this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are ~~two~~ three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.

  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months ("what was just the number of our gas meter?" "what is the process to clean the dishwasher?") , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.

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[–] floatingpin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 36 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I really like units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.

~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in'
	6 ft + 2.8031496 in
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

I also like it very much. I hope they make a library for it soon, I can't wait to use it to make unit aware calculators.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you don't want to bother with a CLI app and specific syntax to follow, there's rofi-calc, it's super fast to load since it's just rofi and it understands natural language. When I stumbled upon it I found the idea of a calculator that understands you when you type "30 feet in mm" or "10 usd in euros" completely mindblowing. Props to qalc for making it possible

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean the syntax for gnu units is literally the same unit expression used in math. m^2, cm, m/s etc. the ft;in looks weird because it's two units combined.

Your example in it would be units 30ft mm , use -t for terse results that's just the final value.

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

It's definitely usable if you know the right abbreviations to use, and it seems a lot more concise which much be convenient if you're used to the syntax! But I find natural language also has a lot of advantages, especially for converting units you don't see often and have no clue how to abbreviate, like when watching videos that give you measurements in weird units. Plus my brain tends to freeze when something looks like maths, so natural language is easier to use for me (even though I know it's THE EXACT SAME calculation 😅 ).

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Again, you can type feet instead of ft and it'll work. You can write 'feet per second' instead of 'ft/s' and it'll work. Natural language has its benefits but when you have a very simple syntax model then there's less chances of it making a mistake.

[–] rayhem@lemm.ee 13 points 1 day ago

units is really powerful. I worked with the team there to appropriately support Gaussian units since it seems no other tool would—took a bit of retrofitting to support fractional exponents like "grams^1/2", but I have yet to find another tool that handles this even remotely correctly.

[–] vaionko@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

Cool! Though I'll probably still use krunner for this

[–] SilverShark@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

This looks amazing and I need to have it in my life. Thank you so much for sharing