Useful Linux software you might not know about
Useful Linux software you might not know about
SpaceFM icon [SpaceFM](https://ignorantguru.github.io/spacefm/) SpaceFM icon
A fully customizable file manager! By "fully" I truly mean it - you can edit
everything. Choose what is seen on the sidebar - devices, shortcuts, tree
view? Or nothing, leaving the whole window for managing files. Click on any
toolbar button or bookmark to set its shortcut. Set custom icons for bookmarks.
Format or backup devices. But the most important feature is custom commands.
For a tutorial, we will be adding a command to move all selected pictures to
the Pictures folder. Right click on any file, then on Copy, choose New, and
click Command. For its name, type "Move to Pictures folder". The actual command
will be "mv %F /home/hackerman/Pictures" (of course replace hackerman with your
real username). Now you have to choose upon which conditions the command will
appear. For that, go to the Context menu, and choose rule "MIME type"
"equals". Inside the textbox, type "image/jpeg", and click Add. That will
display the command for every jpeg file. Now do the same but with "image/png"
and "image/gif". Voila! Now, every time you right click an image (or many),
there will be an option to put it (them) in an appropriate place. Note: if there
are multiple files, all of them have to fit the command's requirements. So
if you select 100 files, of which 99 are images and one is a music file, the
command will not appear. Anyway, that's the power of SpaceFM. Our command is
pretty basic, but the possibilities are endless. Works with GTK2.
qBittorrent icon [qBittorrent](https://www.qbittorrent.org/) qBittorrent icon
A torrent client with an in-built search engine! There are more of them but
the others all suck. For example, Vuze has ads in its free version. Tixati is
bloated to hell and back. Frostwire is also bloated - video players have no
place inside torrent clients. KTorrent is the only other one that's open source
but the last time I used it, most of its search engines didn't work and
displayed a big ugly error. That, then, leaves qBittorrent, which also has a
really nice, clean user interface (though an unfortunate qt dependency).
aMule logo[aMule](http://amule.org/) aMule logo
Even better than torrents. As qB, it has a search engine, but is also more
configurable in other ways. You can add friends and send messages, but the most
important feature is the ability to set a SOCKS proxy server - yes, this
means you can download files through TOR. In an age where ISPs literally
send letters trying to scare you from torrenting, and some people even get
fined, this is very important. Note: I wasn't able to get High ID with TOR -
it doesn't seem to be possible, and apparently is with some VPNs. However
(most) VPNs are paid, and can rat you out. Also, only TCP traffic goes through
TOR, while aMule still sends some UDP traffic, but the actual file is
downloaded through TOR - I know because when I turned it off, the download
stopped. I think the UDP is just for server requests. Regardless, this is
uncharted territory - not much information at all on running aMule through
TOR, so some issues could still pop up. TOR does not provide perfect security
regardless - even with all the effort spent on the TOR browser, they can barely
deal with simple things such as fingerprinting. TOR itself was deanonymized many
times, and probably many more tactics are in preparation or even active, but
unknown to the public. But it is better than relying on direct connections, and
is your best free option. Works with GTK2.
QuodLibet icon [QuodLibet](https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#)
QuodLibet icon
The best Linux music player! (and I think I've tried them all). The UI is great.
Everything is so intuitive and usable. You can choose what you see on the
sidebar - playlists, album lists, your folders, etc. Its preferences menu has
everything it needs to and nothing more (while some other players, like DeadBeeF
or Clementine, have too much stuff shoved in there). In the track view, you can
easily add or remove the visible columns that you need - and there are LOTS of
them, while DeadBeeF only has a few. Supports ratings and grouping tags (which
can also be displayed as columns in the song list) - and here we come to
QuodLibet's most important feature, which is missing in other music players.
The advanced tag filtering capabilities. Every option that is available as a
column can be used as a search term. So you can search by length, album,
author, whatever. And combine all those in any way you want. Let's say I'm not
in the mood for short or sad songs and I've assigned those a relevant grouping
value. So I can type (grouping = !sad, grouping = !short), which means "show
me songs where the grouping tag is NEITHER sad nor short". I also don't want
any badly rated songs, so let's add a rating over 0.5. &(grouping = !sad,
grouping = !short, #(rating > 0.5)). See? You can do everything with this, and
no other player has this capability. A detailed explanation of QuodLibet's
filtering is available
(MozArchive). QuodLibet
2.4.1 works with GTK2 and doesn't appear to be missing any relevant features
despite being 11 years old. The only player other than QuodLibet that has the
regex search is cmus - but it is console-based and requires ~~taking
systemdicks up your ass~~ elogind.
Claws Mail icon [Claws Mail](https://claws-mail.org) Claws Mail icon
A mail client that (similar to SpaceFM) manages to be featureful while not
getting in your way. UI is clean and immediately understandable; I especially
like the Preferences menu where you can see all the categories at once on the
left side and the options they consist of on the right side. Using Claws Mail
has been painless and very efficient for me - you can easily do literally
everything you want in regards to mail handling (PGP support available through
plugin - works very well) - while being able to ignore the things you don't care
about without hassle. More importantly - when the security of various mail
clients against the EFAIL attack
(MozArchive) was tested,
only Claws and Mutt passed them with flying colors:
Contrast that to Thunderbird (usually the E-mail software of choice for Linux
systems) which was one of the only clients vulnerable to all three of the
above attacks (two of them without user interaction). Then again, it is
not even a mail client but an abomination consisting of an RSS reader,
calendar, task manager, and a fucking chat program. It even has a default
search engine and fucking tabs - like what the fuck? This isn't a web
browser! Of course, the UI is also terrible - check out Principles of bad
software design to know more.
There is also Sylpheed (from which Claws Mail has been forked a long time ago)
which is a decent choice but lacks some important features while not really
being more usable. The Preferences menu is badly designed as well. Important
privacy warning: Claws Mail reveals your timezone by default (in the
headers of sent E-mails), which could be sensitive especially if you have a rare
one like +12 or such. To remove that "feature", go to
/home/username/.claws-mail/ and open the file clawsrc. In it, find the
line hide_timezone and change the value to 1. Works with GTK2.
Liferea icon [Liferea](https://lzone.de/liferea/) Liferea icon
An RSS client joining the list of lean, simple and solid software with just
enough features to be useful without overburdening the user. But first - what
are RSS clients and why use them? Briefly - some websites choose to supply a
document called an RSS (or Atom) feed which contains all the articles / news it
has submitted. A client can then mass download those with one click, save them
and read them locally. It is a great debloater of the Web, displaying all the
headlines at once while avoiding the fluff. You can then quickly choose what
interests you and read it in Liferea's simple viewer (there's a gimped version
of the article sometimes, though - depending on what the site has chosen) or go
to the site directly. Liferea's features are exactly what's needed and no more -
the ability to group feeds by folders, marking them so they avoid being
automatically dumped, searching, exporting the feed list, offline mode,
auto-detection of a site's RSS feed location...It's the perfect combination of
usefulness and simplicity. Contrast with RSSOwl which has way too much shit
integrated into it. Anyway, I really recommend RSS clients in general - you
don't know what you're missing until you try them, like with mail clients versus
webmail. Another advantage of RSS is being able to push / view all the
updates since you've last read a site. Really handy for both web developers
and readers! There are not many RSS clients at all - pretty much just RSSOwl
(bloat), Thunderbird (mozillaware), QuiteRSS (bloated qt dependency...) and some
console-only ones - so Liferea is the recommendation. UPDATE: the latest
version I can find that supports GTK2 is 1.8.7. It works perfectly fine.
StarDict
Recently I got annoyed by having to go to a website to find a definition of a
word once again, and realized it's finally time to setup a local solution for
this functionality. Obviously, it's better to not connect to the internet if you
don't have to; the website (or the entire connection) might be down, there
might be spy scripts included, long loading times, or the online dictionary
definitions might become compromised as happened during Covid. So I went on a
journey to find the best local dictionary software but flaws kept turning up -
such as requiring online (making it pointless), being terminal-only, having
undesirable dependencies, not having good dictionaries available, etc. I almost
gave up until StarDict showed up - which was the only one that satisfied my
standards. In Slackware, you can install it by the usual way of slapt-get
-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.-install stardict.
Now, by default it's as useless as any other one, and it might seem hard to find
dictionaries for it. Fortunately I've found this
site which has many really good ones. I
especially like the Oxford English Dictionary ones, which I just picked
because they had big size so I assumed they'd have all the words. But there are
also ones for slang, synonyms, other languages, and other stuff I didn't try
because I haven't needed it (so far). To make StarDict recognize a dictionary,
you'll need to extract the archive and put all the resulting files in
/usr/share/stardict/dic. Keep in mind that searching for a word might get
slow if you have a lot of big dicts installed. You can enable or disable them at
any time in the settings, and you might want to disable the default ones,
as some of them connect to the Internet. Finally, a problem I've had for quite a
while has now been solved, and I hope you can benefit from this software too.
Looking at the screenshot, you should be able to see the Scan option on the
bottom left. Now, that is something I didn't expect nor is what I wanted such
software for, but it turned out very useful. What it does when enabled is that -
when you select a word in any software other than StarDict, then hover over
it, a small StarDict notification will appear under your cursor, showing the
definition right there. Very convenient if you're reading an article with
technical words, etc. and can't be bothered alt+tabbing to the StarDict window
every time you can't figure something out. If you want to use this option, you
really should disable the default dictionaries, because otherwise, every text
selection will be sent to those.
Other GTK2 software
PeaZip or xarchiver for archive management. Older versions of Transmission for
torrenting, alternatively rtorrent. MPlayer is the only video player as far as I
can see, and it lacks any actual user interface. Atril for PDF viewing.
Veracrypt works for disk encryption. The only "modern" GTK2 browser is Pale
Moon. Geany IDE requires an actual review, but for now putting it in here.
Pidgin or old versions of Gajim as XMPP clients; alternatively Profanity.
Ristretto image viewer (edit: actually, Mirage is better, with more features
especially the default zoom). All system settings, etc. tools from Xfce 4.12
work.