Hi Linux Lemmites. Recently finished up school and started working full time and kind of miss working on personal projects. I’m looking to try to make something in rust and try out gpui if I can figure it out or maybe egui. I also want to make something maybe even a handful of people would actually use as I find that motivating, so I ask what would actually be useful to you?
Edit: thank you all very much for the input, I think that maybe doing something akin to a “settings+” would be a fair target for me for a n initial project. If I make anything interesting I’ll make another post in this sub.
GUI for Pipewire configuration. Being able to reliably change the sample rate and buffer size without having to mess with config files would be nice.
I think I’d shoot for something like this for maybe a project 2 or so. I’ve messed a bit with cpal already because I wanted to mess around with doing some basic dsp stuff so I’d love to do a full easy effects replacement with this included. Or alternatively include something basic in the settings project I mentioned a bit higher up
Happy to test if you do.
Three finger drag in Wayland, a new gui for opensnitch where i can isolate network activity by app like little snitch
GUI for managing fingerprints/PAM that allows complicated or at least some customization with PAM such as requiring password on first login then allowing graphical fingerprints for sudo, unlock and other prompts with fallback to password.
I think this a pretty good idea. There’s a few other ideas below as well that are like settings tweaks or ui for them, it might be cool to build out something kinda like what opensuse has with a bunch of settings put into a graphical app.
- ImageMagick
- Ghostscript
- Pandoc
- LittleCMS (CMS: Color Management System)
- Wireguard
- Rclone
A real Photoshop replacement. GIMP is cool, but ain’t it. I have yet to find ANY software that can replace PS. I’ve even tried using multiple programs to replace PS, and it just doesn’t work. I fucking HATE Adobe.
Krita, after som tinkering, has replaced it for me, but I’m not a Photoshop power user either.
I’m not an artist by any definition, but I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment of excising the cancerous growth that is the Adobe company out of existence. You may have seen this website before, but have you checked out fuckadobe.com? Alternatives are a little ways down, past the wall of text.
I’d love to do something this big in scope eventually maybe a couple projects down the road but I’d definitely want rust to be at the level of my main languages before I delve into that depth. I also would want to avoid the gimp development times it seems it takes forever for stuff over there
Absolutely
A standalone utility for decoding QR codes that will work on a desktop. All I want is to be able to put a picture of the code in and get whatever text it was concealing in a little text box where I can read it, and C&P it if it’s useful to do so. If something like this exists, I’ve never been able to find it, although there are seemingly dozens of programs for generating QR codes.
Kde’s spectacle (screenshot utility) does this by default now.
Not op, but holy shit, it actually does! Wish I knew that before, ty!
I wrote a little script a while back that would save a temp file with fswebcam, run zbarimg on it to decode the qr, delete the temp file and if it worked it would pipe the output into xclip/wl-copy, otherwise it would try again (up to 8 times).
I hooked it up to a keyboard shortcut and I’ll see the webcam light flash one or two times when I hit it, then know it’s good.
It wouldn’t be a ton of work to also have a popup with the qr value using zenity or something, maybe use the --question and pass it “copy $output to clipboard?”. You could have an --error if all the scan attempts failed.
Feel free to shoot me a pm if you want help.
Should be very possible. Are you on Linux or Windows? Please write me again at the end of the week if I didn’t come back to you.
zbarimg decodes them on CLI.
I understand why it doesn’t exist because it’s pretty niche and a shitload of work, but I wish there was a a really good dedicated 2D animation software similar to Moho Pro or Toon Boom Harmony on Linux. That’s one of the only reasons I’m still keeping Windows around.
Also as a side note, don’t trust Toon Boom. I bought a perpetual license from them that was super expensive, and then they switched to a subscription model and turned off my perpetual license.
I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.
This is some sage advice thank you. I’m guilt of always starting something super difficult and then going back. My first couple qt projects were forcibly scoped because I had actually end users I needed to keep in mind and that helped immensely.
I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.
That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.
For a bit of mindfuck check kdialog : Tool to show nice dialog boxes from shell scripts
Maybe the shell truly is enough BUT in some cases, say you want to help somebody who for some reason doesn’t want the terminal, you can bring the bare minimum of UI to give utility. My favorite example is the file picker e.g
kdialog --getopenfilename "*txt" | wc -las most CLI commands do support a filename as input.Paint.net for Linux. Most of my experience with making art digitally came from paint.net and there’s not really a good alternative that doesn’t require me to recreate my workflow from the ground up (Krita).
Pinta is technically an option, but it’s missing many of the features that modern paint.net has.
For now, I have to make do with a VM to run it.
replace paint.net with painttool sai and this was pretty much my experience
took me ages to flip over to krita and i still miss its simplicity
Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/
Pursuing feature parity with Calibre would be a long journey, but we have to start somewhere
I wish there was a graphical or CLI option to add a Linux drive to etc/fstab.
gnome-disk-utility can. And PySDM.
Ah, I’m on KDE though.
Doesn’t stop you from running a GTK app.
This is kind of what partition managers do, no?
And CLI-wise, you can just open it in nano… Or where you talking about something interactive?
I use KDE and it keeps asking me for a password to mount one of my partitions. I tried to edit it using nano but couldn’t find any documentation about how etc/fstab even works so I was hoping for a way to do it with the CLI.
Nano is the way to do it in CLI.
Should be:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Should bring your fstab file up right in the terminal. Make the edits and then hit Ctrl+x to exit and save. Reboot to see if it worked.
Problem is that I don’t know the format and I couldn’t find any documentation on the matter.
You can’t exactly type “man nano /etc/fstab” into the console.
Man fstab will work though I think
I wish Divvy/WinDivvy worked on Linux. There are similar alternatives, but none that duplicate the functionality.
- Bulk unarchiver or a frontend for ffmpeg (using existing tools, both get very messy when special characters or multiple directories are involved)
- Existing ffmpeg GUIs have had fixed lists of formats and options, making new or obscure ones inaccessible. There also needs to be an option to export the command based on GUI selections so the user can learn if they choose, or fix the command if something isn’t right.
- Adding the little details of Windows File Manager (i.e. Format dialog, search by attribute like MP3 bitrate) to some existing Linux file manager
- Mounting of network drives in Linux graphical file managers: many of them handle it through gvfs, which for some reason insists on mountpoints with long directory paths and special characters, breaking compatibility with various utilities
- Extending Linux Mint’s libadapta to further restore theming in libadwaita apps. This I am personally looking forward to contribute to as more programs move to libadwaita and disrupt the look I’ve painstakingly set up for my desktop.
These are all some very good ideas. I particularly like the ffmpeg idea. I do think a file manager is on the horizon for me eventually as well, I’ve always wanted to try making one
- Bulk unarchiver or a frontend for ffmpeg (using existing tools, both get very messy when special characters or multiple directories are involved)
Some QT or Cosmic takes on Pika Backup. The maybe unrealistic dream would be some new non gtk photo dam that ignores editing all together and hands off files as needed to an editor like vkdt. Kinda like Adobe Bridge.
Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.
