My top 3 FOSS apps (x3)

5 minutes read •

I have some free time, so why not sign the praises of my current fav apps. Broke things down by device since the use cases differ greatly. Here’s the context re: devices:

Chrultrabook (Laptop)

  1. Firejail - It’s a love/dislike relationship that has captured a lot of my attention in the last two weeks. I like the idea of locking down a device and have experience tweaking the config for trackercontrol on my phone, as well as AdGuard Home + BanIP on my router. Firejail arguably gives more granular control than the other three apps combined, but the documentation is traditional for advanced users, or users that want to set it on the GUI and call it a day. There’s a steeper learning curve than I’d like but I’m slowly getting better. It’s an addictive hobby I find and I’m not the only one given how quickly people respond on the firejail GitHub lol.
  2. Shortwave - Oh crap, a Gnome app on my KDE rig. I’ve tried 1-2 other radio apps and it has one feature that sets it apart: it proactively records songs - for ‘research purposes’ of course - and then either discards them automatically, or if you like the song, it will save it to a folder of your choice. I have mines set to my server’s jellyfin folder *chef’s kiss*. Outside of that, it uses the same radio API as other radio apps that allow for radio listening across the world… which, side-note, is one of those things that people both take for granted and at the same time, don’t take nearly enough advantage of. I mostly use it to listen to tech house on European stations (why does the Russian tech house station slap so much?).
  3. OpenSSH - This device is the least powerful but thanks to ssh, I can quickly jump around when I need more oomph or want to work on my server while laying out on the couch. (An honorable mention goes to scp for throwing files into the /tmp/ of another device quickly)

Optiplex (Desktop)

  1. taskwarrior - I use this daily to organize my life around the principles of Getting Things Done. It is built w/ power users in mind and I can’t sing it’s praises enough. I will freely admit that the transition to 3.0.0 burned a lot of bridges, but I came late to the party and am having a good time 🤷🏾‍♂️. I will do a deeper post/series on my taskwarrior usage eventually.
  2. Jupyterlab-desktop - I am running jupyter-server on my server and connect via jupyterlab-desktop. I used this setup daily when I was reading [[@/blog/currentlyReading033125|the Pandas book]]. I recently started a course on Agentic AI which had me using Cursor and I hated it. I pivoted to a FOSS setup from there (Codium + Continue) and struggled w/ that as well. The navigation just didn’t feel as intuitive as Jupyter but luckily I found out I can use jupyter notebooks for AI coding via jupyter-ai.
  3. Workrave - Stumbled across this one randomly. Being in front of the monitor/screen for hours on end adds up over time. The app reminds me to take breaks and stretch my legs throughout the day and has made me more conscious of my work habits.

Server (Laptop)

  1. Docker - I am running 30 containers as we speak.. My fave containers at the moment are SearXNG and FreshRSS.
  2. Audiobookshelf - I use this daily. My use case isn’t actually podcasts as much as listening to audio-only YouTube videos via the yt-dlp which can strip out the video. Here is the aliase I have in my .bash_aliases file: alias audio='yt-dlp -f "249/250/251/ba" -x --audio-format opus -P "/path/to/mounted/Server"'. I listen to the content mostly when I am going to sleep. On a related note, I was converting to .mp3 since it was familiar, but it turns out that .opus is (and has always been) FOSS, and is among the best quality codecs out there. It saves better quality than mp3 whi
  3. Syncthing - This is my set-it-and-forget-it tool for accessing data across devices. I have a bunch of removable media collecting dust because the only times I need a USB stick is when something breaks and I need recovery media. (An honorable mention goes to kde-connect here)