3 cool and handy Linux apps to try this weekend (January 16 - 18)
Are you looking for useful software to run on your Linux PC? There's never a better time to try some out than the weekend, and I've found a song identifier, a powerful image viewer, and apingreplacement.
This week, I've noticed all the apps I found have in common the ability to give you something to look at where there wasn't a visual element before. Whether you need to look through your images without effort, examine the duration of your packet trips, or see the cover art of the song you're hearing, there's a free Linux app that can do that.
gping
Get graphic your pings
If you've done any basic networking on the Linux terminal, you probably already know the ping command . Its basic function is to let you send packets to a specific destination over the local network or internet and wait for a response. If and when you get a response, you can use the response time to diagnose network issues.
Whilepingon its own is useful, you can improve your experience by gettinggping. The "g" in the name stands for "graph" because it draws a graph while it works, allowing you to visualize responds times over time. This can be handy if you want to monitor the network while you make changes. The graph's differences can help you pinpoint and address issues.
For example, you can issue this command to send a ping to Google's website and see how long the response times are, graphed:
Thegpingcommand line tool also gives you options to customize the experience. You can use the--coloroption to specify a color for the graph, and you can use--vertical-marginand--horizontal-marginto adjust the margins around the graph. The--bufferoption lets you customize the number of seconds to display in the graph, and the--watch-intervalaffects how oftengpingwatches for responses.
Interestingly, you can also usegpingto graph the execution time of commands. For example, you can run this command to repeatedly measure how long it takes for the ls command to list your Downloads folder.
As a bonus,gpingis just a cool-looking terminal user interface that will impress your friends if they see it running on your screen. It's almost like a heart rate monitor, but for network connections.
You can findgpingin many Linux repositories:
Gwenview
Image management made easy
If you work with images a lot, you should check out Gwenview . It's sort of like a power user's image viewer.
You can use it to start by browsing quickly through your photos and other image files. It has filters for file names, date, and by tag. You get quick access to thumbnails, property views, and file linking options in the Gwenview toolbar.
What I really like about Gwenview though is its quick and easy editing tools. When you switch to View mode, as you scroll through images you can quickly apply common edits like rotation, mirroring, resizing, cropping, and adjusting colors. Even better, there are annotation tools built-in, which I use a lot for instructional screenshots in my articles.
In the past, I'd open GIMP for all of these minor editing jobs. GIMP takes a long time to launch though, so Gwenview's lightweight interface has allowed me to make image edits a lot faster.
If you pop open the settings, you can customize it by toggling between color profiles, change transparency appearance
Gwenview is widely available across Linux repositories, meaning you'll likely find it in your software center. You can also grab it from Flathub and from Snapcraft . To install it over the command line, use one of these commands:
Musai
A simple app for identifying songs
If you're like me, you like your phone's ability to recognize music, but you don't necessarily trust the data privacy of apps like Shazam or your phone's microphone. Fortunately, you can avoid those privacy risks by installing the Mousai on your Linux computer.
Mousai is able to take input from either your external microphone or your computer's internal audio stream and identify music, using the popular audd.io database on the backend to do this. It gives you links to the song on YouTube, Apple Music, and more, and it keeps a record of everything you identify (but you can also delete the record as needed).
Giving it a try, I was impressed the app was able to recognize songs most of the time, even when there was other audio in the mix. It had trouble with very quiet instrumental music. Sometimes, it would get the song wrong on the first try but would end up succeeding with a second attempt.
While Mousai is free to use, the audd.io API is limited, and you may bump up against your limit if you use Mousai too much. I hit the token limit at around the tenth song, but Mousai's description indicates you can create an account on the audd.io website to get more, presumably free, trial access.
Mousai is available on Flathub and on Snapcraft , which means you can likely find it by searching your Linux distribution's software center. You can also install it from the command line in some distributions:
Need more free and open source software to try? Be sure to look at the apps I recommended last week , which included a steeping timer, a headphone control app, and a document converter tool.
