Hi! I've been missing something like PowerToys on Ubuntu, so I built toolswitch: one small app (15 MB, ~90 MB RAM) that sits in the tray and gives you 10 tools with keyboard shortcuts:

- Remove background from photos (AI model that runs locally, no upload, no watermark)

- Audio to text: voice notes, WhatsApp audios and videos, recordings (Whisper, offline, ~100 languages)

- Text from screen: select an area and copy the text (OCR, works with accents and tables)

- Clipboard history with images and search (Super+Shift+V)

- Compress JPG/PNG/PDF/Word files, sign PDFs without printing

- Wallpaper changer,

- Reminders ("in 20 min call Juan"),

- Eye breaks/Pomodoro,

- Shutdown timer

Everything runs on your computer, no account. Made in Rust. .deb for Ubuntu 22.04+, also Windows and Mac builds.

It's open source (MIT): https://github.com/berchj/toolswitch It's free.

I'd love feedback: what breaks, what's missing, what you'd actually use.

I’m going to dual boot Ubuntu and windows. I was thinking of Ubuntu on my best ssd because I’ll delete windows in a few weeks when I get comfortable with Linux.

This new animation looks terrible compared to the previous ones; this is supposed to be a distro with a well maintained UX/UI. It's something so basic, and they ruin it.

hello im very linux illiterate and i opened my laptop to see this on boot

if anyone can help ty in advance

It's only virtual but works perfectly and I get to use my main desktop the way I like it.

I'm developing a flatpak of my app and have been pulling my hair out trying to get it to show my icons for the file/mime types the app provides. Everything I've looked at says I've done it right, and I've finally determined I am doing it right... if I switch icon themes.

I've been testing with Ubuntu 24.04. I've never installed any icon packs, this is a VM I use for development testing. So out of the box, the default icon theme seems to be Yaru. If I change the icon theme to hicolor, dmz-white, or dmz-black, my file icon work as expected. I've not found another built-in theme that allows them to work.

Flatpak is installing these icons into ~/.local/share/flatpak/app/${FLATPAK_ID}/current/active/export/share/icons/hicolor/${SIZE}x${SIZE}/mimetypes. This isn't a location I've chosen, I just tell it to install into share/icons/hicolor/${SIZE}x${SIZE}/mimetypes and flatpak does its thing.

My understanding is that hicolor is the fallback theme that I'm supposed to be installing them into. Why would most of the preinstalled themes not do that? Since this works with a few themes, this doesn't seem like a flatpak issue. And I've looked at a bunch of other flatpak manifests, and I can't find any that install icons into something other than hicolor.

What detail am I missing?

Edit: Ok I'm not missing anything. It's an Ubuntu bug fixed sometime in 2025. I setup a new VM with 26.04 and the icons work as expected.

update/upgrade in our CI runs went from minutes to hours, anyone frustrated by this?