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GNU/Linux Software Hall of Fame


V.T. Eric Layton

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V.T. Eric Layton

OK, since ATW has its own HoF thread, I thought we should start one here in ATL.

 

I'll even open with @FuzzButt's opening comments to that other thread:

 

Quote

 On 6/5/2003 at 4:28 PM, FuzzButt said:

Hello,I know we all complain about software bugs and whatnot but there should be a thread about software that you really like and make your computing experiance [sic] better.

 

So, there you go. Post about all those excellent opensource (or otherwise) GNU/Linux tools and apps that you've come to love over your careers as Penguins.

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V.T. Eric Layton

We'll start off with @abarbarian's posting that was place elsewhere on the board:

 

Quote

Why use Ubuntu instead of other Linux distributions?

 

Ubuntu is the most famous Linux distribution in the world. Used by all types of platforms, from enterprise to desktop and passing by mobile phones, the distribution that started its journey just 14 years ago totally dominates the markets today in terms of userbase.

 

I could not find a dedicated Ubuntu thread so this seemed the most appropriate place.  😎

 

Now there is a dedicated thread for this. :)

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securitybreach

Well honestly I believe LinuxMint has surpassed Ubuntu in popularity. Granted it is based on Ubuntu but I see a whole lot more LM posts these days than Ubuntu.

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Ubuntu has diverged markedly from many other Linux, so much so I think it is losing popularity. I would even suggest LinuxMint would improve a lot by dropping Ubuntu as its base and focussing on the Debian edition. I believe the rapid rise in popularity of MX is partly due to the anti-buntu effect.

 

Still ain't nobody gonna sway me from KDE Plasma. That's my No.1 in the software hall of fame. The current version 5.17.5 is so much better than anything else I've tried, including resource use now better than Xfce as used in MX-19. And 5.18 has a number of really nice improvements, including integrated theming for GTK applications which had to be configured separately in the past.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Well, of course, a long time favorite of mine would have to be...

 

The GIMP. 😎

 

 

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V.T. Eric Layton

A posting here by @raymac46 reminded me of probably my FAV-of-ALL-TIME app in GNU/Linux. And that would be...

 

Mozilla Thunderbird!

 

If this application goes bye-bye one day, my Internetting daze may come to an end because of that. I LOVE T-Bird!

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On 3/9/2020 at 10:46 AM, securitybreach said:

Well honestly I believe LinuxMint has surpassed Ubuntu in popularity. Granted it is based on Ubuntu but I see a whole lot more LM posts these days than Ubuntu.

 

On 3/9/2020 at 4:01 PM, sunrat said:

Ubuntu has diverged markedly from many other Linux, so much so I think it is losing popularity. I would even suggest LinuxMint would improve a lot by dropping Ubuntu as its base and focussing on the Debian edition. I believe the rapid rise in popularity of MX is partly due to the anti-buntu effect.

 

I seldom post at the Ubuntu forums, and even less at the Kubuntu forums, but I do run Kubuntu, so I don't know what looking at the number of forum posts says about anything. Not sure how popular Kubuntu really is, but it's been great for me here.

 

I'm sold on Ubiquity's "Minimal installation" option; I go with that for Kubuntu, and I'd use it if I was installing Ubuntu, too.

 

From my point of view, there are so many distros based on Ubuntu, and so many Ubuntu "Flavours", and distros that are based on Ubuntu derivatives or "Flavours", that I really don't see how Linux Mint can be considered to be more popular than Ubuntu. The distros on this (incomplete) list, taken from DistroWatch (the list includes Ubuntu itself), I think they all use the Ubuntu repos in one way or another, along with whatever else they add:

 

Linux Mint
Ubuntu
Elementary
Zorin
KDE neon
Pop!_OS
Peppermint (based on Lubuntu)
Linux Lite
Lubuntu
Xubuntu
Kubuntu
Ubuntu Kylin
Ubuntu Mate
Feren OS (based on Mint)
Voyager Live (based on Xubuntu)
LXLE (based on Lubuntu)
Ultimate Edition (fork of Ubuntu and Linux Mint)
Ubuntu Budgie
Bodhi Linux
ExTiX
Nitrux
Robolinux
Emmabuntüs (based on Debian Stable, Xubuntu, Ubuntu LTS)
Ubuntu Studio
Trisquel GNU/Linux
Linux Kodachi (based on Debian, Xubuntu)

 

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securitybreach

Well actually two of the three versions of Mint use a ubuntu base, the cinnamon and the mate version. The other version, LMDE, uses Debian stable as its base. That said, Ubuntu uses Debian as its base so really they are all based on Debian anyway: "Ubuntu packages are based on packages from Debian's unstable branch, which are synchronized every six months".

 

There are only a handful of distros that use their own source.

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One of my favorites now:

 

ScreenGrab - A program for fast creating screenshots, and easily publishing them on internet image hosting services. It works on Linux and Windows operating systems. ScreenGrab uses the Qt framework and thus, it is independent from any desktop environment.

 

https://github.com/lxqt/screengrab

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8 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said:

Audio/Video:

VLC

 

I find MPV to be more reliable and less buggy, and it sometimes plays files VLC refuses. There is a simple frontend for it I just found recently called Celluloid which is basic but neat.

I still have VLC installed though, mainly for its ability to loop a section of video if you show the Advanced controls bar. It did freeze up completely on me the other day and I had to killall -9 vlc as I couldn't stop it any other way.

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securitybreach
2 minutes ago, sunrat said:

 

I find MPV to be more reliable and less buggy, and it sometimes plays files VLC refuses. There is a simple frontend for it I just found recently called Celluloid which is basic but neat.

I still have VLC installed though, mainly for its ability to loop a section of video if you show the Advanced controls bar. It did freeze up completely on me the other day and I had to killall -9 vlc as I couldn't stop it any other way.

 

Same. I only use mpv for video files.

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On 3/12/2020 at 9:16 PM, sunrat said:

There is a simple frontend for it I just found recently called Celluloid which is basic but neat.

 

Super find just installed it. It has the ability to easily choose language and subtitles which I need for my anime vidioes. 😎

 

Celluloid is a really good mpv frontend for Linux

Edited by abarbarian
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securitybreach
2 hours ago, abarbarian said:

 

Super find just installed it. It has the ability to easily choose language and subtitles which I need for my anime vidioes. 😎

 

Celluloid is a really good mpv frontend for Linux

 

Neat but I see no reason to have a frontend for mpv. The controls are simple enough without needing a gui. But then again, I prefer cli apps B)

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6 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

Neat but I see no reason to have a frontend for mpv. The controls are simple enough without needing a gui. But then again, I prefer cli apps B)

 

Yes we know you like cli apps. Celluloid doesn't do anything much except make transport controls always visible. Subtitles, language, and transport are in the popup bar when you mouseover in MPV anyway. It's the keyboard actions that make it really powerful.

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13 hours ago, sunrat said:

Subtitles, language, and transport are in the popup bar when you mouseover in MPV anyway.

 

Ha ha I have been using mpv ever since I started with the penguins and that is news to me. Guess I did not RTFM :w00t:

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  • 1 month later...

ClipGrab

Quote

 

ClipGrab is a free multi platform software for downloading and converting online videos from many sites like YouTube or Vimeo.
ClipGrab can download from the following sites: YouTube, Clipfish, Collegehumor, Dailymotion, MyVideo, MySpass, Sevenload, Tudou, Vimeo.
Downloaded videos can be converted to the following file formats: WMV, MPEG4, OGG Theora, MP3 (audio only), OGG Vorbis (audio only).

 

ClipGrab isn’t limited to the sites listed above, because many more sites are supported "unofficially" through the automatic site-recognition of ClipGrab - just try it!
By the way, ClipGrab can also download HD videos from sites that have support for high definition (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo).

 

 

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/clipgrab/

 

There is a AUR package also as well as the official Arch package.

 

I use the official Arch package but only for extracting audio from you tube videos which it does perfectly for me. I like odd offerings of famous songs like this,

 

https://youtu.be/XTdOiCa0-4o

 

You can see the english lyrics in this version,

 

https://youtu.be/K5n245MzJqc

 

😎

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47 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

Neat but I think youtube-dl has the same features ;)

 

http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

 

youtube-dl is great. I too use it for extracting audio of rare music videos, only rarely downloading an actual video. The Opus audio codec currently used by YT has much more acceptable quality compared to the older aac or mp3 they used to use. The devs are right on the ball with upgrades when Youtube inevitably changes their API every month or two as well.

It's a shame in the software world, and not just open source, that so many forks are made when the coders would probably end up with a better product by collaborating. It's often some most trivial reason like forker doesn't like the font or has conflicting politics with the original developer. It wouldn't surprise me if Clipgrab is actually based on youtube-dl.

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securitybreach
3 minutes ago, sunrat said:

 

youtube-dl is great. I too use it for extracting audio of rare music videos, only rarely downloading an actual video. The Opus audio codec currently used by YT has much more acceptable quality compared to the older aac or mp3 they used to use. The devs are right on the ball with upgrades when Youtube inevitably changes their API every month or two as well.

It's a shame in the software world, and not just open source, that so many forks are made when the coders would probably end up with a better product by collaborating. It's often some most trivial reason like forker doesn't like the font or has conflicting politics with the original developer. It wouldn't surprise me if Clipgrab is actually based on youtube-dl.

 

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Developers should contribute more so instead of reinventing the wheel.

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Hello,

 

The tee command can be useful for troubleshooting or logging.  I used to use it a bit on *NIX systems

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

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17 hours ago, securitybreach said:

Neat but I think youtube-dl has the same features ;)

 

http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

 

The cli side looks like it would take me quite some time to set up to use. Had a quick look at some of the GUI offerings and they look almost as easy to use as clipgrab but as I am now familiar with clipgrab I'll be sticking with it for my limited use.

I normally download videos with a FF add-on called VideoDownloadHelper, two clicks and job done. 😎

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I have been using mp3splt to split up radio plays so that I can play them via usb in my car stereo. I used the guide below as it allows me to assign file names whilst splitting.

 

Split mp3 Files With mp3splt

 

Quote

Mp3splt is a Linux program that can break mp3 files into smaller pieces without re-encoding. This is nice for long mp3 files like e-books or for putting language learning CDs onto your mp3 player. Sometimes you only have a few minutes to listen to your language lesson and you'd rather not start at the beginning of a half hour lesson every time. I'm going to show an example of how to use mp3splt to split a 30 minute mp3 into 5 minute pieces.

 

mp3splt Home site

 

MAN page mp3splt

 

Whilst the program does not seem to have had an update since 2014 the support forum is active and the last post was nine days ago.

 

mp3splt Community Support forum

 

For some strange reason mp3splt is in the Arch - Extra repository but the gui version mp3splt-gtk is in the Arch - Community repository. Last update for both was in 2018.

 

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/mp3splt/

 

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mp3splt-gtk/

 

I have not used the gui version but from the screen shots I have seen it looks to have some pretty neat functions.

 

The cli version is fast and works like a charm. In addition to the method used in the guide above I have also used this simpler method,


 

Quote

 

If you have a large file in a folder you can split it and have the result saved in the same folder by doing this,

 

mp3splt -a -t 5.10 -o somefile@n somefile.mp3

 

similar to the first example but means you do not have to specify a folder.

 

 

My latest split which is very appropriate was,

 

The Missing Cryptoqueen

 

Enjoy

 

😎

Edited by abarbarian
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  • 1 year later...

Zim - A Desktop Wiki


 

Quote

 

Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

 

Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

 

 

A superb program. I just keep it for taking notes on programs I have installed. 😋

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