this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

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...

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

a 🔥blazingly fast🔥 voxel based open world RPG with soulslike and medroidvania elements

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Or maybe a 100% science-based dragon MMO?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A Linux implementation of Microsoft's Powertoys. Having all those utility features in one app would be great.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Could be a decent idea

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Implement a wireless file transfer protocol that works with Apple's Airdrop and Android's Quick Share.

In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.

  1. Create a software tool with UI that allows syncing of a phone with Linux to copy over photos, documents, music etc.

Must work with ios and android

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.

May I introduce you to LocalSend

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

1 is great.

for 2: syncthing is exactly this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I think Syncthing specifically does not work with iOS.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (8 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Here's a thread that sort of just... finishes nowhere.

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/issues/1026

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Obsidian clone thats better than logseq

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

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."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Have you checked out Stirling-PDF?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

Obsidian 1:1 open source alternative.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

A speech-to-text / dictation system geared towards writing documentation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

An open-source Resilio Sync alternative (not syncthing) that centers around the folder represented by unique hash, without any device management

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

1 Custom GLIBC locale configurator

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)

2 System hosts manager

Search, detect conflicts or other issues and add new items.

3 XCompose manager

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

4 Package manager

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.

5 Port your app to tauri

I saw you're using Electron, you could port it to Tauri https://tauri.app/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A music player for Jellyfin (that support SyncPlay)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

doesn't that exist already? I could swear I saw at least 2 on flathub

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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

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