Blanket – focus and productivity tool

Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It’s the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.

We are always looking out for small utilities that help improve productivity.

Blanket is a free and open source GTK-based utility written in Python that aims to help you improve focus and enhance productivity by letting you listen to sounds in the background.

In this review we’ll take you through installing Blanket, what it offers, and our verdict on this open source utility.

Installation

We tested Blanket on Ubuntu systems exclusively. There is a Ubuntu package available but it’s not in the official repositories. To install the software, we first need to add the project’s PPA. Issue the command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/blanket

Due to dependency issues, this PPA is unable to provide the latest version of Blanket for all versions of Ubuntu. The PPA only allows us to install the latest version of Ubuntu for systems which are running Ubuntu 21.04 or later. If you’re running an older release of Ubuntu, the project recommends you use the Flatpak release. As we’re running Ubuntu 21.10, we didn’t try the Flatpak.

Next issue the command:

$ sudo apt update

Now we can install Blanket with the command:

$ sudo apt install blanket

On our systems, this command also installs packages for libgladeui-2-13, libgladeui-common, and libhandy-1-dev.

If you’re not running Ubuntu, you can install the Flatpak. Alternatively, there are distro-specific packages available for Arch, openSUSE, Fedora and others.

As this is open source software, you can also build the software from the source code. The developer has no plans for a Windows release.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary