikely to me...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 18 2022, @01:25AM (1 child)
emacs, a document compiler I wrote myself, xterm, mutt, firefox esr and chromium browsers , qterminal, LXqT, the X window system, Dr.Racket, etc., all running on Devuan Linux (chimaera release)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 18 2022, @08:47AM
For what's running in front of me now, under dwm almost everything is hanging off an xterm->ssh->tmux pipe, most of those being irssi or just status/loggers, but a few emacsen, and even a mutt or two. So everything's basically text. GUI-wise, mostly just palemoon, and firefox when palemoon fails, and chromium when firefox fails.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by kreuzfeld on Monday April 18 2022, @01:27AM
Ubuntu (both at home or work). Running:
Firefox
Thunderbird
Emacs
xfce4-terminal
VLC
Libreoffice
IPython
evince & okular (depending on my mood)
nemo (I hate the standard Ubuntu file browser)
Cisco VPN client (for work, ugh)
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Monday April 18 2022, @01:30AM
Xubuntu, VLC, Firefox, ProtonVPN, Thunderbird, transmission, aptitude.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @02:08AM (2 children)
xv - the before-1995 image viewer.
Every attempt after it has been a program for dah desktorps, and if those had similar command-line usage, still insisted on useless slowbloat features for desktop users or doing things in desktop ways (the always-in-your-way MDI..). And at the other end, ImageMagick's display is a big PITA when trying to do the same things as xv, and excludes a lot of capabilities (like one-key image resizing, padding, resaving).
It's the only non-free program I use... Although it's abandonware, and several people provide patches for later innovations, like PNG...
(Score: 1) by inky on Monday April 18 2022, @07:17AM
true! i also use xv!
also to make and crop screenshots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @04:31PM
There's a list of image viewers over at suckless: https://suckless.org/rocks/ [suckless.org]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 18 2022, @02:19AM (1 child)
Zsh or bash, vim, bc/dc, grep, and find are all incredibly useful on a regular basis, with tar, bzip2, and a bunch of other utilities not far behind.
If you know what you're doing with them, they massively speed up getting done what you need to get done.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @01:47PM
Well, sed. ;)
(Score: 2) by deimios on Monday April 18 2022, @03:47AM (2 children)
Total Commander - the file manager that I would like to have under linux natively. (somewhat works with wine)
I use other stuff too but this one stands out. I bought it back when they still mailed the floppies from Switzerland. Since then my first piece of software installed on any new system is Total Commander.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday April 18 2022, @09:12AM
I'm a Double Commander fan myself.
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Monday April 18 2022, @10:42AM
Try midnight commander (mc)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @03:58AM
I use FLOSS exclusively. Haven't paid for any software since I bought an opera license in the late 90's.
Debian distros, xfce as desktop. Thunderbird as mail client, chromium and brave as browsers. Libre Office for spreadsheets. Gimp, audacity, Inkscape for graphics and sound. Blender and PrusaSlicer for 3D printing and animation. Rhythm box and piano bar for music.
Of course there are the thousand utilities like xfce-terminal that are so ingrained in my workflow that it's about as easy to list them as the individual blood cells in my body...
(Score: 1) by TheGeezer on Monday April 18 2022, @03:59AM
this feels like it should be a Lockergnome "recommend apps for 2022"
obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/934/ [xkcd.com] - increasingly there is an app for that web page that offers more features (looking at you online banks)
but came to sing the praises of Nextcloud, Keepass, Gnucash and Irfanview, without which I would be unstuck. Here is my list of the essentials :
On the various platforms:
Linux server - preference for Gentoo for stability + customisability
Linux desktop - Enlightenment
Nextcloud - deck, files, keepass , news reader, time tracker, calendar
Windows desktop - Visio, Texworks, Word, Excel, Irfanview, Greenshot, multi-commander, mputty
Media playing - mpv with some vlc, irfanview, minidlnad, media monkey, kodi
Networks - wireshark/tshark, iftop, mputty, deluge/transmission
Mail - thunderbird, trying out hexamail as feels lighter and snappier, hoping for clues from this thread for others
Web - firefox for profiles and containers - genius for multiple cloud saas managment, chrome/edge for looking something up quick
Stars - stellarium and celestia
Invaluable cross platform apps - gnucash, keepass, gimp, freemind, nomachine
Invaluable windows apps - mputty, notepad++, greenshot, irfanview,
Invaluable cli tools - units, less, grep, awk, tshark, tcpdump, iptables, arptables, ebtables, mtr, iftop, vim, screen
Invaluable linux daemons - fail2ban, radius, mariadb, tinc, samba, cronie, openswan, bird, lvm, bind9, ssh, openvpn, redis, squidproxy, asterisk, clam, postfix,
Invaluabler on android - realcalculator, wifi analyzer, k9 email
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @04:29AM
debian
i3
xfce4-terminal
bash + lots of cli commands (ls, cd, find, grep...)
vim
pandoc
xelatex
okular
firefox
claws
python3
nim
mpd
cantata
syncthing
qmapshack
mpv
vidir
I hardly ever use a GUI-based file manager, and only occasionally mc, because bash with tab completion generally is much faster and more convenient for me. For text documents I prefer markdown in vim over word processors, and pandoc can convert them to pdf (using xelatex) for printing and sharing with others, and to (and from) odt, docx and other formats as well if needed. I have libreoffice installed but I don't often use it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @06:55AM
I use PCLinuxOS (systemd-free, yay!) and …
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday April 18 2022, @07:09AM
I'm currently running most of my desktops (currently 8 on site and 2 remote) on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with MATE desktop manager. I don't get too excited about those who want to use something else instead.
Firefox (with takyon's scripts), and hexchat (IRC) for preparing stories and editing the site.
Pycharm for my python3 IDE - does exactly what it says on the box.
VSCode for editing D.
Nano for working on my computers - which is usually done via ssh so I should include that I suppose.
I'm using half a dozen or so PI sbc which are running updated versions of whatever I installed 4 or 5 years ago. They fulfil a variety of functions: ADSB (for tracking aircraft), web scraping for story content, security and honeypots, etc
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by inky on Monday April 18 2022, @07:13AM (1 child)
on a desktop(laptop):
windowmaker
wmaker dockapps: wmclock, wmwifi, wmmemload, wmix, wmbattery, wmgtemp, wmnd, wmweather+, bubblemon.
my windowmaker background is usually a xscreensaver atlantis screensaver.
i use xscreensaver also as a screensaver and a locking tool.
sylpheed
uxterm
terminology
thunderbird
netsurf
firefox
lagrange
pidgin
dino
git, vim, imagemagick (i apply hald cluts)
gimp, ufraw
on a sailfish device:
the sailfish browser
integrated xmpp client
gopherette
dailycomics
soylent news app - i actually found out about soylent news because of it.
foilauth
foilnotes
amazfish
rockpool
imageworks - to apply hald cluts
gpodder
(Score: 1) by inky on Monday April 18 2022, @07:22AM
forgot to mention: xv and geeqie for image viewing.
atril as a document reader.
on android(lineageos):
conversations xmpp client
antennapod
radiodroid
hauk - selfhosted location sharing client.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Monday April 18 2022, @08:11AM
Debian bullseye /KDE
Pale Moon (so outdated it won't run most animations; yay!) , Vivaldi for when I have to see the animation.
Thunderbird.
Libreoffice / Kate / nano
Virtualbox
Gimp / AfterShotPro
vlc, calibre, audacity
dolphin (allows horizontal split window too afaik? Maybe I have an old version?)
signal
Every once in a while something happens and I have to use a device with commercial software on it. Have yet to see any that isn't awful. People apparently live that way! (yeah, AfterShot is commercial, and it's my least favorite of the list.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @09:19AM
windows-free-zone (the shanghai version):
samba
lighttpd, php, msqli, fastcgi + something-something
tor
dnsmasq
transmission
kodi (thank you netflix add-on), firefox, steam ... libreoffice, thunderbird (too be nuked by google mail soon).
still not enough sheepel support to replace that "lying in bed" interface called android. (firefox, stock-price-lookup-app, wunderground, reuters, aljazera, line, no facebook, no twitter, no instagram, no whatsapp, barcode and qr code scanner, bluetac on camera)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday April 18 2022, @09:22AM
At home I use:
Slackware 15.0 and -current
WindowMaker
XTerm
vim
git
gcc
GNU user land
bash
LibreOffice
Palemoon
LAME
oggenc
FLAC
Audacious
xpdf
... and various other things.
At work:
Windows 10
Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint
Adobe Reader
Microchip Studio
Chrome
Ubuntu 20.04
Firefox
gcc
bash
LibreOffice
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday April 18 2022, @10:26AM
My notebook PCs are exclusively FLOSS, my mobile phone is SailfishOS without Android, which means I don't run non SailfishOS native 'apps'.
On the Notebooks
Like many others, Thunderbird for email. Firefox for web-browsing.
I run full disk encryption with LUKS - only the ESP is in clear. This is not because I think I'm important, but simply to hinder anyone trying to get at my personal info if I lose/mislay the notebook PCs, or if some ignorant thief thinks a beat-up multiple year old notebook PC is worth stealing. External hard drives are also LUKS encrypted.
I layer LVM over it as it makes backups easier. rsync.
I use NILFS2 as the filesystem for its unrivalled checkpointing/snapshotting capabilities.
OpenWrt on my routers
gpg --verify to check signatures on downloaded software
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing to check for download errors.
QEMU for playing with/evaluating new distributions.
LibreOffice - Calc and Draw mostly. Draw is not particularly good for scaled diagrams, but it hasn't been quite bad enough for me to find a better (FLOSS) choice. Calc graphing is also not quite bad enough for me to find something else. I want what I produce to be, at least in principle, revisable by someone else, and I would not be thanked for producing things in really obscure formats.
Gnome Disks
Gparted
Leafpad
nano (vi if I am forced to (embedded systems without nano))
GIMP and imagemagick
Geeqie (tried many other image viewers, keep coming back to it)
Simple Scan (sometimes xsane)
Wireshark and tcpdump
Transmission
VLC
have used abcde, but I still don't get clean rips. Somehow CDs that play with no obvious problems on cheap-and-cheerful CD players rip with skips,pops,and speed variations which is Very Annoying.
ARandR
Synaptic
Evince, Zathura, MuPDF, xpdf - sometimes only one of these renders pdfs 'correctly', which could mean that Draw outputs malformed pdfs, or there are some shared bugs in pdf image libraries.
qpdf for manipulating pdfs - splitting and merging, mainly.
CUPS & ghostscript.
I use WINE to run one non-FLOSS program no longer supported by the manufacturer. It was gratis with the hardware it is designed to support, but closed source.
On the SailfishOS phone
The built-in apps for managing contacts, email (which is pretty good), the web-browser, and a note-taking application. The built in pdf viewer. Telephony functions.
I occasionally use a positively ancient Android tablet. I suspect the root certificates will expire soon, and as there is no upgrade path it will become landfill. I'm hoping to buy a Pine64 tablet if they ever become available again. Unfortunately, I have to support Windows, Apple iOS and Apple tvOS for other people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cosurgi on Monday April 18 2022, @12:00PM
sawfish, gvim, xterm, omnifocus (a todo-list manager), chromium, claws-mail, gnuplot, latex
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @12:05PM
Evince like it used to be before the GNOME GUI 'doozer' assholes got ahold of it.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday April 18 2022, @01:55PM
Seems fair to participate. And to the dude who made reference to "all 27 active members" ... feel free to invite people. More is better around here. This was a useful health check, to be sure.
At the console: mutt/neomutt, lynx, links, newsbeuter/newsboat, irssi, midnight commander, zsh, rsync
On the Desktop: kmail, sylpheed, claws-mail, LaGrange, Mini Gopher, QGIS, QCAD, Digikam, Dolphin, Konqueror, Okular, GIMP, xv/xzgv/qiv/feh, konsole, and my browser is Vivaldi
Desktop: Cinnamon for several years, now back to KDE just for fun. Also love windowmaker and IceWM - both perfectly useable.
Servers: FreeBSD Deesktops: Linux Mint, now Mageia for a change.
At Work: Win11 with O365, the single worst bit of office software I use. Stop trying to be helpful dammit, and Outlook: "you suck."
On the phone: Android of course; Aquamail, Materialistic (for hacker news), Samsung Browser, wunderground, and a sweet SFTP program whose name I forgot
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 18 2022, @02:08PM
Our library is finally upgrading from 'ye olde 90s software for Cataloging books. Same vendor, but new cloud interface. Hosted on our server, hopefully/supposedly.
Still, I have a list of features that I won't get to use anymore.
#1 Any of my Macros. (This one kinda hurts.)
#2 Ability to directly edit a record.
#3 Ability to directly input horrible stuff, so that I can break a record. (Ok, that's not a feature I will miss.) Still, this will likely be doable with the third party program I will have to use in order to do #2.
#4 Easily input a needed custom line. (Must go through support and can only have 5 custom fields.)
#5 Did I mention how much I hate not having a Macro feature? Seriously, this warrants 2 or 3 or 5 entries on this list.
#6 Compatibility with some of the record sources that I use, pretty much daily. (Sure, they may be using an outdated version of a protocol. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be supported. Feels more like a cop-out.)
Other things I use for work:
LibreOffice
GIMP
Firefox
DYMO Label software
Python and Pycharm Community Edition (pymarc is a nice python library for manipulating and searching library (book) records)
MarcEdit (MARC record editor.)
Notepad++ (At least this thing still has Macros!)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Monday April 18 2022, @03:16PM (2 children)
First, I do the actual recording. I should probably use Kodi or something, but I couldn't figure it out. I use something based on [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140717160732/http://rogerx.freeshell.org/files/bin/record-dvb.sh]this shell script[/url]. I need to get it in shape and post it on Github.
Next, I remove commercials, with comskip, dvbcut, and some script that glues them together. I should post that, too.
Then I compress the TV show or movie, usually with Handbrake or HandBrakeCLI. But some shows have odd telecine interlacing or, worse, simple duplicated frames that Handbrake can't seem to delete properly. For those I use ffmpeg with yuvkineco.
Then I want to get the TV show or movie ready for Jellyfin or Plex Media Server. (I uninstalled the latter and use the former, but I haven't ruled out installing the latter again.) That's another whole, very custom set of scripts, but it uses AtomicParsley to get the metadata correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @05:42PM
Out of curiosity, who is the "customer" for your recorded and compressed TV shows?
Are they available for download??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2022, @07:51PM
What hardware are you using to capture broadcast? I'm looking for something that's decently compatible with the above applications.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday April 18 2022, @03:42PM
Vim, git, gcc, cmake
Firefox
Angband
Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
(Score: 1) by jman on Monday April 18 2022, @03:46PM
Hadn't audited like this before. Tough to believe all these are touched on a daily basis. Ugh!
Desktop: OSX 10.15.7 (OpenCore DBG 065, Intel CPU, nVidia GPU, Corsair Memory, Samsung Storage)
Adobe: Acrobat v2020.009.20067 / AD v17.2 / AI v26.2.1 / PS v23.3.0
Applescript: v2.11 (Mostly for automating Adobe)
Bash: v5.1.16 (Compiled)
CMake: v3.23.0-rc1 (Compiled)
FileZilla: v3.58.0
Firefox: v99.0.1
Git: v2.33.0 (Compiled)
Libre Office / LO Basic: v7.3.2.2 (Community)
Make: v4.1 (Compiled)
MS Remote Desktop: v10.3.12
PHP: v8.1.4 (Compiled)
Python: v3.10.3 (Compiled)
RealVNC Client: v6.9.1115
SSH / SFTP Client: Compiled OpenSSH v9.0p1 (Compiled)
Thunderbird: v91.8.0
TunnelBlick: v3.85.a (OpenVPN client)
Vim: v8.2 (Compiled)
VLC: v3.0.8, (Streaming net radio, viewing various video downloads via yt-dlp)
VS Code: Insiders v1.67.0 (Code/Notes/General Text)
Phone: Android Samsung S20 Ultra (Stock Firmware, hand-me-down from when the S7 got run over by a car a year or so back)
GoToConnect: v0.0.966 (Mobilizes the desk phone extension)
K9-Mail: v5.806
MS Remote Desktop: v10.0.12.1148
OpenVPN: v0.7.33
Phone: v13.1.22.29
RealVNC Client: v3.7.1.44443
Rocket Player: v5.18.54, Playing device-local music
ServeStream: v0.7.0, Streaming net radio, mostly SomaFM.com or RadioSwissClassic
SimpleSSHD: v27, SSH server
Termius: v5.5.1, SSH client
Total Commander: v3.24, File manager / Text viewer
Trinimon Calculator: v1.4.1
Vim Touch: v7.3
Waterfox: v60.1.0, or Opera v67.1.3508.63168 for anything that needs credentials. Mozilla on Android has IMHO gone overboard on security making it hard to log into things. Haven't taken the time to tame it
Tablet: Samsung T813 9.7", Lineage 16.0 / Android 9 (If it ain't broke...)
MU PDF Viewer v1.14.0
Same apps as Phone, except for GoToConnect and Phone
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday April 18 2022, @04:20PM
Everything.exe
Finds files anywhere on your computer faster than anything short of having them near the top of your recent files list.
The single most profoundly empowering app I use on a daily basis (I believe fsearch is a similar option for Linux, though I've been stuck on Windows for a while now and haven't tried it yet)
Opens instantly to list every file on your computer (subject to a range of optional filters), and as fast as you type word fragments it filters out every file whose name doesn't include them. It rarely takes more than a few 3-letter word fragments to reduce the list from millions of files to a dozen, at which point it's easy to spot the one I'm looking for. And since the list is updated as fast as you type there's never any wondering if you should type a bit more to narrow the results enough, nor waiting around for a search to complete.
The rest of my "daily drivers" -
Firefox
MS Office --- because I'm paid to
LibreOffice --- when I'm not being paid, though I really, really wish they'd add Excel-style structured table references to Calc - [@table column header] is a MUCH clearer way to refer to other data in the same row than a cell address is
SpeedCrunch and GraphCalc --- scientific calculators with history, and different strengths
Notepad++
KeePass --- password manager
Nightingale --- mp3 library player
Windows Snipping Tool --- great for quick partial screenshots. Probably far from the best, but it's already there.
VLC --- to play any media file that may cross my path
Irfanview --- to view almost any graphic file that crosses my path with impressively smooth zooming/scaling. I'm using an old version because there was something wrong with the newer ones. I completely forget what - taken over by a malware co. maybe?
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday April 18 2022, @08:40PM
I use Safari every day to browse the web. I’m even using the iPhone and Safari to dictate this comment right now. I didn’t type a single word.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday April 19 2022, @04:54AM
Steam, linux version of course. And Proton only for games that I have nostalgia for (i.e. 20+ years old)
Brave, Thunderbird, and Kodi.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P