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Botspot/README.md

Hi there 👋

I'm just a guy who believes everyone should use a Raspberry Pi as their daily, desktop PC. Few developers share this dream and as a result, the desktop experience of Raspberry Pi OS is lacking.
Rather than complain to the Raspberry Pi developers, I became one myself.

My first project was vdesktop - basically virtualbox but it runs on a Raspberry Pi. This command-line tool was the first RPi-compatible application capable of interacting with the virtual machine's graphical desktop session.
Next came Pi Power Tools. This application is a suite of tools for creating and modifying Raspberry Pi OS disk-images and SD cards. This was the first application I made with a GUI interface.
Pi Power Tools never became as popular as I had expected it to, so I took a step back and questioned what people really wanted. Did they want a utility to create & manage operating systems with virtual machines? Apparently not.
Then what did they want? Desktop software. In hindsight, I wonder how I missed it before - after all there are thousands (if not millions) of Raspberry Pi tutorials! The vast majority of these tutorials explain how to install 3rd-party software on your Pi. Unfortunately, most of these tutorials don't work anymore because they were written in the Raspbian Stretch era.
I thought to myself, "If only someone maintained a centralized collection of tutorials? What if those tutorials had a 'Run script' button? And what if you could easily undo the changes it made with an 'Uninstall' button?"
Thus, Pi-Apps was born.
In early 2020 it was a small application that I never imagined would see widespread use. But slowly, word spread through the community that there is finally a convenient alternative to tutorials. Soon it was added to Twister OS and not long after, Pi-Apps was featured by all the large RPi YouTubers.
Today, Pi-Apps has over 100 apps and likely serves over 500,000 users though it's hard to know for sure.

It turns out Pi-Apps was just the beginning. Over time I found additional software niches that nothing else was filling:

  • YouTubuddy - The private, lightweight YouTube search engine & player with the best hardware-acceleration available.
  • CloudBuddy - The ultimate way to manage your cloud storage on any Linux computer. This is a bash-powered GUI frontend for rclone, and includes built-in support for Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft Onedrive. It's vastly more convenient than any web interface or tool available on any OS architecture.
  • Update Buddy - a sleek utility to run on startup. It runs sudo apt update in the background, and if any updates are found, it displays a non-intrusive notification, asking permission to upgrade.
  • Zoom - The popular video-chatting client had no easy way to install properly on Raspberry Pi. One other installation tool existed before mine, but that one did not install pulseaudio - a necessary utility if you wanted sound! Additionally, my version of the Zoom installer has Google account sign-in working.
  • WoR-flasher - World's first Linux-compatible tool to install Windows 10 or 11 on a Raspberry Pi SD card. Before this tool existed, you had to use a Windows PC to install Windows 10 on a Pi's SD card, but with this tool, you now can use a Pi to do it all.
  • Windows Screensavers - An efficient GUI screensaver manager, preloaded with fourteen classic Windows screensavers that run smoothly on the RPi using Wine.
  • Windows 10 Theme - A complete transformation theme for Raspberry Pi OS, designed to look like Windows 10.
  • Chromium Widevine - Watch Netflix and play other DRM-protected web-videos using the default Chromium. When Chromium 84 was released, it broke the previous DRM solution. I was the first to get it working, though there are plenty of copycats now.
  • Downgrade Chromium - The latest and greatest web browsers are not necessarily the best, or the fastest. This application allows you to easily switch versions of Chromium Browser.
  • Twister OS Updater - Twister OS's previous python-powered updating program was a nightmare to understand and maintain. I rewrote it in bash and added some additional features, and it has proven to be far better than the previous patching program.
  • UltiFlash - the world's most advanced and flexible imaging tool. This, by far, is the longest and most complicated bash script I've ever written, and it's not completely finished yet.
  • Scratch 2 - When Adobe Flash Player was deprecated, Scratch 2 was removed from all RPiOS systems through an apt update. This annoyed many people, so I found a way to bring it back and make it work again.
  • Finally, I've written, or at least edited, all of the app-installers on Pi-Apps.

Popular repositories

  1. pi-apps Public

    Raspberry Pi App Store for Open Source Projects

    Shell 531 101

  2. Legal utility that runs on RPiOS to flash another SD card with Windows 10/11

    Shell 202 14

  3. General Purpose Raspbian Image & SD Card Manager

    Shell 126 15

  4. vdesktop Public

    Run a second instance of Raspbian inside Raspbian.

    Shell 66 13

  5. Download links for Raspbian-X and iRaspbian

    21 5

  6. CloudBuddy is the ultimate wizard for cloud storage. It uses rclone to connect to your cloud drives, download from them, upload to them, mount them to your file manager, and more. In addition, Clou…

    Shell 21 1

2,030 contributions in the last year

Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Mon Wed Fri

Contribution activity

September 2021

Created 5 repositories
Opened 2 pull requests in 2 repositories
ryanfortner/sysmon-rpi 1 merged
techcoder20/RPI-PowerlineShell-Installer 1 merged

Created an issue in ptitSeb/box86 that received 3 comments

Latest Box86 breaks Zoom launch entirely

Commands to reproduce: wget 'https://zoom.us/client/5.4.53391.1108/zoom_i686.tar.xz' tar -xf ~/zoom_i686.tar.xz rm -f ~/zoom_i686.tar.xz cd zoom bo…

3 comments
Opened 5 other issues in 4 repositories
C-EO/AppPlay 2 closed
Itai-Nelken/weekly-box86-debs 1 open
techcoder20/MacOSBigSurThemeConverter 1 open
ptitSeb/box86 1 open

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