 One of the interesting things about modern-day computing is that a lot of people are conscious of the programming languages that their software is written in. Many people actually care for some reason what programming languages some of their software is written in. For example, many people have like a unhealthy hate for Python apps, but many people absolutely love everything that's written in Rust for example. And you know on that kind of front one of the languages, one of the frameworks that people really trash on probably gets the most hate out of anything is electron applications. And today I wanted to give a little love to electron because even though it's not my favorite kind of thing, I don't want everything written in electron, there are actually some applications on my system that are electron apps that I use all the time. And I think are fantastic. Today I wanted to give you my top seven electron applications. Now before I start listing the applications themselves, I do want to briefly tell those of you that are not familiar with what electron is, kind of what it is and why it gets a little bit of hate is electron is a framework to build applications. It's a way to build cross-platform applications, meaning your application should work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And the reason that is is because they're essentially, they're kind of like web applications, right? It's like a stripped-down, minimal chromium browser and it's built using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and that's kind of where the hate comes from. It's because not everybody loves JavaScript. It's one of those things. Not everybody wants everything written in JavaScript and these electron applications tend to be heavy, you know, they have a little bloat to them obviously because of having that chromium engine as a part of the application themselves. But let me show you the applications that I love to use that are electron-based. So the very first one is the one I use the most and that is my email client. And obviously I check my email every day. My email client is MailSpring. MailSpring is an electron app. Formerly it was proprietary software recently, about a year, year and a half ago. They open-sourced everything and re-licensed some of the proprietary stuff under the GPL. So it is for an open-source software and quite honestly, it is a fantastic email client. It's very slick, very modern-looking, has all the features. It has the ability to give you notifications when somebody receives your email, when somebody opens your email, things like that. And I just really love this particular email client. And again, it's cross-platform, so you've got Windows, Mac and Linux, which is another big selling point for these kinds of applications, especially for something like an email client, where you want the same email client on all of your machines. And if you happen to run different operating systems, sometimes it's hard to find an email client that works on, for example, all three platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux. So that is one of the big selling points here for MailSpring. I did a video on MailSpring about a year, year and a half ago, and I've been using it ever since. And it does have the ability to actually do some custom theming. For example, this dark colored theme that you see here, this is actually my own theme that I created. If I go into edit and preferences, you have some appearance stuff here, and you see change theme. If I look through here, you will see DOOM 1. DOOM 1, obviously, is the DOOM Emacs color scheme. I kind of ported that color scheme over to also work here inside MailSpring. Now you will see my custom DOOM 1 color scheme for MailSpring over on my GitLab, for those of you interested. But this is not going to be an in-depth coverage of this particular email client. I just wanted to show you MailSpring as one of my top seven electron applications. And the next electron application that I really love, I actually think this is one of the best applications available for burning ISOs to a USB stick. This is Belina Etcher. Now Belina Etcher is really easy to use. It's cross-platform, meaning Windows, Mac, and Linux, which is something kind of rare. I can't think of offhand any other USB stick writer that is cross-platform. And it's free and open source software as well. Belina Etcher, how it works, it's very simple. So right here is where you choose the ISO, you know, the file you're burning to whatever device. So I don't have an ISO handy. I don't have a USB stick plugged in to show you this, but you would choose something like Flash from File and choose the file on your system. And you will see the file appear here. And then if I plug in a USB stick, instead of being grayed out here, this select target thing would actually show a device. It would show the USB drive that I plugged in. It'll say, you know, like 32 gigabyte sans disk, whatever the hell, kind of, you know, flash drive I plug in. And then finally, it will say Flash, or there'll be a button and you just click Flash, and it will burn that ISO to that USB device. And I say this is really safe because it only selects USB devices, meaning you can only write to a USB flash drive, USB external SSD or external hard drive, something like that. It's never going to choose any PCI devices. It's never going to write to your actual SSDs or NVMe drives in your computer. So you never have to worry about accidentally overwriting like a system drive, for example, which is something that you can do with most other ISO burning programs. You can make mistakes like that, sometimes critical mistakes where you actually write to the wrong drive with Belina Edger, that really should never happen. Now another really cool electron app I have on my system is the Raven Reader. Now Raven Reader is an RSS feed reader. And you can say it's pretty simple here. I've got a whole bunch of various news related RSS feeds. These are mostly Linux related. And you can say they all get thrown into the center column. It's very similar to the same kind of layout as MailSpring, this three column to layout where if I click on something, I'll get a little preview of it. Of course, both MailSpring and Raven Reader. And for those of you familiar with, of course, Microsoft Outlook, right? So that's kind of the program that really made this kind of three column layout famous. And you know, I could just go down here or with control J and K, I can move through, you know, the various articles here. And of course, there are various features that I could turn on and off. For example, right now I'm just getting a little preview of the article. But if I wanted to, I could go into preferences and some of the stuff I could turn on, I could turn on full article by default, which I have turned on. So if I go to something like this, instead of just getting the preview, you know, I'll actually get the full article output right here. Now if I wanted to read the full article output exactly as it, as it appears on the web, because remember, we do have a chromium engine as a part of these web applications, these electron apps, I could click on view original. And instead of, you know, getting it themed exactly the way everything else in the app is themed, it will actually just give me the web page with the article on it. So that is kind of a really neat thing too. I really think this is probably the best RSS feed reader I've come across. So it's got a lot of the features that you want. It's got the ability to import and export your subscriptions. It's got the ability to group your subscriptions and, you know, favorite articles and things like that. So this is Raven RSS Reader. Again, cross platform, Windows Mac and Linux, which is going to be the case for all these applications, but one today. There is one Linux specific electron app I'm going to talk about today. By the way, all of these applications being electron, I believe all of them are available as an app image. That's the way I'm running most of them on my system. I believe all of them are also available in the snap craft store. So all of them are available as a snap pack, and it wouldn't shock me if all of them aren't available as a flat pack as well. So if you want to install these and they're not in your Linux distributions repositories, which depending on your distribution, they may or may not be. I know on Arch Linux, I could install all of these through the AUR, but I don't think any of these are in the core Arch repositories. Those of you using, you know, older distributions or, you know, distributions that have older packages in their repository, something like Debian, you may or may not find any of these applications in the Debian repository. But again, just go grab the app image. And the fourth electron app I want to talk about is an application called Potter, which will not launch from the menu. Have I not actually added that using app image launcher? I know I've got it as an app image. I may have never actually added it. Let me run it through the app image launcher. But Potter is a podcasting application. You can see I was listening to the last episode of Linux unplugged here, right? If I hit play, which I can't play much audio, but you know, it's playing right now. I don't know if you guys were able to hear that hopefully not because I really don't need to play anybody else's audio. But if I want to search for a podcast, maybe I don't know Joe Rogan, right? I can get the Joe Rogan experience and I can start playing that. I just click on it and it's going to start playing here. I'm going to pause that though. Obviously, I don't want to play that as well. But you know, this is an electron podcast application. You have your favorites before she have your settings. You've got various hotkeys. You do have some key bindings you can use. It's very web-like, right? Which makes sense for something like a podcasting application because it really is kind of a front end to a website, which makes sense for an application like this to be built with electron. Many electron applications, I think, don't make a lot of sense. But a lot of them, you know, it makes sense when your application is essentially going to be a web front end anyway. Yes, I understand why an application like this, it makes sense for this to actually be written with electron. So that was Potter, a podcasting application. Another really neat electron application that I've talked about before. Let me go back to my app images folder here. So in my home directory, applications with a capital A. That's typically where all of your app images go. Stacer, let me launch that. Stacer is Linux specific. So this is the one application I'm going to talk about today that is not cross-platform because this is designed to clean up a Linux system. So it's not designed to work on Windows or Mac or any other operating system. And you see I get some information here on the front page here. So we get CPU, memory, disk space, things like that. So you can think of it kind of like a system monitor, but you've got some other things here. For example, startup applications that I could turn on and off. And then if I click the broom here, we can clean up some of our package caches, application caches, we can delete some logs, we can empty the trash, etc. And you've got various other things here. For example, in the system settings menu here, it tells us our system services, right? Those are system D services that are starting or not starting so we can turn on and off various services. We have a process viewer. So you think of this as your system monitor, again, you think of it as something like htop. And you've got some other categories here as well. So Stacer is one of those applications that's kind of, it's got a lot of tools built into it, right? It's kind of a multi-tool, but it's application that I would strongly recommend, especially newer to Linux users to actually install because Stacer is one of those applications that you could replace about half a dozen different other applications with just this one application. Stacer, I think, is a fantastic tool. The sixth application I want to talk about is one I don't use that often. I use it occasionally when I need to actually meet somebody online in a chat room or in a video chat. This is Element. Element is a matrix client. Now, you can think of Element kind of as a free and open source alternative to something like Discord. I do have a matrix channel. There is a distro tube matrix channel with various rooms. I'm never there. I don't know what goes on there. I'm not responsible for anything that you happen to see here because again, I don't hang out on this kind of stuff. I don't chat. I don't hang out on social media. It's not what I do. Honestly, I can't stand the stuff. But you can see what this is. Essentially, again, it's kind of like Discord. You can see there's some chat going on. You can have private chats with people, which is usually what I would jump on here for. Somebody wanted to have a private chat with me direct-direct for something, maybe an interview or something. We could jump on Matrix. It does have the ability to do video calls just like Discord as well. I believe it uses Jitsie's video technology to handle the video portion of that. But that is Element, a Matrix client, and it's a really, really good application. Now, I mentioned Jitsie. The element uses Jitsie for its video calls. That is the seventh and last electron application I want to talk about is Jitsie. What Jitsie is, it is essentially a free and open source alternative to something like Zoom or Skype. I could start a room here. I could say Vim is great. Just to name a room here. And it's going to try to connect to my camera and to my microphone. Now, Jitsie is not going to be able to do either one because my camera and microphone right now are in use with another application, OBS, because I record these videos through OBS. So Jitsie can actually do anything. But let me click Join Meeting. Imagine the camera and microphone, everything was working. You would see me here. You guys have seen me use Jitsie many times. This is what I do my monthly chat with patrons streams with. So once a month on the last Sunday of every month, I do a live stream with my patrons that want to join me in a live video chat on YouTube. And we do this in Jitsie. Everybody shows up and we have a live video conference here in Jitsie. Jitsie is fantastic. Very similar. If you've ever used anything like Zoom or Skype, you can use Jitsie. And I really think Jitsie in many cases is better than some of the alternatives. I will say Jitsie is definitely better than Discord as far as video quality, sound quality. I love it. So there were the seven electron applications I currently have installed on my system that I use either occasionally or sometimes every day, such as in the case of Millspring. And I think they're worthy of you guys checking out just to quickly recap. Etcher, Millspring, the Raven RSS reader, Potter, Stacer, the Element, Matrix client, and Jitsie. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Devin, Dustin, Gabe, James, Maxim, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, Armored, Dragon, Chuck, Manor, Angry, Dio, Kai, Dylan, George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja, Marsh, Drums, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Medor, Polytech, Realiteaks, for less, Red Prophet, Stephen, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons. Without these guys, this episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, all my supporters over on Patreon. These are the guys that support what I do. If you like my work and want to see more videos about free and open source software like these fine applications you saw today, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. A little JavaScript never hurt anybody.