Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
Lemmy
It’s been a bit over a year for me, otherwise this would be the answer.
Syncthing; it’s a modern miracle
Last time I tried it, it choked on anything over a million files. Is it better now?
When I learned about it first time I thought it sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it is just that good.
What is it?
Similar in function to google drive or onedrive or other cloud sync services but everything is kept local, more performant, and non-intrusive. Each device keeps your chosen synced folders up to date with other devices. You choose what is synced with each device on a foldee-by-folder basis.
I use it to sync my password manager database (keepass) and my notes app, among other things. So all my devices have the password database up to date and i can use the same password manager accross them.
It also provides version control optionally. I use obsidian for notes so if i screw up i can revert to the prwvious revision as a complex ‘undo’ option.
Works on major platforms including android, Linux, windows, and i assume apple stuff.
Awesome. I wonder if I can incorporate OneDrive easily. I’m on a family plan and have 1 TB of storage. Maybe there’s a way to upload stuff to OneDrive without the garbage of OneDrive.
Hmm. No it won’t work like that. It only syncs between devices. But i suppose you could have a dedicated device sitting in a closet or whatever which only handles a cloud sync service to which you could use synching with the one drive folders. That would minimize the suffering of having to deal with the broken interface of onedruve/google sync.
Yeah exactly. The Drive Sync hasn’t been too bad but OneDrive app is much more limited and I’m afraid to use it because it’s so flaky. Especially on non-Windows.
It syncs things.
No but really, it’s Pretty freaking cool A tool you can use to automatically sync data across multiple OS with minimal interaction from you.
Oh, is it like a Dropbox but without a cloud?
Yes. You have a “share”. That’s the imaginary dropbox-like thing. Then you have a folder on some device that you link to that share. All folders you link with that share become the same on any device, intelligently.
For sanity’s sake, unless I’m doing something like syncing game map folders across devices but inside a game’s special map folder, i keep them all in a folder called ‘sync’, and name the folders in ‘sync’ after the share name. Otherwise, things can get wonky. Consistent naming is important imo. With a share called “share with bob” started from a folder called ‘bob sync’ on sam’s end, ‘Sam’ on bob’s end, and they stay that way after anita joins, and she calls it ‘bob and Sam’ or something. Someone else joins and calls it “buddies”. Then, people say things like ‘i put it in the sam folder’, and it brings up questions.
But with a little bit of organization, it’s awesome. Drop a file in a folder, and it’s now on the other person’s computer too. They move it out, and the file’s gone for you.
If the computers can talk to each other (same lan, or proper internet connection) they will. If you have dysfunctional NAT or phones with no public-facing IP that are connecting to each other, just make sure some system can be accessed, and it’s all good. You want a cloud backup? Just set up the daemon on a server somewhere, and join the share.
Mine is kdeconnect which does what local send does plus so much more.
- using phone to control laptop
- getting phone notifications send to your pc
- can browse phone’s storage directly from pc
- find my phone function
Kde connect is great, iv always thought about using it but never got round to it as im current using a wm instead of a desktop environment. If i was to switch to a desktop environment kde would be my first choice as it has so many features.
I have kdeconnect on my i3wm.
I’ve had issues with it for file sharing, so far that I’m sticking to LocalSend, but I really need to explore KDEConnect further, as I haven’t explored the rest of its features.
Wait kdeconnect is Foss?! Can I fix the atrocious gui myself?!? 😂
That application rules but it looks like butt on my workstation.
May I suggest valent?
I’m sure they’d welcome a pull improving the UX! https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-kde I think the implementation of the protocol is pretty well isolated from the UI, so pretty radical UI changes should be relatively easy
I just may…
Yeah no complaints on functionality! It’s great!
GSConnect works great for GNOME too.
There’s also a still in-development rival for GNOME, Valent. And it’s a native program and not just a shell extension. I prefer it, and maybe it even has more features.
Well, I guess we’re a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
Bitwarden / Vaultwarden, no other password manager I’ve tried before has really worked for me.
Bitwarden or KeePassXC is my favorite too :)
HomeAssistant, it’s such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.
It’s just an amazing piece of software.
My favorite thing I’ve done with hass is put a color-changing light bulb by my front door. It’s connected to the weather forecast. I know what the weather will be at a glance without a website or going outside. (Where I live, it’s not always obvious when I’m gonna get rained on.)
This isn’t exactly “can’t live without,” that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
Well we can’t live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can’t live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?
I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it… and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too…so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.
Loved TA as a kid. Played it for countless hours on GameSpy and EA Zone. Will definitely give this a try, thank you!
Sweet! For others coming by, here’s the official trailer:
That link doesn’t seem to work for me 🙁
Fixed, but it’s a youtube link.
I switched to niri about a year ago. It’s perfect for those who like tiling WMs but want a more natural flow, without constant window resizing.
Niri with waybar, fuzzel, and tessen give a pretty complete desktop.
Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack
*chef’s kiss*
Add a private torrent indexer and/or Usenet and it’s perfection.
There’s also Homarr for those who prefer a nice and easy frontend to install the arr suite and more.
Probably Playnite as someone who games a lot. I like to mod my games and get them from different sources so being able to launch Northstar (a launcher for Titanfall 2) or FROST (a total conversion mod for Fallout 4) from one place is nice really nice. You can do a lot of this from within Steam but I find it works a lot smoother in Playnite. You can easily scrape box/cover art for unofficial games, have HowLongToBeat data readily available, have links to the Wikipedia and Nexus Mods pages, and edit the description below the game to say stuff like “Press T to open up trainer menu”.
Unfortunately it’s not available (natively) on Linux. I’ve used Lutris but I don’t believe it has the same customization options. I don’t think there is much in the way of themes besides dark mode and light mode or plugin support. That said I haven’t tried to customize it in several years. I’ve gotten complacent in that aspect and have just been adding them to Steam. I have heard GameHub is another option I have heard about recently but I thought it was mostly the same as Lutris. It turns out it does have some features I was looking for such as popularity scores, game description, and genre tags but I am not sure how the support is for themes and plugins. You can read a decent It’sFOSS article about it here.
Thank you!
I’d never heard of this until your comment, and tried a few others, but as someone with LOADS of emulators and games across multiple services this is amazing. Ive just finished setting it up… I hadn’t saved this post so went trawling to find this post just to say thanks!
Emulation Station Desktop Edition (ES-DE) is probably a good alternative gaming frontend similar to Playnite
The TIC80 fantasy console. It’s like Pico8 but open source.
Pico8 is not open source? TIL. That’s so odd.
Yeah, it’s not. Leads to weird situations on Linux handheld where you paste in your purchased binary if it’s compatible, or you use an emulator like fake08 that has good, but not perfect, compatibility.
conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.
PCSX2. It’s an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2’s native resolution doesn’t do the graphics of the PS2’s best games justice.
It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!
- URLCheck: Bring back the “open link with…” functionality of android with so many more features
- PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.
I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.
KDE connect is 🔥🔥🔥
