Favourite Lesser Known Programs

Welcome, i remember you too! :upside_down_face: :space_invader:
It’s nice in here :rocket:

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Anyone use viu or pqiv :thinking:

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https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/picard-git/

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Can identify most music by scanning the file.

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Typora is good, nothing malicious, the main issue is that once they’re happy with it, it’ll go proprietory and there will come a day when you have to pay if you want to continue with it.

This is pretty cool. I pretty much just stream all my music now but this would probably be useful to many people.

That’s not even a main issue for me, I don’t mind paying for good software, if it makes me more productive and pays for itself. It’s the insane EULA that I have a problem with. But no point in derailing this thread any further with that, in my opinion


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Prince of Persia

(Linux port of the original game)

prince1

prince2

It was one of the first games I played as a child on my first very own IBM-compatible PC (386 with a mathematics coprocessor, oh yeah!) on MS-DOS. It’s great to have a modern Linux port for it, which plays and feels like the original. For such an old game, the smooth gameplay and beautiful, rotoscoped animations impress me even to this day.

Here is the project page: https://www.popot.org/
and Git: https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP
and the AUR package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sdlpop

Here is also a nice presentation by Jordan Mechner on how he made that game: Classic Game Post Mortem: Prince of Persia - YouTube

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@Kresimir I played that game on my Apple II. You can also play it in DosBox. Never knew it was directly ported for Linux, it’s an awesome game.

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Yeah, while the game runs great in DosBox, this Linux port is much better. I wholeheartedly recommend trying it out if you like this game. :slight_smile:

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Oh i love this game! :slight_smile:

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Ah I see - makes sense. I guess I was trying to use cryptomator for something it is not built to do.

That’s a pity to hear! It is by far the most intuitive system for backups I have found, with Timeshift level ease of use. I went through a long list of other candidates, and most were incredibly complex to get going. I really try not to be one of those users who always wants a GUI but I find obvious visual feedback very handy for backups.

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The topic isn’t “Favourite Lesser Known Programs that run on Arch” but “Favourite Lesser Known Programs”, so :wink: [Edit: It’s how I get EOS onto hardware.]

For those with rooted Android phones - try out DriveDroid.

Copy an ISO to your phone as is, connect the phone to your pc, fire up drivedroid and you’ll be able to boot from your phone. You can hold as much iso’s as your storage space allows.
I haven’t needed to write an image to an actual usb device for years. :grin:

From its website:

DriveDroid simulates a USB thumbdrive or CD-drive by using the Mass Storage capabilities in the Android/Linux kernel. ISO/IMG files that are stored on the phone can be exposed to a PC like any other USB thumbdrive capabilities. That includes allows booting from the drive as well. The combination makes it quick and easy to do OS installations, rescues or have a portable OS on the go.

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Ok, I got one more for KDE users, been messing about with it for a good while:

Cullax

https://store.kde.org/p/1278039

Works well with Breeze Chameleon icons:

Or:

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This one might not be lesser known to many of you but I guess there are users out there like me to whom still many things in Linuxland are new: Ciano, an audio, video and photo conversion tool. It can be installed from the official repo (community).

https://robertsanseries.github.io/ciano/

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I just added howdy to my machine which does facial recognition instead of password using a webcam.

You can get the general gist from here:

Though pay attention to the arch wiki section on configuration and PAM here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Howdy

The PAM files you need to edit are here:

/etc/pam.d/

For example I edited sddm and sddm-greeter and now if I press enter instead of a password it uses the facial recognition.

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Then don’t miss

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Something else I like:
pulseaudio-dlna-python3-git

It casts your audio to any dlna devices on your network.

I run it as a command at startup, then my dlna devices appear as audio devices I can pick with audi device switcher.

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Bashtop.

Best terminal system monitor app around, not sure if this is lesser know though.

Most people seem to use htop, which is poor in comparison.

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It is reasonably well known here :smile:

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Htop starts faster though

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