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 updatein 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.