Lemmy

(applause)

Definitely Syncthing.

Great app to sync my phone with my laptop.

Firefox. Fuck chrome amiright

Kde connect on my phone (iphone) and laptop.

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else's money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That's just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

I'll try to keep this to lesser known apps:

• Catima (saves barcodes for gift cards, gym memberships, etc so you don't have to worry about the physical card)

• Cofi (nice timer for active guidance through coffee brewing recipes)

• 10,000 Sentences (a language practicing app that doesn't have a mildly threatening owl 😉)

• OSMAnd+ Mapillary, Overlay Maps, and 3D Features (seriously, the best. I only use Google maps to get around traffic these days since, unfortunately, Magic Earth doesn't work very well in my area)

• Obtanium (as a gateway to lesser known software, no shipping to an app store required!)

• RethinkDNS (an absolutely amazing piece of software that gives you fine-grained control of the domains your apps are talking to. A bit of a battery sync but it's been a game changer for me. On my GrapheneOS setup I use it in the Google sandbox to reduce the amount of data scraping servers my Google apps can talk to)

• LibreWolf, a privacy-optimized fork of Firefox
• Mull, hardened Firefox for Android.
• EteSync with self-hosted Etebase, an end-to-end encrypted solution for syncing calendars and contacts.
• Molly, a hardened Signal fork for Android.
• Accrescent, a secure, alternative app store for Android. Still in an early stage of development though.
• UnifiedPush, a privacy-friendly notification system.
• LibRedirect, a browser extension that automatically redirects you to private frontends for privacy invasive websites.
• movie-web, a web app that let's you watch any movie/tv show for free. I highly recommend it.
• Seal, an amazing Android app for downloading videos. YTDLnis is an alternative.
• Cobalt downloader, a website that let's you download basically everything imaginable from the internet. All kinds of posts, photos and videos from various social media platforms and many other websites.
• Linkwarden, a bookmark manager that can be self-hosted. Also check out Omnivore and wallabag.
• ArchiveBox, a self-hosted app for archiving websites.
• Tube Archivist, a self-hosted app for archiving YouTube videos/playlists/channels.

(I love downloading and archiving stuff lol)

Joplin for notes, and Rclone drastically improves any cloud services.

Gadgetbridge lets you connect and get data from supported smart or fitness watch without manufacturers app. Completely local.

Borg for backup. I'm really surprised it's not more widely known. It's an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

Paperless has taken me from various stacks of important documents strewn around my apartment, to having all of these things nicely organised and searchable.

pivpn for wireguard setup:

• https://www.pivpn.io

newpipe and libretube for youtube:

• https://newpipe.net/
• https://libretube.dev/

And the entire Fossify app suite in Android:

• https://www.fossify.org/

scrcpy for connecting to my Android screen from my laptop:

• https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

kde connect for general android/laptop connectivity:

• https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

Logseq pkm note taking/outliner https://github.com/logseq/logseq Syncthing https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing Omnivore, Pocket alternative https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore Bypass Paywalls Clean browser addon https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

Open source AI models and tools like HuggingChat, Whisper

Shotcut helped me get rid of the heavy, bloated Premiere Pro.

• RiMusic basically saves me about 6 bucks a month from spotify subscription lol
• Droid-Ify much better interface to F-Droid
• Grayjay newpipe but with much better ui, worth nothing is developed by louis rousmann
• NixOS not necessarily improve my daily life but i've been having a really good time trying it recently

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

rclone - you can use cheapest cloud or s3 provider and sync encrypted data. Syncthing - sync across devices.

Android

Audile like SoundHoud and Shazam but open source

Funkwhale a federated cloud community music streamer app

Innertune find new songs from YT Music

Open Video Editor edit videos

Heliboard successor of OpenBoard

Tubular successor of NewPipe

ZipXtract a zip extractor

Wger fitness app

Please just a reminder, consider contributing to these apps developers.

Loop habit tracker app on android: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

They are in the google play store and f-droid i believe

• ShareX
• Fan Control must have for windows 10/11. FOSS

• OpenWrt
• Syncthing
• VeraCrypt
• KeePassXC
• GNUCash

I use DokuWiki for my personal wiki. Very easy to use.

ddcutil is a daily driver for me, lightweight, hyper compatible, full monitor control. I primarily use it to lower brightness at night but also constantly switching inputs with simple macros so I can share multiple monitors with multiple systems.

I switched from Mint.com to the FOSS Money Manager EX for desktop a while ago and couldn't be happier.

My favourite program is CherryTree notes. It's a hierarchical notes app which supports hyperlinking between nodes and to external files, URLs etc. I pretty much use it to organise my whole life! You can have it encrypted and make your own theme as well.

KDE itinerary. Keeps track of all my train tickets, airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc... all offline. This is quite handy, especially for via rail in Canada as often internet can be sketchy when you need to bring up your tickets.

Barrier: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Edit: Input Leap looks like a promising KVM replacement for Barrier, thanks for sharing!

Immich is the must for self-hosting photos. Bye Google.

Stremio. A free Netflix-like UX for streaming bittorrents.

Kotatsu and Mira, both on F-Droid. Kotatsu makes it easier to read manga without a subscription and you can add your own DRM-free manga. Mira is similar but adds anime and K-drama streaming as an option as well.

Even though I am subbed to Crunchyroll, having an option to watch if I have to cancel to save money, that's very helpful.

Recently, UnifiedPush where I can (currently just Megalodon for Mastodon sadly) as an alternative to using Google's push notifications.