3 more free and open source Linux apps worth trying
This week, I'm trying out an alternative menu system, a movie journaling app, and a terminal-based document converter.
It can be hard to know what to install when you first start using a Linux desktop computer. These, though, are ones that I've tried and can confirm they're worth trying at least once.
Kando: A new way to navigate your computer
A typical way to become a computer power user is to increasingly use your keyboard to navigate and move away from your mouse. But what if the opposite were true?
Kando is a "pie menu," that is, a circular menu organized into sub-circles that you can hover over to open. It results in a navigation experience that makes use of flicking and other gestures you can do with a mouse or touchpad. Kando's menus can do everything from launching apps to running macros to controlling media. It's all configurable and customizable, and you can even incorporate keyboard shortcuts if you want to go hybrid.
Jordan Gloor
Why I like it
Making Kando useful to yourself and your workflow means putting in some effort to create a customized menu (or menus—you can have multiple, each activated with a different shortcut). What I really appreciate here is that Kando gives you a lot of helpful info through the customization process so you're clear about what you're doing and how to achieve the workflow you want.
Managing menus, especially ones with an unconventional structure, you might expect to be challenging. In Kando's case, though, it holds your hand in a good way.
How to get it
Kando is available on Flathub, meaning you can likely install it just by searching your software manager. If you're an Arch user, you also have the option of installing it from the AUR with the command yay -S kando-bin.
Memento: Private movie watch lists and journaling
There are a lot of ways to track your movie watch history, and keep a list of films you want to watch. However, if you want things like posters and release dates attached to your lists, interesting statistics about the movies, and other more engaging features, you typically have to use an app or website that's riddled with ads.
In the case of Memento, though, there's none of that. You can keep a list of movies you've watched and movies you want to watch in an attractive and organized way, with lots of interesting stats, stored on your Linux computer. It's a GNOME app that uses metadata from TMDB, a community-built alternative to IMDB, to show you posters, cast and crew lists, critic ratings, and more. Your personal database can be exported and imported whenever you change devices.
A big caveat is that in order to use Memento you need generate an API key using a TMDB developer account and paste it into Memento's settings menu. A personal developer account is free, but you do have to provide TMDB with info about yourself.
Why I like it
I had used another GNOME app, Ticket Booth, in the past when I wanted an ad-free but data-rich movie tracker. That project was abandoned, though, and Memento has more recently taken up the banner.
How to get it
The Memento app is available through Flathub. That means you can likely find it by searching your software browser.
pandoc: Convert documents in your terminal
Converting documents is a job that's hard to avoid when you do much office work on a computer. There are many ways to do it, but desktop apps like Microsoft Word are often limited in their abilities, and online converters come with privacy risks.
If you're comfortable running commands in your Linux terminal, then you can easily convert your documents with pandoc. For example, if you want to convert a Markdown file to an EPUB file (like I did in the video above), you can easily do that with a command like this:
pandoc input.md -o output.epubThere are many more conversions you can make using Some jobs, like converting Markdown to PDF, require add-on engines like xetex. With all the add-ons, though, you get a real Swiss Army Knife of document conversion with pandoc.
Why I like it
It is neat to be able to complete such a common job in the terminal, but I also like to show people that you can use pandoc with a complete graphical interface in your web browser by visiting pandoc.org/app. The pandoc app runs under the hood, with the complete capabilities added. It's also running directly on your computer, and does not transmit to other servers anything you give it.
How to get it
You can install the pandoc command line interface from just about any Linux software repository. One of these commands will likely work for you:
sudo apt install pandoc #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install pandoc #Fedora
sudo pacman -S pandoc-cli #Arch
sudo zypper install pandoc-cli #openSUSE
That's all I have for this week. Be sure to check out my archive of Linux app recommendations to get more.
