Author: Tanis Kevlin

My Favorite Linux Programs

Posted on by Tanis Kevlin

This is my personal list of Linux programs that I like and use. There are many lists on the web by category of software. I wanted to list all of my favorites from the different categories. I come from a Windows background so I am often looking for a package to replace something I have used in Windows. Most of these are GUI-based apps.

These are not reviews of the software, nor am I saying they are better than other software in their categories. I have found them to be the most friendly and useful to me of the ones I have found. Most of them have nice interfaces, too, which is important to me.

I do not like using some of the most popular packages out there because of the poor interfaces and unfriendliness. I do not like Thunderbird for email. The interface is ugly, old-fashioned, and clumsy. Ditto for Evolution, Claws, and a few others.

I cannot use Gimp for similar reasons. While I love Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paintshop Pro, and Affinity Photo, they only have Windows or Mac versions, nothing for Linux. Gimp may be powerful, but it is awkward and just feels…wrong! I can’t explain it. It’s just a feeling.

I have spent many hours looking for the right software for myself in each category, testing many of them, and have come up with some decent applications. These are my favorites, not the world’s favorites. Some of them are not FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), but I always look for that first. I currently use Linux Mint Cinnamon.

I may add more details to why I like these applications over others, but for now I just want to share what I have found to be useful to me on Linux. Let me know if this lists helps you or if you think you know of list-worthy software I may have overlooked.

Email

  • Thunderbird – I really like the new Thunderbird interface and don’t use Mailspring anymore.
  • Proton.me – Proton also has a great password vault and an encrypted file storage drive. You can also use encrypted mail in proton with Thunderbird using Proton Mail Bridge.

Development – IDE

Notes

Office Suite

Graphics

Photo Processing

PDF

Other Awesome Software for Linux

Remove ‘Shared with Me’ and ‘OneDrive’ from Open and Save Dialog in Word and Excel

Posted on by Tanis Kevlin

I get so annoyed with Microsoft Word and Excel these days with their online this and their online that and their let me do all these fancy things for you that you don’t really want. Damn! It has ticked me off too many times to count.

For the last decade, probably, I have fought with the Open or Save dialog in Office. Ever since Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to ‘help’ me by offering me more choices of where to open and save things, I have struggled to keep my files where I want them. For a while, I did use their suggestions to save things in OneDrive but the more I used it the more I hated all of the automation and suggestions. I got files mixed up and had multiple copies online and on my computer. This probably goes for other MS Office products that I don’t use, too.

Anyway, to the point of this post, I wanted a cleaner interface for Open and Save that only saved to one place by default, my computer. If I want to put it in my OneDrive folder on my computer, that is my choice. I don’t like things that save to places like https://d.docs.live.net/5a56871b86005abc. That just gets my goat.

I found a way to disable this craziness. It probably comes from some lawsuit-threat pushback over the years from someone somewhere, but there are settings under Options -> General called Privacy Settings that will let you turn this crap off.

I turned all three of these off and the online lunacy seems to have stopped. I turned off
Experiences that analyze your content,
Experiences that download online content, and
All Connected Experiences.

The last option is what removed the excessive online options called Shared with Me and OneDrive in the Open and Save dialog that drove me crazy.

Before

After

I hope this helps someone keep their sanity. I know that many of the features that have been added to Office over the years are not really for the benefit of the user but to benefit Microsoft with their tracking and control of users. The same thing has happened to Windows. What was once a great OS has gone the way of the big corporation that needs to keep its thumb on you in order to control you and sell you as a product. But hey, that’s for another post.

Fixing Fractional Scaling on XFCE

Posted on by Tanis Kevlin

I was playing around with Fractional Scaling in the Display settings of ArcoLinux (xfce). This is running in a Windows 11 Hyper-V VM. I tried changing the scaling to 1.5x and 2.0x which actually makes things smaller. But, that is not the focus of this post.

When I set the scale to Custom, I was able to make the X and Y settings less than zero. I tried changing them both to 0.7 but when I clicked Apply, my screen when totally black. This would not normally be a problem as I can press ESC to revert back. But I accidently clicked my mouse again, apparently telling ArcoLinux to keep the settings.

I later learned that this changed a setting in my user folders and I probably could have gotten back in using root or some other user from the login screen as the desktop only went black after logging in. But what I did was go to a terminal session (via CTRL + ALT + F2) and log in as root. Searching the internet, I found several forum posts (see below) that led me in the right direction.

What I ended up doing was editing the file
/home/username/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml
and changing the X and Y values under Scale from 0.7 back to 1.0. There were two locations in the file that I updated, one in the Default section and one in the Fallback section.

This got me back up and running after a reboot.

References I used to figure this out: