I have an old gamer keyboard with extra programmable keys on the side, which I use for cut, copy, paste, close tab, close window, etc. Logitech provides drivers/software for Windows & Mac only.

To make it work I have a custom monkey-patched USB driver that I compiled from source, some weird daemon that interacts with the driver and some shell scripts on top of that. I’m not sure how but it works thanks to a 9 year old youtube video made by a guy from eastern europe somewhere.

I made a user for my partner

I have a meshtastic script that runs once a day that sends a weather report for our local area at 6:00 am. It was based off a script that some awesome person did. I also have a script that once a week sends out ham/meshtastic events to all local people. Its worked out pretty well.

I am indecisive when it comes to wallpapers so I have a script somewhere which accepts tag-words as arguments and then scrapes wallhaven.cc for those words at the resolution of my setup and picks one that contains those words at random before downloading it to my wallpapers folder and setting it as my wallpaper image.

So for example, you could just know you want something blue so you would run wallpaper blue and it just grabs one and sets it. You could get a wallpaper of the sky, of a blue car, of the ocean, whatever happens to be a wallpaper that met the criteria of the word/s supplied.

The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.

I use compose key sequences to save time writing out long email addresses. For example, I have something like this in my ~/.XCompose:

<Multi_key> <b> <o> <s> <at>: "[email protected]" # Email of my very angry boss

So I can just type Compose (right alt on my system), bos@ and get his email address. Less error prone than typing out emails manually.

I’m probably not the only one to use compose strings as a replacement to a text expander, but I don’t know anyone else who does this.

I have scripts set up to switch between my desk setup and my home theater setup that swap monitor configurations with wlrandr and default audio devices in wireplumber. These scripts are triggered with the “Netflix” button on my Nvidia Shield remote via Home Assistant and SSH. Simultaneously on Home Assistant power to the peripherals on my desk is toggled, the TV input is toggled between the Nvidia Shield and the PC, my AV receiver settings are toggled, and if the PC was asleep, it’s turned on with a WoL magic packet.

My applications menu icon (or the “start” menu for the philistines) is a 🐢.

my awesome wm config has a lot of customization. We’re talking 5+ years of basically re-writing an entire theme, along with behaviours, widgets, and bindings.

I use this app (webapps is the name I think) to make apps for YouTube, Mubi and TorrentLeech and I have then pinned on the task bar and use them as apps instead of webpages. This is in my hometheater pc

I use many KDE activities all mapped to a single hotkey. Meta+H, Meta+J, Meta+K, then L, Y, U, G.

I set my browser and maybe one other as sticky to show on all. I also have specific desktop picture for all of them.

On top of that I have a startup command that opens all applications I use for work. Each application is configured to open in a certain activity.

The end result is that instead of doing Alt-Tab or looking for the window I do Meta+Key and it’s there in front of my eyes with focus.

When I press Super + PrtSc, a bash script performs the following:

Takes a screenshot of the entire desktop (import -window root) and saves it as ~/screenshot.png…

Analyzes the screenshot to calculate the “mean brightness” value of the image. It converts the image to grayscale and determines the average pixel brightness (a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is black and 1 is white).

Checks if the image is dark by comparing the mean brightness to a threshold of 0.2. If the mean brightness is less than 0.2 (i.e., the image is very dark), it applies a negative filter to the image (convert -negate), effectively inverting the colors (black becomes white and vice versa).

Sends the image to a printer (lp command) named MF741C-743C for printing.

I use hot mount SATA slots for backup and other media. Not that common on workstations. Sure, common on servers.

I’m one of at most a handful people in the world with a full disk encrypted Steam Deck and unlocking using the touchscreen.

Until someone implements https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/issues/464 in Bazzite.

ChatGPT wrote a Python program that does select->Tesseract OCR for me, but it doesn’t always work right with two monitors. I’m too stupid to correct it. How have you done yours, what are you using for selecting the area?