Variety - a silly taskbar program that changes my background randomly from my own selected sources with added random quotes. I have it set to change my background every 3 hours and the quotes every hour I think. I just can' live without it anymore.

Well, I guess we're a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.

My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.

Two candidates for my best-discovery-of-the-year prize,

Ptyxis terminal: https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis A modern take at a terminal, gtk-4 native, gpu accelerated, container-aware etc that replaced tilix in my setup. And it comes neatly packaged as a flatpak

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

Big shootout to flatpak/flathub that for me has finally taken off, I converted all of my regular desktop apps to flatpaks. Went from 3-4 apps last year to ~20 (including Firefox libreoffice, even my terminal app) this year and not looking back. This has made doing a major host SW upgrade almost painless for the first time in 25+ years using Linux desktops.

Nuclear and RiMusic are great so i dont need spotify/YTmusic or something.

proxmox really made me enjoy selfhosting again.

"Can't live without" is an overstatement, but here are mine:

• Kvaesitso, search focused android launcher. I used to really like nova launcher's local search and navigated my phone mostly using that. But once gensture navigation became a thing I had to stop using nova and replicate the experience in Samsung launcher with various local search apps that were lacking in comparison. Tried to go back a couple times once gestures with 3rd party launchers got better but found my old setup still too ugly and sluggish to go back to. Recently I randomly came across Kvaesitso on fdroid and it was everything I ever wanted out of a launcher.

• Amberol music player. Not the ideal music player I'd like but at least it's not Elisa.

• Kid3, audio file tag editor. It has much better workflow/automation than mp3tag that I used in windows, and it seems if you spend some effort on it you could add more automation to make it even better.

Spottube, like Spotify but without the shitty ads, play limitations and tracking.

Every. Day. In the kitchen.

Gotta be my Synology NAS. Although the hardware isn't free. The software is open source.

I moved always from every cloud storage provider to my own private cloud instead! Could not be happier!

My wife loves it too!

Edit: Sorry! Looks like some parts of the Nas is open. Not DSM itself.

Navidrome, as a music server. It's very convenient to have a central place to host your music.

My biggest issue is that it doesnt't support multiple artists yet.

Superproductivity is great for tasks. It can even sync issues with apps (Gitlab, Jira, etc.) Pair it with Obsidian or any note taking app and you can forget work todos outside of work.

For the windows users: Powertoys has bunch of utilities. Without this windows is unusable for me.

The TIC80 fantasy console. It's like Pico8 but open source.

Now that most of my friends and family are using it, I'm on Briar Messaging every day. Since there are no central servers, is entirely encrypted, and runs on the Tor network, I think it is probably the most secure messaging platform out there. It also has private groups and forums but I am not yet involved in any of those outside of a couple of small ones that are just for sharing family news.

My choice is screen on the CLI. It's an old one, but I just learned about it this year and it's been amazing helpful doing complex, long-running tasks via SSH.

Guix!

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.

That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).

Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.

It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern "media library" interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).

conduwuit, a matrix home server it is so much faster and works so much better than the Dendriter server it replaced.

Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.

I second local send :)

Magic Wormhole - it's been around awhile but it's super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.

I can live without Logseq but for work and keeping a log of how that worked (other than bash history) It's really useful

ZFS. It's come so far, and it has so far to go. but it's a good concept for sure.

Some great apps on here, downloading some of the suggestions to try out