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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.

When I was first given a Raspberry Pi 3 in 2018, I knew nothing about Linux or programming. Raspbian was harder to use back then, and I encountered many problems. Slowly, through hundreds of Google searches, I began making a list of useful terminal commands to do specific things: copy a file, create a keyboard shortcut, install something, search for a file, make a backup, close an unresponsive program, or recover from a frozen screen. Eventually, my list of commands was getting very long, and that's when I discovered shell scripts - a special text file that runs a list of terminal commands. How useful!

My first major shell-script 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 200 apps and likely serves over 2 million 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 reviewed, all of the app-installers on Pi-Apps.

Popular repositories

  1. pi-apps Public

    Raspberry Pi App Store for Open Source Projects

    Shell 1.1k 165

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

    Shell 463 61

  3. General Purpose Raspbian Image & SD Card Manager

    Shell 158 25

  4. vdesktop Public

    Run a second instance of Raspbian inside Raspbian.

    Shell 106 18

  5. 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 49 6

  6. Search/Watch/Download YouTube videos with a lightweight, interactive tool

    Shell 28 5

540 contributions in the last year

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Contribution activity

January 2023

Created 11 commits in 2 repositories
Reviewed 1 pull request in 1 repository
Botspot/pi-apps 1 pull request

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