Which graphical system utlities you miss on Linux?
Which graphical system utlities you miss on Linux?
Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?
I'm willing to entertain the possibility that the linux world may be lacking in some things, but I'm pretty sure "configuration tools for sysadmins" is not one of them.
I generally don't miss anything graphical, once I learn how to do something from the cli I rarely feel the need to do it graphically anymore as it's usually a lot slower
The obvious one would be Photoshop and paint.net of course but krita does the trick
I maybe need to correct my post. I am talking about system utilities like Device Manager or something else.
A GUi for SystemD
Just yesterday I saw one on Lemmy but I don't know if I will be able to find it again.
Found it! https://lemmy.ml/post/23671806
With the ever increasing complexity of systemd, the GUI will quickly get in par with Firefox in lines of code 😂
SystemG sadly doesn't exist
Setting per game frame limits and undervolting AMD GPUs is a lot more complicated than on Windows
LACT and Mangohud can do that pretty well
This
Maybe tangential but this reminded me of how much I hate setting up systemd timers/services. I refuse to accept that creating two files in two different directories and searching online for the default timer and service templates is an okay workflow over simply throwing a cron expression next to the command you want to run and being done with it. Is there really no way we can have a crontab-equivalent that virtually converts into a systemd backend when you don't need the extra power? I feel like an old person that can't accept change but it's been a decade and I'm still angry.
This is a configuration declaration abstraction issue. Systemd timers and services are more like primitives.
In NixOS, we have an abstraction that allows simple declaration of a service and timer that runs some script.
As an example, I use this to export my paperless for backup daily in a way that is safe (paperless itself cannot run during that time, guaranteed by systemd) and simple:
(Even without NixOS domain knowledge you should be able to follow what's going on here.)
All that's needed in order to cause a systemd timer to be created for this service is to declare the
startAt = "daily";at the bottom.I love this, I have nixos on my server and it handles all the services this way
I did this for awhile...
https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next
If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.
Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.
My Linux experience has been command line training. Now I avoid GUI stuff like the plague if I can help it.
A decent GUI LDAP client.
Yes, I know, I can use slapcat and all... But holy hell, I'm tired of writing basic LDAP files to populate a new domain. And, no, I really don't want to spin up a webserver just to run a web based GUI that I NOW have to ensure is locked down.
Something to help visualise BTRFS volumes & sub-volumes (ie, free-space, etc)
I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That's all the GUI system configuration I need.
Why use NixOS, when you could just use emacs?
I'd like some kind of visual task scheduler instead of having to read up on how to do cron jobs every time.
One thing I kind of miss is autohotkeys on windows. It was relatively easy to do things like set keyboard keys to act as mouse keys. I did that once when I was getting over tendonitis.
These days I have a keyboard with mouse keys on it and a trackball also with mouse keys. I can use the middle button on the trackball and scroll with it, but I can't use the middle button on the keyboard and scroll with the trackball, which would be more ergonomic for me. Haven't figured that one out yet.
That said, I mostly don't miss GUI stuff. I use a tiling window manager and command line utilities to do most things on my system. Its kind of primitive I guess, but the benefit is it works exactly the same on remote systems, headless servers, etc.
I have replaced autohotkeys with https://github.com/espanso/espanso
It does everything I need it to, although I am not sure if it can do the mouse button things you need
Check out
keyd, it's very powerful.
Given that windows administration is powershell these days they kind of are similar.
Windows is missing so much in their guis abilities (like copy text) that I wonder what there is you are missing.
Edit: Although this is not an admin function, one thing that bothers me about windows, A LOT is that the file explorer does not show free space while I am in the current directory. Dolphin will do it even for SMB shares. Also you can click the drop down and examine all drives right there instead of have to back to the left and ruining your view in explorer. And don't get me started about how you can't split views in Windows explorer. This is just one everyday task where windows GUI is lacking in features even though it is not an admin tool.
IrfanView. Nothing comes even close. I would probably move to Linux if not for that.
Irfanview!
It's FAST, it's SMALL, it's PURE POWERRR
I never understood why there isn't anything even remotely close to it in Linux. Kde has Gwenview which is awful slow, bloated yet barely has any features at all.
There is a way to run it through wine but that is awful. Cane e start a GoFundMe for the dev to make a Linux KDE release with Deb and rpm files? I'll happily contribute.
For real! Every time I spend real periods of time with Linux (and a random year with a MacBook Pro a friend wanted to get rid of). It always hits a point where I need to view images and can't find anything that matches IrfanView. I have tried XnView and it is way too much with regards to the UI and features I don't need. The most frustrating thing (and this applies to most others I tried) is handling going through a folder of images that are different resolutions. IrfanView has the option to both scale the program's window based around the image size, and also be set to scale images if the are larger than my display resolution.
It is a very weird combination of those two things that drives me nuts. There are settings in XnView that kind of work but break. Like it might adjust the image that is large, but then the program's UI will not shrink to fit a small image (the window will just stay large and have large black borders). Or it will shrink the window to the width of a large image, but not scale and the height will still require scrolling up and down to see all of it. The funny part is that I don't even look at my saved images all the time. But shit is like a hard slam on the breaks at high speed.
I did end up just dealing with the kind of weird clunkyness of running it via WINE while on the Mac as it was my only PC at the time. Which was still better than not having it for my use-case. Just weird how it has been the only image viewer (with mid-level editing options) that has "felt" correct ever since I first tried it out over like 17 years ago.
I really miss Microsoft AD configuration GUI.
Wait, no, that sort of group you have to make through Entra, formerly Azure admin center, wait no they actually wanted a SharePoint site for the group, wait no you can't do that through entra even though you can see the groups, you have to do that through O365 admin center, wait no you can only make a SharePoint aaand teams group there, you have to click more -> SharePoint admin center and then create a new group there, but not the default, you have to click "show more group types", but where can you modify the members of this group? Oh you can just go back to O365 admin center to do that. Now you want to make some small access changes to the force-created email for the group? Oh well you have to go to Exchange admin center for that. Wait, not Outlook admin center? No they are named different things just to make it easy.
Now someone who made an event involving the group is on holiday so I have to remove it, I can do that from exchange admin center right? Well actually the easiest way to do that is to log into Exchange from a power shell terminal through the GUI pop-up and terminal commands. But wait, the search for the event actually doesn't work there ever, even with the exact name? I guess I will give myself rights to the calendar, reboot Outlook, go to the calendar, remove the event, go back to the terminal, remove my rights to the calendar, restart outlook.
Actually, I don't miss Microsoft sysadmin tools.
HWMonitor / cpuID / cpuz. One of the frustrating things is not having good driver level support for certain mbs with system monitoring utilities, so you can’t see fans and some cpu stats (like per ccd temps etc on Ryzen processors). Specifically things like it87 boards
HardInfo2 may be interesting to you
I’ll check this out, thanks! I really just need to figure out how to build in the driver level stuff for my chipset. Even this I think just pulls from lm-sensors which needs the low level drivers to populate the appropriate files to read from.
Maybe simple and easy to use GUI Firewall.
You should try gufw. Great for simple setups! For more complicated ones you could use opensnitch.
Thanks. I will try all the suggested options and see which one is more convenient. :)
Portmaster?
Thanks. I will try all the suggested options and see which one is more convenient. :)
I use csf which isn't GUI, text only, but the configuration is so straightforward and simple that it's been my default for years now on server and desktop
Thanks. I will try all the suggested options and see which one is more convenient. :)
Pretty sure any one using YAST is confused right now
I've recently gotten into using cockpit. I just wish it was as expansive as openSUSE's yast.
It seems impossible to set display scaling from the command line. Anything that fixes that would be nice.
What is your DE? On KDE Plasma Wayland you can just use
kscreen-doctor output.HDMI-A-1.scale.2to set it to 200%And it seem like CLI not GUI issue :)
One of my favorite things about Gnome is that almost anything can be customized via CLI with dconf or gsettings. Which is great until you encounter one of the few things you can't customize, like displays.
Well KDE had this awesome process management tool, I think it was called
System Monitoror something. You could tune process priorities with IO and CPU. They deprecated the tool though, I think because nobody wanted to port it to QT6EDIT: It's not System Monitor. I can't recall the name, but there used to be an app that let you set niceness / priorities of your processes.
System Monitor is very much still alive, and I'm pretty sure it is updated to Qt6. I was using it only yesterday on Plasma 6...
I personally would like a systemd gui. There have been several attempts in the past, but none is maintained.
On openSUSE, I've apparently got at least this thing for looking at SystemD services:
Allows viewing the services for the different boot targets, as well as the service files. You can also start/stop services or change their start mode (on boot vs manual).Well, and there's a JournalD viewer with filtering:
Not the most developed GUIs, but...
SystemD is far too much of a poorly thought through mess to have anything like a sane GUI configuration, it doesn't even have a sane textfile based configuration. We're going to have to wait fir SystemD to crumble under it's own weight and be replaced with multiple, simple, cleanly designed components before we have any hope of a sane config again. Sort of like we used to have before a certain someone/some company (depending on how conspiratorial you're feeling) decided to come along and muck it all up.
/rant
Thank you for coming to my Ted
TalkRant. You may gather I dislike SystemD quite a lot.Its far too convoluted. A systemd gui for... DNS? Boot services? User Services? tmp file management? Everything?
Everything! And a virt-manager like tool for nspawn! And for the faux-cron jobs! Make it as byzantine as systemd itself
I would like something to change my monitor output at a system level, for example I could emulate a CRT screen or decide my aspect ratio. Something like RetroArch shaders but in a more high priority level.
I've been using linux for over 25 years and I don't understand this post. One of the strengths of linux is that you don't need a gui to do sysadmin.
I think I'm 30 years in, and I came to mention I haven't used the GUI since ~97.
For sysadmin stuff? Or for daily use?
And one of the weaknesses is that you require the command line. Choice is good
The only thing I miss from Windows is Voicemeeter. God, I loved that thing. I miss it so much.
Handling the audio and adding what were once simple things like noise supression has been a really really shit experience.
7-Zip,on windows it was powerful and i loved it there is a port p7zip but it has not been updated since 2016.
Yes. But if you really need it, it works great under wine.
currently using Engrampa but thanks ig.
I'm missing a lightweight (not like Thunderbird) contacts app, that can work with CardDAV and allow me to see, search and edit my contacts.
Sound volume mixer
Pavucontrol exists.
I will look into it
If you need something advanced install EasyEffects