Linux

An app that tracks how much time you spend using each app. Locally obviously. I want this information so I can see how much I should donate to each project each quarter.

Make an app that is a little ASCII potted plant in your terminal and every time you type something it waters the plant and it grows

Obsidian 1:1 open source alternative.

How about a Lemmy Client?

I'd like to see a simple, dependency-free, calculator app, written in Rust, using egui. All other GUI calculator apps I've seen so far are unnecessarily heavy, using bloated toolkits like GTK or Qt.

This would be handy for those run a GTK/Qt-free environment, and/or those who just want a tiny calculator app (optimised for the smallest binary size) without any external dependencies. Preferably even compiled using musl, to remove any glibc dependencies - resulting in a simple, small, portable binary that can run on any distro and doesn't even need to be installed.

Eventually, I would like to see this idea expanded to other apps - such as a simple text editor, a simple image editor, and maybe even a simple and lightweight web browser using Servo.

The world needs the ability to sync freetube and newpipe. It's the missing link for both Apps, to be usable from home, to out and about

A Linux implementation of Microsoft's Powertoys. Having all those utility features in one app would be great.

An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, ...), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.

a 🔥blazingly fast🔥 voxel based open world RPG with soulslike and medroidvania elements

GUI app to create/edit/config Samba shares.

Idea 1

I've been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn't completely thumb chewing stupid. I've yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you'd get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.

I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like "take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5" and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.

And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the "journal" apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a "view" mode to see what you've done. Also: Don't be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don't want some light mode Gnome lookin' bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.

Idea 2

Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.

Idea 3

You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This "seems quite complex." The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It's a general purpose engineering CAD system and it's designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can't think in terms of "put a mortise and tenon joint here" you have to think "create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions." And then it doesn't give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn't write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so...I'm not sure why they bother at this point.

I've been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I've thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as "monumental."

A music player for Jellyfin (that support SyncPlay)

Afaik, there is no app to very easily generate GIFs.

• select images
• select duration
• select quality / size
• generate gif (avif?)

plus:

• optimized for smartphones

There is switcheroo which makes image conversion easily. It converts to gif as well but only 1 image to 1 gif, not 2 images to 1 gif.

It should be straight forward since image magick contains all neccessary commands for gif creation

Implement a wireless file transfer protocol that works with Apple's Airdrop and Android's Quick Share.

In other words Airdrop for Linux that works with both iOS and Android.

2. Create a software tool with UI that allows syncing of a phone with Linux to copy over photos, documents, music etc.

Must work with ios and android

What about a fully featured PDF tool (page deletion, blank page instertion, OCR, edition, conversion, cropping, reorientation, etc...). This is a very missing feature of the linux world, we always have to jump from one software to another. An alternative would be to build the plugins of Okular to allow to make these operations.

Do you know what really doesn't exist?

A pure, HTML only, WYSIWYG text editor. Every text editor out there is either XML, JSON or Markdown based. HTML is the most widely adopted standard ever and is the best for storing content long term. People could write CSS themes, you could even add paged media support.

Real time midi sequencer for the trs-80 model 100

Obsidian clone thats better than logseq

@Fredol a simple, clean-looking GTK4 client for Syncthing.

A simple GTK4 + libadwaita sound recorder. I know it's probably a 1 day task but we seem to lack a good modern recorder for my favourite DE.

P. S. I smell another downvoted to oblivion moment for liking GNOME

A backup and restore utility which allows me to export/restore system settings and installed apps. This would make a reinstalll much less time consuming and allow installs of the same configuration on other computers.

Voice assistant that allows to perform common tasks like setting up calendar events, sending emails, opening apps, etc. Bonus points for "connect to server abc" and the assistant would open the terminal and ssh to abc server.

A simple intuitive whitelist/blacklist firewall with logging for both inputs and outputs. I shouldn't have to navigate NFT's complexity or write scripts simply to list all the websites I'm willing or unwilling to connect to and their port number. There are silly limitations on all the tools I've tried.

I use a whitelist because my code sucks, and PDF datasheets for hobbyist hardware projects can be super sketchy to download. I have somewhere around 600 entries on my list. It feels like an intentionally obfuscated/overcomplicated issue in OpenWRT and elsewhere from a user's perspective.

I really don't trust local LLM's overall now that they've been shown to have hidden vulnerabilities and would love to have an easier way to monitor an outputs log and sandbox really.

How about a doc editor, not code editor, not m$ word. Just a simple modern doc editor.

We really don't have a native asciidoc editor, not even one. Unlike other apps which we don't use it frequently that even electron liked apps' performance are acceptable, doc editor should be built in native.

We have something like https://www.appflowy.io/ and https://www.getgrist.com/, but none of them are native.

A gtk app for YouTube and/or twitch intended for media PCs would be neat, with controller/remote support and ui optimization for air mice.

I don't like the ux of kodi very much and trying to get it to play YouTube has been a nightmare 😅 a simple app with a decent user interface would be very welcome

I desperately want a simple GUI for setting the sample and bit rates for my audio input device. Mine is a Focusrite 2i2 gen 3, but there should be a fairly universal way to do this in Pipewire.

A gui app that lets you:

• symmetrically encrypt and decrypt text and files with AES-256 and without any weird formating that would make it incompatible with openssl.
• generate (without writing to file) RSA-(2048-4096) keys and asymmetrically encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify text and files.

It should be simple without any advanced options or storing any data or credentials or saving anything without asking the user. For example;

For symmetric text:

• 3 text boxes, 1 for input, 1 for output, 1 for password, encrypt/decrypt radio, 1 button.

For symmetric file:

• file picker, 1 password text box, encrypt/decrypt radio, 1 button

For asymmetric generation:

• 2 text boxes, 1 for priv key, 1 for pub key, 1 button.

For asymmetric text:

• 3 text boxes, 1 for input, 1 for output, 1 for priv/pub key, encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify radio, 1 button

For asymmetric file:

• file picker, 1 priv/pub key text box, encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify radio, 1 button

Clozemaster-style spaced repetition app for languages. It reads a sentence with text to speech, you have to fill in the blank with your target language. Translation can be shown if you're stuck, and you can turn on hints when typing. It shows the words based on the SM-2 algorithm or similar

There's a big lack of a decent RC airplane simulator on Linux. One that you can plug a transmitter in via USB or Bluetooth and go from there. Real flight is the king but it's Windows only.

Not sure if you can use rust to write browser plugins, but I really want a plugin that when you right click a link, you have to option to open the link with javascript disabled. Chrome or Firefox.

I wrote a version of this in Python a few years ago, but it depended on external tools like ffmpeg to work, limiting its portability. The Python requirement was also a major factor for adoption.

If it were ported to Rust, doing the (de)serialisation internally, I believe that it could have far-reaching implications on how we share and consume news:

https://danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/

If you're interested, I presented the Python version at PyCon UK a while back.

A graphical SSH client similar to Termius

A gui for a tunneling solution such as rathole or FRP.