You may like this pattern of starting all custom commands with a comma - benefits against a wrapper command would be shorter command names and built-in tab completion.

The Signal Foundation does work on Signal Desktop - but they only release binaries for Mac, Windows, and Debian-based Linux distros. Those are the downloads available on their website, there is no link to the Flatpak on their website.

The community turns that official Debian release into an unofficial Flatpak release. This means that you need to trust the community packagers to be doing the right thing, along with trusting the Signal Foundation. It's an additional layer of trust that you wouldn't need for an official release.

An alternative option would be building the app yourself - there's documentation here and the repo is here, but then you're responsible for keeping up and rebuilding when they have updates. I definitely hope the Signal Foundation releases an official Flatpak, it's not a great position to be in if you're not on a Debian-based distro.

Just a note that the flatpak is not made by the Signal Foundation, it is maintained unofficially by the community. See the last sentence on the app description on Flathub:

This flatpak is maintained by the Flathub community, and is not necessarily endorsed or officially maintained by the upstream developers.

There's a discussion about the community flatpak's trustworthiness on their repo here and here, a feature request for the Signal Foundation to have an official distro-agnostic release here, but for now the only official Linux release of Signal is for Debian-based distributions.

Accrescent is in early alpha, but it looks like it's on its way to be a great, modern app store.

Jerboa does maintain a list of instances for you to select how to open in the app - list here and see my other comment on how to pick the instances you want.

The list can be updated with this generation script, it seems to get all the Lemmy instances with at least 50 users from fediverse.observer.

Disclaimer: I've only tried this with my home instance and it's worked fine, I think I ran into issues with links from other instance, but try it out and see if it works now!

If you hold down on the app and click on "app info", then go to "open by default", you can select which websites should open in the jerboa app:

It's worked perfectly for me with links from my home instance.

(This "Open by Default" feature is very useful to know about for unofficial frontends like squawker, because if it isn't an official app this setting is how you choose it to be the default app.)

I'd love to try out Apple News, but as far as I can tell you can only access it on an Apple device, there's no web access :(

Starting with Android 12 (and maybe earlier, I think it may be a part of a Google Play update?), you can delete your advertising ID in settings - definitely worth doing!

There's a github issue about this if you want to add anything to it, this separate issue also has some details about the sanitation. The issue seems to have been introduced in v0.18.3.

Edit: fixed :)

Hi! Incredibly small note - it looks like the community name has a trailing space (it seems like it's "Android ", with a space after the d), so it looks a bit goofy on non-lemmy.world instances with a space before the @:

This isn't exactly what you're going for since it isn't automatic, but Apple is introducing NameDrop in iOS 17 which will allow you to share contact info by holding iPhones next to each other (similar to Bump back in the early 2010s). Of course NameDrop is closed to Apple devices which sucks (Android has Nearby Share, but it doesn't default to sharing your contact), but the idea of being able to hold phones to each other to share contact info would be ideal for me - it'd be quick so I wouldn't have to think about it and would be willing to do it for brief interactions, but also ensures my info is only shared with who I choose.

For my 6a, when it gives me trouble I've run my finger against the outside of my nose and tried again - that's consistently worked for me.

• pdfcrop (commonly included with LaTeX) for cropping margins - it cuts the pdf down to its contents then adds a margin of your choosing, extremely useful for forcing academic papers to have consistent margins, pdfcrop --margins 72 *pdf here* will create a document with a ~1in margin all around (it uses bp as its units)
• vips for resizing/converting images - it's a bit faster and lighter than imagemagick in my experience, although the main reason I use it instead of imagemagick is just because I like playing around with stuff I haven't used before :) It has an officially supported python binding too