Ask Lemmy

Honestly, find an existing project in your language of choice with an active maintainer and start fixing tickets.

You start a new project, odds are you're stuck maintaining it for years, and it becomes a job, or it dies. IME, it's far better to find a project you yourself use and like, that you're capable of contributing to, and doing that. Start popping stuff off the bug list, if you're a hero, or implement that missing feature in the backlog that you want. Your commitment to the project is a patch. Or, maybe you like working with the project and you become a long term contributor.

That's just my recommendation. I'm not saying don't start something new; just, if you're looking around for things to do, and aren't passionately trying to scratch an itch you haven't found a solution for, you're most likely just going to create a throw-away project.

Just my opinion.

Yes! I am an assistive technology specialist - helping people with all kinds of disabilities access computers - and I have a laundry list of little challenges I haven't found the right tool for.

An example to start is needing something kind of like the windows on screen keyboard but that selects letters/keys using arrows and space/enter (a lot like typing using a remote).

The osk has some special feature to not steal focus from where you're typing, but this could instead let you do all your typing and then when you select done run a sendkeys to type in the text (could have clipboard option but this doesn't work everywhere). This also makes correcting errors easier. Bonus if it works with text prediction same as the osk :)

This is not a small task so apologies for overstepping that a bit, but MusicBee on Linux. I have been trying out Linux music players and none of them are anywhere even close. Mainly I miss the auto playlists feature and the full support for custom tags, but a lot of features could be replaced with scripts as long as the program allowed easy shortcuts and menu options to send files to those scripts.

I'd actually love to make it myself or contribute to a project to get it there, but I have a feeling many projects don't wish to become that "bloated" or the base wouldn't be much better than simply starting from scratch. But if anyone knows projects that are actively taking commits or are close in feature set...

I had this idea a few months ago, and found a thread discussing the same thing from several years ago. Seems like nothing came of it.

I currently use Syncthing to keep a lot of items synced across a few of my devices. It's completely decentralized and fully encrypted. Instead of synching files, what if it could be used as an instant messenger? No central server to interrupt service. No single point of attack. No more requiring a name or phone number, just exchange a QR code to begin communicating.

I think this would excel at group messaging, especially if some members are out of service occasionally. Reconnect, and all messages get distributed.

There must be something out there that already works like this, but I don't know of a serverless system.

I haven't looked at all since I found Beyond All Reason (open source RTS) but an open source rpg would be cool too. Or survival.

It would help if you said what your interest and skills are. If I wanted a small GNU/Linux desktop or server thing I'd just write it myself. But I can suggest some Android apps since I'm not set up to write those at the moment.

There used to be a GNU project task list but it no longer has concrete suggestions, oh well.

Actually one desktop thing I'd like is a gnus.el back end for Lemmy (if you don't know what gnus.el is, this project isn't for you). I might pursue that someday but I'd rather that someone else do it so I can use it.

Another thing I could use: a Pandoc exporter for bbcode, for some other forums I visit. So I could easily convert Org or Markdown files to BB. Pandoc is written in Haskell so that could be an interesting language learning project too, if you don't already use Haskell. There could be an Org exporter as well, or instead (written in Emacs Lisp).

Those are off the top of my head. Maybe I can think of a few other things too.

"Make this" evokes hardware projects for these. I have many ideas for those that I can't really pursue myself, as I'm not a hardware guy and don't have the resources for it.

Maybe try c/selfhosted

A notes app for gnome and libadwaita which feels native with CalDAV as it's Backend.