Taking your ideas for my next linux app
I'm bored and want to practice my Rust skills. I am the creator of open-tv. If you have any idea for a linux desktop app, even if it seems quite complex, I will take it.
An app that tracks how much time you spend using each app. Locally obviously. I want this information so I can see how much I should donate to each project each quarter.
This. This is a hole in the market I think.
Windows used to have a similar hidden feature that my friend used all the time to tracking his work projects, but they removed it some time ago.
This is a good idea. It could even be later expanded to a sort of "digital wellbeing" type use case with time limits or reminders on certain apps, etc...
This is a very interesting concept, and I would also like it. Would this even be possible on Wayland though? I know it should be possible on X11, but I'm unsure if the Wayland isolation would entirely prevent a usage tracking program like this from seeing what the focused window is, or seeing the total time a process has spent in the background (depending on what type of usage is being tracked).
I'm attempting to implement this a Hyprland plugin, I could adapt it to work with all Wayland based compositiors/DE's fairly easily. It just provides the stats using a CLI command, I'm not a UI dev xD
Make an app that is a little ASCII potted plant in your terminal and every time you type something it waters the plant and it grows
When nothing happens for too long, the plant withers and starts losing leaves. For each leaf that falls, a random file is deleted in /sbin.
Lol and maybe when the plant blooms you can have sudo back.
This reminds of a stupid filesystem pet idea I had a while ago. Running as a daemon, it walks through your filesystem and sometimes leaves traces (as files), maybe you'll find it sleeping in your downloads folder every now and then. I thought it was a cute idea, but didnt actually think about implementing it, for obvious reasons, it could go so horribly wrong 😂
Obsidian 1:1 open source alternative.
LogSeq doesn't do it for you?
How about a Lemmy Client?
I would love a text based ActivityPub client focused on meaningful discussions: threaded view, ability to follow threads or branches, highlight posts based on keywords.
The world needs the ability to sync freetube and newpipe. It's the missing link for both Apps, to be usable from home, to out and about
I agree, but I think something is already in the works, I'll check and probably make something practical to sync the two. It's not really a new app that's needed but a feature integrated into freetube/newpipe
Here's a thread that sort of just... finishes nowhere.
I've been following it pretty closely, and haven't seen any progress as yet. There are many github conversations, but nothing seems to have ever come of it.
I assume the challenge would be having the two different storage formats be able to be interchanged?
I'd like to see a simple, dependency-free, calculator app, written in Rust, using egui. All other GUI calculator apps I've seen so far are unnecessarily heavy, using bloated toolkits like GTK or Qt.
This would be handy for those run a GTK/Qt-free environment, and/or those who just want a tiny calculator app (optimised for the smallest binary size) without any external dependencies. Preferably even compiled using musl, to remove any glibc dependencies - resulting in a simple, small, portable binary that can run on any distro and doesn't even need to be installed.
Eventually, I would like to see this idea expanded to other apps - such as a simple text editor, a simple image editor, and maybe even a simple and lightweight web browser using Servo.
Jesus Christ.
I use the calculator in Ubuntu tor very simple purposes. It was crashing on me every time I opened it.
I tracked down why.
It was trying to get a foreign currency exchange rate file - which I was horrified that you'd think about even having in a calculator.
The reason that was failing? Because I had a VPN enabled.
And it wouldn't even fail gracefully. Nope it would poof, disappear.
The fix is to disable vpn, and disable foreign currency in the preferences.
I was so pissed off. And on the next upgrade the same thing happened, which I'd forgotten all about, so went through it AGAIN!
This was in fact what prompted my search - the Gnome calculator is so horribly bloated, and yeah, it should have no business making network connections, at least not by default - this should be an opt-in behaviour.
Not to tell you you don't need a GUI calculator program, but the only times I needed one was on screen sharing when I had to show someone else what I'm doing.
For all other cases, python in console is the best calculator ever. You don't need to learn Python to use it, and it's most likely already installed in most systems that you use.
How are Gtk and Qt bloated?
A Linux implementation of Microsoft's Powertoys. Having all those utility features in one app would be great.
Could be a decent idea
a 🔥blazingly fast🔥 voxel based open world RPG with soulslike and medroidvania elements
Or maybe a 100% science-based dragon MMO?
An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, ...), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.
If you move to OpenSUSE/SUSE you have this via GUI GTK Yast apps. pretty much anything you want to adjust (kernel param, samba, add devices, alter services, etc) is available via GUI
GUI app to create/edit/config Samba shares.
Good idea, after having just spent quite a while setting mine and troubleshooting them (first time samba user).
I haven't used the tool below, but I've seen it be recommended. Might it be kind of what you're looking for?
Idea 1
I've been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn't completely thumb chewing stupid. I've yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you'd get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.
I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like "take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5" and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.
And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the "journal" apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a "view" mode to see what you've done. Also: Don't be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don't want some light mode Gnome lookin' bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.
Idea 2
Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.
Idea 3
You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This "seems quite complex." The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It's a general purpose engineering CAD system and it's designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can't think in terms of "put a mortise and tenon joint here" you have to think "create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions." And then it doesn't give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn't write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so...I'm not sure why they bother at this point.
I've been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I've thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as "monumental."
How can there not be a good todo app???
Is it just that there's no Linux one but there is mobile?
Maybe with Kotlin Multiplatform someone will get an existing mobile one running on Linux as that would be useful.
I can't imagine it'd be too hard given a todo app doesn't need a lot of Android specific functionality. I'm in the middle of converting my app to target desktop/ios/android and its been going very well and the tooling is improving rapidly.
That or someone might write a nice one as a starter project as Multiplatform from the start to learn it?
I'm after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I've yet to find the thing I'm after.
I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we'd get the occasional "citizen inventor" off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they'd describe their "invention" to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn't work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what's happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.
Also, just searched Mint's software manager for "todo" and came up with this:
TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with...someone. Worthless.
Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as "Endeavour". I'm guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome's PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.
Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome's name that isn't below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn't it.
OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I'm looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren't obvious what they're for with no tool tips and...it's just combative, it's trying really hard to be a pain.
Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a "todo.txt syntax" which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.
Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a "Sign in with Google" button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.
That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn't seem relevant.
I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I've yet to find since.
Ad. 2, have you seen https://www.zombietrackergps.net/ztgps/ ?
Item1: I would love something along these lines. Honestly, I wish I could configure Thunderbird to be my journal and reference my to-do items programmatically from inside journal entries.
Similar to your wish for first class dark mode, I want light mode to also be first class. Too many apps lately have made dark mode default and the light mode is unusable.
I'm starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I'm just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.
A music player for Jellyfin (that support SyncPlay)
doesn't that exist already? I could swear I saw at least 2 on flathub
In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.
Must work with ios and android
In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.
May I introduce you to LocalSend
LocalSend looks great, but I don't think it captures OP's intention. It would require someone else to download the app if they wanted to receive a file, but OP is asking for something that uses the already existing Airdrop/Quick Share so that they could send a file to someone without them having to install anything. I've had similar wants, as when I've wanted to share something with someone in public that I don't really know, I've just had to upload it to send.vis.ee, but that can be quite slow and inefficient. Something leveraging both Airdrop/Quick Share (that doesn't require you to be connected to the same WiFi network like LocalSend) would be ideal, as those are features included by default on stock iOS and Android (no install required). For instance, there was something similar called WarpShare that allowed you to share something via Airdrop from an Android device to an Apple device (but only in that direction), but its development has stalled and it isn't capable of using Quick Share for Android devices.
I'll take a look at that. Thanks
Afaik, there is no app to very easily generate GIFs.
plus:
There is switcheroo which makes image conversion easily. It converts to gif as well but only 1 image to 1 gif, not 2 images to 1 gif.
It should be straight forward since image magick contains all neccessary commands for gif creation
What about a fully featured PDF tool (page deletion, blank page instertion, OCR, edition, conversion, cropping, reorientation, etc...). This is a very missing feature of the linux world, we always have to jump from one software to another. An alternative would be to build the plugins of Okular to allow to make these operations.
Do you know what really doesn't exist?
A pure, HTML only, WYSIWYG text editor. Every text editor out there is either XML, JSON or Markdown based. HTML is the most widely adopted standard ever and is the best for storing content long term. People could write CSS themes, you could even add paged media support.
NVU, Dreamweaver were tried to be like this. Only thing that wysiwyg'ing HTML isn't that easy as one might think, especially nowadays where thousands of web css frameworks exists and every structuring is done via divs.
You could make your own framework, or select/import one you like, but then the app will have way too much parameter, which needs to be configured by the user. It would be a really neat power tool, though.
ps.: Funny thing I was just thinking about wysiwyg editors in the recent days 😅
Nono. It's just a Writer. Like, Word, or Google Docs. It's easy to do. Like all those Markdown editors, but HTML. For notes, book writing, etc.
Obsidian clone thats better than logseq
Real time midi sequencer for the trs-80 model 100
You had me at TRS-80!
A simple GTK4 + libadwaita sound recorder. I know it's probably a 1 day task but we seem to lack a good modern recorder for my favourite DE.
P. S. I smell another downvoted to oblivion moment for liking GNOME
GNOME is great.
I just have a script that wraps pw-record and ffmpeg to transcode to a mp3 file. I'd also like a GUI for it tho
I must admit I do not understand what's going on in the first sentence but I do agree that having a GUI is good
Doesn't gnome already have this?
It has an old GTK3 one
@Fredol a simple, clean-looking GTK4 client for Syncthing.
A backup and restore utility which allows me to export/restore system settings and installed apps. This would make a reinstalll much less time consuming and allow installs of the same configuration on other computers.
Voice assistant that allows to perform common tasks like setting up calendar events, sending emails, opening apps, etc. Bonus points for "connect to server abc" and the assistant would open the terminal and ssh to abc server.
How about a doc editor, not code editor, not m$ word. Just a simple modern doc editor.
We really don't have a native asciidoc editor, not even one. Unlike other apps which we don't use it frequently that even electron liked apps' performance are acceptable, doc editor should be built in native.
We have something like https://www.appflowy.io/ and https://www.getgrist.com/, but none of them are native.
Someone did this on Mac and I was impressed with it.
There's LocalSend that already exists
A simple intuitive whitelist/blacklist firewall with logging for both inputs and outputs. I shouldn't have to navigate NFT's complexity or write scripts simply to list all the websites I'm willing or unwilling to connect to and their port number. There are silly limitations on all the tools I've tried.
I use a whitelist because my code sucks, and PDF datasheets for hobbyist hardware projects can be super sketchy to download. I have somewhere around 600 entries on my list. It feels like an intentionally obfuscated/overcomplicated issue in OpenWRT and elsewhere from a user's perspective.
I really don't trust local LLM's overall now that they've been shown to have hidden vulnerabilities and would love to have an easier way to monitor an outputs log and sandbox really.
A gtk app for YouTube and/or twitch intended for media PCs would be neat, with controller/remote support and ui optimization for air mice.
I don't like the ux of kodi very much and trying to get it to play YouTube has been a nightmare 😅 a simple app with a decent user interface would be very welcome
I desperately want a simple GUI for setting the sample and bit rates for my audio input device. Mine is a Focusrite 2i2 gen 3, but there should be a fairly universal way to do this in Pipewire.
Clozemaster-style spaced repetition app for languages. It reads a sentence with text to speech, you have to fill in the blank with your target language. Translation can be shown if you're stuck, and you can turn on hints when typing. It shows the words based on the SM-2 algorithm or similar
A gui app that lets you:
It should be simple without any advanced options or storing any data or credentials or saving anything without asking the user. For example;
For symmetric text:
For symmetric file:
For asymmetric generation:
For asymmetric text:
For asymmetric file:
This sounds like something a LLM could do. Have you tried it? It could get pretty close.
There's a big lack of a decent RC airplane simulator on Linux. One that you can plug a transmitter in via USB or Bluetooth and go from there. Real flight is the king but it's Windows only.
Not sure if you can use rust to write browser plugins, but I really want a plugin that when you right click a link, you have to option to open the link with javascript disabled. Chrome or Firefox.
Extensions are in Javascript.
Well damn. Isn't that just ripe.
Opening a link in Firefox reader mode would be pretty cool!
I'll try looking to see how easy it is to create an extension
https://github.com/mozilla/readability/
Edit: maybe this extension can be used https://webextension.org/listing/chrome-reader-view.html
I will take a look, thanks! And I got a huge ad right at the top of the page, how apropos.
A basic, local text-to-speech app using home assistant's piper would be great. Feed it a document and have it read the document to you, highlighting along the way.
Sticky notes, but they accept markdown and mermaid syntax
Option 2: a Windows XP Paint clone. Seriously, all the paint clones you can get on Linux, like gnome paint, just don't work properly
KolourPaint works very well for me.
If you're content with a web-based JS-App, try https://paint.js.org/
No selection, copy or paste working yet, but looking good thus far
screen2gif. Peek is really good on the capturing side but it lacks all the editing tools like resizing, changing speed of each frame, removing specific or ranges of frames, inserting frames, drawing on frames, and of course exporting in different formats with very good compression options. I really miss being able to fine tune my gifs without having to open multiple tools or scripts.
I want this, needed to add a demo gif to a Hyprland plugin's README the other day and it was way too complicated.
Something that gives you a reminder after a certain time of using a specific program (a game for example). I wanted to make it on my own but my coding skills are absolute garbage so it probably wouldn't work very well.
This might help https://codeberg.org/unfa/HyperTimer
edit: Video by the creator https://youtu.be/rmUZ_iem1xw
it needs to be manually set, but a script to run this when you launch the app/game maybe?
A speech-to-text / dictation system geared towards writing documentation.
An open-source Resilio Sync alternative (not syncthing) that centers around the folder represented by unique hash, without any device management
Would it be possible to clone the snipping tool from windows?
Flameshot pretty much already does this, though perhaps not as elegantly
There is an app called Rethink DNS for android. It is a DNS filter by Mozilla guys. It can also show the DNS queries generated through the system. One can block certain apps, exclude certain app from DNS filtering. It has wireguard support, that means can route certain apps through proxy. It has to be the bast app I ever downloaded. Please can you make something like this for Linux.
If anyone knows an existing alternative please comment. (On arch based distro.)
AdGuard
Search for unbound-redis on github
A graphical SSH client similar to Termius
A gui for a tunneling solution such as rathole or FRP.
Konsole has a SSH Manager. So its one click to Connect. Not sure if that is what you want.
I want something with: a built-in key manager (with optional cross-device sync) SSH tunneling support (dynamic, remote and reverse) snippets simple, beautiful UI.
I'm sure many users will like it.
I wrote a version of this in Python a few years ago, but it depended on external tools like ffmpeg to work, limiting its portability. The Python requirement was also a major factor for adoption.
If it were ported to Rust, doing the (de)serialisation internally, I believe that it could have far-reaching implications on how we share and consume news:
https://danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/
If you're interested, I presented the Python version at PyCon UK a while back.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Cool project. Perhaps something could be implemented on the fediverse. It might even help prevent people from cropping out credits 😀.
That's an interesting thought. There's a lot of cases you see where people have stripped a comic's name from the bottom of the image, but that's not really what this project was designed for. Aletheia will guarantee you that the person/company sharing the media is who they say they are, but critically it won't prevent infringement.
The example I give in my talk is that InfoWars could take a BBC news story and say "we made this", but it wouldn't let them modify that story and claim that "the BBC made this". The goal is to be able to re-connect what someone is saying with the reputation of the person saying it, with the hope that we can start delegating our trust to individuals and organisations again.
Maybe a Linux-native Lemmy app? Or a client for Mastodon? Pixelfed, PeerTube?
Or a GUI for the Rust-based rescrobbled project?
I second this. The only lemmy client that exists worked quite badly for me
A wayland screen recorder. Not everyone needs a complex app like obs. Also, a jellyfin/emby front end maybe?
Like Kooha?
Also, GNOME comes with a pretty great simple screen recorder by default.
Spectacle from KDE is also a pretty good default
As far as I know, SSR doesn't work with wayland. Kooha seems nice though, even if I can't try it (I don't use flatpaks).
lemmy client? it would be amazing just to have a tui.
Something like this? https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
\
It uses my Lemmy API client library :3
yes, thank you
An actually good alternative to Notion for Linux.
Appflowy might not be there yet, but it is improving fast
Yes I know about AppFlowy and also about Anytype. However AppFlowy feels off for some reason and not as stable. Anytype feels pretty good but it has the issue that you can't store and sync more than I think 1 GB of data. You could self host a sync server but that's extra complicated with that software for some reason. So it's not really a good alternative either. :/
Pick date format, time format, currency I'm currently using a weird combination of English, German, and Danish and it still doesn't fully do what I want (time is separated with a dot)
Search, detect conflicts or other issues and add new items.
I made something like this myself some time ago but it uses the outdated GTKSharp library and misses several features such as conflict detection. https://github.com/QazCetelic/Composition
This might be a bit complicated, but it would be really neat to have an app to manage packages that doesn't freeze, crash or fail.
I saw you're using Electron, you could port it to Tauri https://tauri.app/
It used to be tauri, but due to a bug in tauri that lasted more than a year, I had to switch to electron. I've been thinking of switching back, but I've got other priorities
Frontend for AOL that looks like regular desktop AOL but without all the ads and popups. If only because it's something I doubt anyone would make before the EOL of Windows 10.
A budget app. I'm tired of all the good ones being web apps that spy on you. Multiple accounts, recurring expenses, ability to set goals, there's a lot of features you can implement (or not) depending on how far you take it.
Currently I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onetwoapps.mh which gets the job done but I want similar functionality outside of android.
Have you tried plaintextaccounting? I am using hledger, it works very well for me.
hledger actually seems like it'll fit my use case rather well. Thanks for mentioning it!
Torrent based software installs and updates, to reduce workloads on Linux servers
A modern UI for ClamAV or a Subsonic Music Streaming client (In gtk4)
How about a Linux (or even multi platform) version of Stereoscopic Player?