You’ve heard of it for sure, but shout out to Audacity. I used Cool Edit Pro for years before having to switch to Adobe Audition. The UI in Audacity feels surprisingly familiar and it does what I need it to do.

ffmpeg - www.deb-multimedia.org . I edit podcast videos for distribution to subscribers. High-quality video produces very large files but if they're only going to be watched on laptops, tablets, and phones, I can throw away a lot of bits without noticeably affecting quality on a phone screen.

And nothing does that better or faster than ffmpeg.

Any benefits to help notes stuff over obsidian or other?

AutoKey automation / word expander tool.

• I reconfigure ALT + i/j/k/l to ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts.
• It expands abbreviations of one's choice like "gCo" to git commit -m '
• One can assign scripts to abbreviations and hotkeys. E.g., when I press CTRL + Shift + [ it surrounds the selected text with a tag:

text_selected = clipboard.get_selection()
text_input = dialog.input_dialog(title="Wrap with a tag.", message="E.g., type cite to get <cite>x</cite>.", default="")
keyboard.send_key("<delete>")
clipboard.fill_clipboard(f"<{text_input[1]}>{text_selected}</{text_input[1]}>")
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+v")

I'm likely not even harnessing AutoKey's full capabilities and it's already absolutely indispensable for being a huge time-saver and annoyance reducer.

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✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

Pinta is the main one that comes to mind. I don't use it every day, far from it, and that's a part of why I love it. On the rare occasion that I have to do some image editing, I load up Gimp and then proceed to fight against it for at least a whole day to make it do the simplest of things before finally ragequitting. Then I load up Pinta and actually get the task done in either minutes or hours at most.

It's like old school MS Paint, but better. Simple, intuitive, no huge learning curve, just enough features to get my nonprofessional tasks done. It should be a distro default.

Logseq for notes and task tracking. It’s an open source alternative to obsidian. Life saver for tracking stuff at work.

https://logseq.com/

KDE Connect

• https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I've used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I'm sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone's lockscreen to pause the music.)

I'm starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.

There's more too I need to explore.

• https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect

(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a 'device unreachable' error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)

The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server.

FreeTube, a desktop client to watch YouTube videos, without an account. Why not use a browser without an account? Well, it has a watch history, favorites and subscriptions as if you had an account - but its all "offline" account, without Google involved (besides watching their video). So it manages an account with subscriptions, without YouTube account. Plus it integrates an ad blocker and SponsorBlock, and has a few more features on its sleeve.

kdotool, a xdotool like program for KDE on Wayland. Just learned about it when setting up another application. But I will use it for independently too.

There are more, but this is what came to my mind right now.

Ocenaudio for audio editing. It's not FOSS but it's native, simple to use, and doesn't have backend library issues I kept having with audacity.

I do a fair amount of pentesting and I'm on mobile, so I'll just list software.

Trufflehog & nosey parker (both kinda suck, but there's nothing better)

Subfinder

Nuclei

Credmaster

To name a few.

I'm trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!

digiKam was the first Linux application I encountered that was so polished and useful for what it does that I tried to shoe-horn it into any and every DE I experimented with, as well as installing it onto my windows machines under KDE4Win.

GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.

For example: ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3 encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3. parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2} then copies each FLAC file's metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the --xapply option).

edit: copytags is https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that's useful for anyone.

1. xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without "installing" them on the target device, which is great because you don't have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.

2. Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.

3. wdfs - It's an old project that is patched by this random github user. It's the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user. I mount it from a bash script because that way I can use KDE wallet to store the credentials instead of having a plain text file somewhere on my fs, the script waits until the wallet is unlocked, then reads the credentials from it and mounts the webDAV to a path in my home. That is more accessible to apps and other scripts (e.g. recent files) instead of doing it via Dolphin, which generates a random string in the path every time when opening network storage.

Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I've ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.

I would say Rymdport (https://github.com/Jacalz/rymdport). It's a GUI for the magic-wormhole tool (another recommendation in itself). It let's you easily and safely transfer files to another computer.