This is the list of the apps I use the most on my Linux machine.

1. Firefox.

I have multiple windows, each with multiple tabs, on different workspaces...This is what you'll see on my computer if you were to look at it, a Firefox window or two. Inception:

I have it heavily customized and I won't tell you how but it is quite the same as we have it default in TROMjaro. So if you are curious install TROMjaro :D.

I tried many browsers but Firefox is still my favorite as long as I keep it tweaked as I do. I see no ads, I use Libredirect to not even visit the popular websites like youtube, twitter and the like. I therefore use trade-free instances of those. Anyway, Librewolf seems to be a candidate for me in the future, but for now I'll stick to Firefox.

2. Zettlr for my notes.

I tried so many notes apps, but I need one that can sort my notes in folders and sub-folders that are easily accessible. Plus support basic text formatting/lists + code. Zettlr supports Markdown and a WSYIWYG editor for it so all looks neat.

The fact that I can add the type of code, is useful because it automatically uses the proper colors for it, making it easy to understand it. Since it saves everything as individual markdown documents then it is easy to backup and move to another Notes app if needed.

3. Syncthing to file share.

Because it is so easy to use, and is p2p. So no limitation in terms of how much you can share and with whom. I share files with my friends like this, and it is so fast. The only difficult part is setting up the Send and Receive folders between you and your friends, mostly because you may get confused by that. The way I do it is to create a Sync folder. There I make another with the name of the friend: Sasha. And then inside this 2 more: Send and Receive. I share them both with Sasha and the Receive is set as "receive only", the other one as "send only". DONE. Now copy the files into the Sasha-Send when you share with her, and look in Sasha-Receive when you get files from her. Easy and reliable.

4. Flameshot for screenshots.

I screenshot a lot. To showcase bugs with the software, or for posts like this, and so on. I cannot find anything close to Flameshot. Press one keyboard key then drag the area you want to screenshot.

And you also have access to quick tools for blurring parts of the image, add arrows, and more. Then CTRL + S to save or CTRL + C to copy it. Done! Cannot live without this app.

5. Thunderbird for email.

If you customize it a bit can look sleek. I absolutely love and need the "open in new tab" feature because many times I want emails to be stored in tabs so I can reply later. I cannot do email without this feature.

6. KeePassXC for passwords.

1 file with all of my passwords. Encrypted with a master password. Stored locally. Perfect. KeePassXC simply works...stores all of my passwords.

If I lose this file I do not know any passwords. But is fine I have it backed-up in multiple locations. The integration with Firefox is decent and at times fails. So is not ideal when you want to save new passwords when you register on some websites....but is fine....

7. Transmission Torrent for torrenting.

It does the job. Not too simple, not too complex. Works. Reliable.

I use it nonstop. I seed some 2k torrents. Good for me!

8. EasyStroke for mouse gestures.

I have a mouse with 18 buttons. I use them all. But I also use global mouse gestures and it makes things so much easier. People who do not use this, have no idea what they are missing :D.

9. SMPlayer as the video player.

The default SMPlayer looks like crap. But installing some skins and tweaking it a bit and looks like this:

Everything I throw at it, it plays. You can tweak the seekbar as you want (easily), and setup it any way you want. Has hardware acceleration, and a ton of features. I have been using it for so many years and I tried so many other video players. For me nothing beats SMPlayer.

10. Nuclear for music.

Such an amazing project. Plays any song from lots of sources. All trade-free.

Easily make playlists even download any song you want. You can even use it as your local music player.

11. Imagine for image optimization.

Out of all image optimization tools nothing beats Imagine. Not very well known but damn good. Easy to use and reduces the size of photos while keeping the quality. The best of any I have tested, by a lot!

The other notable mentions are: Blanket because I need some background sounds when I sleep... :D, Element + Signal as my chats; I use Gnome Boxes to test TROMjaro or other distros, and Meld to check between versions of files; I use Shotwell for my photo albums, Inkscape and Krita for image editing, and Kdenlive for video editing. Lastly, Private Internet Access is my default VPN, Vorta + Timeshift is the way I backup my files, and Peek helps me video record my desktop when I need to make a short video.

That's it! :) If you want, tell me what are your top apps that you use. I'd be curious to try them out.

I and Sasha. I am 1.8 meter tall, she is a meter and a half. She is quite short, but I really like that. Together we are 3.3 meters tall.

Not that it matters but we are also more than that. We want to reach higher and higher. I spent the past decade fighting in the online world with this society. Trying to make people aware of the fuckery of this world, but also showcase how to perhaps think differently about this society, through the perspective of trade. Then how we can do awesome things via this trade-free approach. She spent that time traveling and learning a lot about the world, the offline one. And writing about it on her very interesting blog. She gathered so much knowledge that she also wrote a 300+ pages book about....the world basically. And again how to approach it differently.

So she has a massive book ready to be published (currently 2 people are proofreading it), and I have tons of active projects (tromsite.com plus tromsite.com/tools) and have finished 2 hours out of 4, for the TROM II documentary that can be a really interesting one. Cannot wait to release it.

So, we are very active. As much as we can.

We are also financially fucked because in this society it does not matter if you are engaged and try to be informed, and be a good human overall. It does not matter if you want to do, and do good things that are valuable for hundreds or thousands of others. Does not. And we are very aware of that.

The focus is always how to be a better trader. Chase the trades!

But we can't give up! And we try not to!

Because we have so little money and we live with my parents, we can't continue not to make any money. The donations for TROM are dropping and dropping for the past many years. So we decided to take the matter into our hands and try to trade ourselves a bit in order to support these projects of ours, together with the help we still get from donations.

So this is what we are doing and we hope to "succeed":

UNO - I have launched a new project: WebApe. I am trying to make websites for money. I can build pretty much any sort of website (this is my "skill") and I have a decade plus of experience with that. I charge monthly but provide a lot.

If I manage to get some 10-15 websites then we are saved! I will make enough to support both of us. Because we need very little. We spend less than 300 Euros on food a month. We don't eat out ever, we do not use drugs or have other bad habits :D. So if we can get some 1k Euros a month then we should be fine.

So far, thanks to @Alexio who is a long time TROM friend, I managed to get 3 long term projects. And my "mission" for these next months is to get more.

DUO - Due!? I don't know. On top of this we are trying to work in cleaning in weekends or any other "gigs". The retarded part is that @Sasha is willing to get a summer job here, but no one can employ her because she does not have the right papers. She is from USA, married with me (having a Spanish residency), but she cannot get the papers because I (the husband - I hate these words) am poor. I need to make over 1k a month for Spain to allow he to work.... So we do not have money, and the gov in Spain is like "then she cannot work"....but if she worked we would have the money....

This world is so retarded. So we are trying to make money but it is difficult as you can see....

TRES - WebApe + summer gigs + donations. Donations. They are super important. If we can get at least some 300 Euros or so a month, and with our savings (around 2k now) we can survive till February when Sasha can get the papers. Here's another retardation: so Sasha cannot get the papers because I am poor. She cannot work to make us not poor, because she has no papers. BUUUUT if she can manage to survive in Spain for 3 years WITHOUT leaving Spain, she can get the papers!!! haHahA. Stay here! But you cannot work! If you want papers, you need to have money. But you cannot work here to make money. Also cannot leave if you want the papers. This is me jumping very high:

If you think that this photo-insertion makes no sense now, it is the same with this system. Makes no fucking sense.

Anyway, if we know that she can get the papers in February when she will have completed the 3-years-stay-without-money-in-spain, she can then work to make some money....

Basically we need to be able to support each other until February/March so then to be able to try and keep on supporting each other....

My hope is that I can make enough websites to support us, so that then I can reach a point when I only manage these websites and have enough time for TROM. So that I can finish that documentary, so that I can scream more, louder and better.

Also at the end of this year I will have to make a donation campaign to help me pay for all TROM servers + backups. That's around 1k Euros a year. Not that much considering that we provide so many tools and content.

So TROM donations + WebApe + summer gigs + a yearly campaign for the server/backups + getting Sasha's "permit" to live and work in Spain in February, is what we need to be able to "make it" in this trade bullshit game. If we do not see any drop in donations we can make it. We try folks. It is difficult. We should not be forced to do any of this. We were already engaged and active and doing good things....but our situation is the perfect proof to support our work, because it proves that this trade-based society is the root of most problems and fucks things up.

We are at war with this society. And we know that.

Stay curious and furious! #tromlive

I just tested it and posting from Friendica to my Wordpress blog seems to work now. This is amazing and it is yet another set of amazing features Friendica has. My blog is my own personal place. My home. My thing.

But Friendica has become like a backyard with neighbors. A place where I can keep in touch with others, with the news, and so forth. But also a place where I can share my thoughts in seconds. No need to visit my blog, log in, and create a new post. It is a lot easier on Friendica. Coupled with the fact that I can add inline media on Friendica, and it makes it easy to create simple posts. I can have some basic text editing such as: bold, italic, underline. And I can even add markdown

Links are of course a thing, and quotes are handy:

Like so

Our Friendica instance has custom designed themes so that it makes it look more modern and easy to navigate. I am using the Dark Purple one:

Ok. So how do you post form Friendica to Wordpress?

Go to your Friendica Settings - Social Networks

Then add your Wordpress URL and the /xmlrpc.php after it. Add your user and password and click save.

Then, when you make a post, click the Permissions tab and select to post on Wordpress:

You can even select to auto-post on Wordpress by default via the same Friendica Settings - Social Networks setting.

In any case this is so awesome! Thanks to the Friendica developers. I keep on Saying Friendica is super underrated. #tromlive

EDIT: testing editing to see if that is pushed to my blog post too. I suppose not...but that's ok.

Listen. I hate google or any trade-based good/service. When you want something in return for what you offer, is not good... I have created a manjaro spin - see tromjaro.com/ - and I've used Linux for many years now. I also curate through thousands of Linux apps to find trade-free ones. I wrote books, made videos, documentaries, etc. about how much I hate these trade-based services like Google. But ....

So. We have this situation: MOM has hundreds of thousands of photos and videos. They are not organized. She wants them on her phone and laptop. Synced. Magically. She wants to share them on Facepalm or whatever networks. She wants to be able to do some simple editing too (rotate, crop, luminosity). She needs a simple interface and a simple solution overall. She does not understand much about computers. She thinks Facebook is the Internet, and a Fire Fox does not exist despite her using it daily.

My parents :)

They both use TROMjaro Linux as their daily distros for many years now.

So I want to help MOM deal with her photos. She basically take photos and videos with her phone, a lot of them, and wants an easy access to them. I tried many Linux apps and sync methods, and all are not sufficient. Most gallery apps do not allow you to set it up to keep an eye on a particular folder for new additions, and the ones who do are either broken or work but lack other features.

What I managed to do:

Install Syncthing on the Phone and Laptop. Sync her phone's camera folder with a local folder on her laptop. Then use FreeFileSync to one-way sync this local folder to one on her external HDD where all of the photos are (I had to involve cron jobs for this to work...). I do this so that she has a copy of them on her machine, since she can't store so much on her phone. This way, if she deletes the photos from her phone, they wont be deleted from her external HDD. So now we have an external HDD with all of her photos and videos. I then use Shotwell as the photo gallery app and set it up to keep an eye on that entire drive.

Great! Great? ...

This is how it looks like:

Not bad. Except for a few very annoying things.

• If she wants to see the photos from 2010 she can't just click 2010. She needs to also click the month, and the day....
  

  

  
  This is really annoying. You can't see all of your photos from a particular year....
• She can't edit them. Well....Shotwell has a super basic editor that is kinda ancient, but the issue is that whatever changes she does, Shotwell does not change them for the photo itself, but for Shotwell...nondestructive photo editing. I have no clue what is this useful for. Basically you edit the photo but is only inside Shotwell...forever. The second option I set up for her is to right click a photo and edit with an external editor like GThumb. GThumb is great for simple editing. But to use 2 apps for such simple things....

Not to mention Shotwell is super slow...

So yeah we have to do gymnastics. At times the Syncthing app on her phone does not work and needs a restart, at times her external HDD disconnects (because she moves the laptop), so I am always on call to help her out.

Online alternatives?

I looked and looked at online alternatives...but can't find anything that works well or is cheaper than google photos. If I am to setup a NextCloud for her it would cost me twice as much + a lot of work. Plus, what about backups ha!? Currently she syncs the HDD to another one on my computer....local backups...with Syncthing... If NextCloud would be cheaper and had a decent photos apps I would consider trying.

I am tired.

I really tried to find a trade-free solution for this. With local drives, with open source software....but for so many photos and her needs, that are (let's be honest) similar to what most people need, then I honestly will go for a 10 Euros a month google photos subscription for her... She will have 2TB of storage, an app that integrates perfectly fine with her Android phone, a webapp for the laptop. A really good photo viewer, editor, and manager. It is super simple to use and works well. She will have the photos everywhere....backups are not an issue, google takes care of that...

I hate to do this but after years of trying I am tired and I cannot find a decent solution. If anyone knows a better way to do this, let me know....