Episode: 4418
Title: HPR4418: My Desktop Applications
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4418/hpr4418.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:30:10

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,418 for Wednesday 9 July 2025.
Today's show is entitled, My Desk Thop Applications.
It is hosted by Kevi, and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Kevi goes over his must of applications whenever he installs a new
distro.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, hello, this is Kevi from the Tux-Champ Podcast, and if you listen to this, this
means that HPR are starting to run out of shows, because this one is specifically being recorded
for the Reserve Q. So can I please encourage you for in order to keep HPR running, because
the motto generally is, once the shows run out, this project stops, which is not something
I want to see.
So can I please encourage you to record something, even something as simple as I am doing here,
even just building up a Reserve Q, because even though I noticed the Reserve Q itself is
rather low, so yeah, please do record something.
Now what I am going to do in this episode is just go over just some of the desktop apps
that I am going to be using, and this is obviously start of 2025, so this is going to change
if I hope actually that this doesn't get released for many this year, and I'll listen
back and go, I don't use that anymore, but right now these are the ones that I currently
use.
Now I am not going to go over things that readily come with distrust in general, instead
I am going to go over the things that these are the things that I use, and I generally
can't live without.
So now just going through them as they appear in the menu, the first one I am seeing there
is, Peasup, Peasup is my preferred option of choice as a general decompressor of files
or even compressor for that reason, it's very seldom in repos though for, I don't know
why, but very few of the repos, it seems to be very seldom in repos, but it is open source,
it's available actually I think, an all three computer platform, main computer platform,
so it's available Linux, and I believe it's also available on Windows and Mac OS as
well, so that's Peasup, so now I'm just now looking at games and the first thing that
I always install is Lutrus, I'm a gamer, and I also like to have my games searched from
various places, generally speaking I will generally support companies that will support Linux,
even if not all the games are available Linux, so things like Steam, I believe Steam
I've done a power of good for Linux, Gog, I am pleased to use just now however I am
rather than if that's Gog Galaxy, it's never reported to Linux, so, but Lutrus does
take care of this, it also seems to work very well as well with it's you and Amazon
games, so yeah this is one that quite often I find that when things fail to run using
wine, setting them up through Lutrus will quite often work very nicely, and I have found
a couple of times, I don't often use non Linux applications other than games, but on
the odd time I've had to, I have found it is actually good for installing non games as
well, so if you haven't looked at that I would highly recommend Lutrus, on the graphics
packages I'm going to talk about two here that I have to have, simply have to have, and
for some I've been on reason I don't understand why these are not, maybe it's just my personal
use case, but these to me are two of the biggest and best flagship applications that open
source has, and that to me is Gimp and Inkscape, Gimp for your image, Edit Photo Editing, people
say it's difficult to create stuff in Gimp, okay fair enough, but it's not designed for
that, it's a photo editing application, if you want to make that and post that and add
text and things, it's much easier to take your edit image and place it into Inkscape, Inkscape
is a graphical program that's more along the route of developing and creating things,
so it would kind of be more akin to your kind of, if you imagine GNU may be as an alternative
to Photoshop, Inkscape will be like an alternative to Illustrator, something like that, so generally
those two are, to me, musts online, but then again I do do quite a bit of graphics.
The Chuba is the next one I've got, and although I must admit I am using it less and less,
just purely because of FANTB being so dashed good, but it's a web page and I'm not going
to start detailing what web pages I use, but I still do have it on, and I still do keep
it updated, it still gets fired up, so Chuba is a client for a master done, so it's been
actually quite heavily developed over these last two years, I mean it went, it's so quite
a few versions being released, I think the first release I tried was we tested in an episode
of Tuxjam and it was 0.2 or something, but it's way beyond that now, so on, now I've got
Calibre on this, that's for keeping the e-books all in the format that I'm looking for, most
people know what Calibre is, I'm going to call it Calibre, it's entirely up to you, I just
like, it looks to me, freedom, Libre, so Calibre, but I can get why people would call it Calibre,
but the other one that I actually always download is PDF arranger, now I don't know about you,
but anytime I seem to get PDF, I have to use PDFs I work especially, and I get sent a document
that's 80 odd pages long, but to be honest, only four pages are relevant, and at work, I only
have PDF, I've only got a PDF reader, I don't have anything I can edit stuff, so I know before
you ask, I can't, I don't even have admin privileges to run applications that aren't
appropriate, far less, aren't recommended, far less than install something, I can't do anything,
I am not allowed to, even if I go to a program and go to settings, it says you do not have privileges
for this, I am really locked out, all I can do is use what I'm given, but PDF arranger is
a simple PDF reader, you can read if you want on that, but it also does so much more, it can
allow you to change the, to remove pages, you can change the order of pages, and it's a simple
drag and drop, and the other thing I like about it is, is that you can import pages from other
PDFs, and again, simple drag and drop, there are other ways, but I just find this one so handy,
I think once upon a time, this might have been originally PDF shuffler, but I'm not sure on that,
it looks maybe I forgot that, but it's the current one I'm using is PDF arranger,
the bluefish editor is one that I use regularly, that's what editing HTML, I need to do that,
and a few different lines of work, and I also tend to do the show notes for HPR on bluefish,
the easy tag, I don't know how many people use this one, this is one that was recommended to me
through tuxjam, can't remember what it from a listener, what it from a co-host, but it's a really good
application for editing the metadata on files, so especially things like if you've got an audio file,
you can do things like say the artist, say the album, things cap, but it's not exclusively for audio
files, it's just all the different data that will be associated with a file, and you can also do
things like add thumbnails for that file, so that's a really nice application, good vibes is one
that I only came across recently, because I was always having fun of Radio 3, however recently
I've really struggled to get Radio 3 to work, just because of various dependencies, it's no longer
a pack, it's not really that actively maintained either, so I have tried and tried, but I keep on running
into dependency issues and then I get clashes, and the last time I got working, I thought great,
it's working, however, when I actually got it, it said to me when I updated my system, it said
package broken, removing, I wanted to cry, but I just gave up on it, so I found this Wii program,
good vibes, it's a nice Wii radio application, there you quite simply, the only thing I will say is
you do need to know the stream, it doesn't seem to search by radio station, you do need to know
the stream itself, but for all I actually use it for, it's absolutely perfect, OBS Studio is one
that in this day and age of streaming, again, I'm kind of surprised this isn't more and more in
more distrust by default, but it's one that I find very useful, if you are wanting to stream
anything and you're not just wanting to be, if you just want the screen casted, then this would do
it fine, but it's ideal for adding different things, like if you want to put a logo on, if you
want to put an icon or anything like that, it's also great for, it can save as a video, or indeed
it can also stream directly to various websites, I use it for streaming to YouTube, so open short
video editor, I don't edit videos very much, but on the odd time when I choose to, it is handy,
it's simple, it's nothing too detailed, it gets a job done, if you're looking for an advanced
video editor, I'd say this isn't for you, however, it's handy just for clipping videos, for joining
videos together, that kind of thing, one that I was only introduced to fairly recently is Rico,
now I don't really want to say too much of it Rico, because I actually want to cover this as a
dedicated episode, this is after Ken Fallon actually requesting this, so that is an application used
for recording audio, and it can be used to record the individual microphone, or the sound that comes
through, so it's ideal for things like if you want to record a group call, and it's dead easy to use,
no, do I have anything else that I have forgotten about, VLC is a standard for me, but then again,
I assume that is for most people, if I am using a distro that has pulse audio volume control
as I must for me, I love how you can control it, you can control sounds from different applications,
what's that input, what's that I could so easily, I mean it takes no, it takes absolutely no
expertise, let's say, very minimal expertise, and people will probably be listening to say,
are you mad, just go and install Jack, that's fine, right, for somebody who's really into audio,
Jack is great, and it's far more customizable, however, for average Joe, Jack is not what I would
recommend, I think it would just throw them, and of course telegram gets installed for me,
for on every one asked us mumble, again those are necessities for keeping in touch with people,
right, so I think that's a bit it, no, this wasn't a highly thought out or even well planned,
sure, but it's still covered quite a lot, and the thing is when you actually get something,
somebody doing something like this, very often you go, oh that's interesting, I'm going to go
check that out, so please do this, I mean very often you may think that what you're using,
oh there's nothing special, but the fact is that it is actually something that is special,
oh one I did forget, how can I forget about this, sink thing, I absolutely love sink thing,
not just for keeping my files between my computer and even my phone, but also for sharing,
especially for sharing larger files with different people, so obviously that's something that
you're going to need to have somebody else that uses sink thing for them to switch between the two,
but if you're in the geek community certainly most people will be using sink thing, so yeah,
so those are my recommendations, that's not the only applications I've got, but as I said,
I'm not going to start listing games I've installed, I'm not going to start listing every single
thing that I'm going to install, that's already installed on the systems,
the only two things that I would mention is this is into applications, but the two things that I
would always say that I do tend to install, but I don't have any specific ones, is I have to have
a clipboard manager, so just something like a clip it or a deodon or something like that,
whenever it's in the repo, I don't go start to install things too much differently,
the other thing I like is Launcher, I used to love Synapse until it's dope and developed,
so you Launcher is my Launcher of choice right now, I just like it, it's nice for searching,
files, it's nice for running programs, it just suits me just absolutely perfectly,
so yeah, so like I said, have I think about what the applications you use,
and maybe even record a show, so this is Kaby signing off on another episode of Hacker Public Radio!
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