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I am new to Ubuntu. I want to count the total time spend on each app and on-screen time. Is there a software for the same?

For example Digital Wellbeing and QualityTime.

Shubham
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1 Answers1

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The examples you give (Digital Wellbeing and QualityTime) are both Android applications, but note that commercial applications also often have Linux clients as well. The issue is that automatic application time-tracking is a form of surveillance, and in some sense a form of spyware. An application that sends this information to a server somewhere is a greater privacy risk than an application that stores it locally. One of the issues with commercial applications is that they are generally closed-source, and therefore it's hard to verify what data they are collecting and where they are sending it. Therefore, I will list only open source options below. (Note that even open source applications like this deserve scrutiny; see this Debian bug report for more.)

In the Ubuntu package manager, there is arbtt:

arbtt is a background daemon that stores which windows are open, which one has the focus and how long since your last action (and possbly more sources later), and stores this. It is also a program that will, based on expressive rules you specify, derive what you were doing, and what for.

The documentation, which includes the changelog, can also be found at http://arbtt.nomeata.de/doc/users_guide/.

WARNING: The log file might contain very sensitive private data. Make sure you understand the consequences of a full-time logger and be careful with this data.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/arbtt

This is a very powerful option, but you will need to set up the configuration file and reports yourself, which may be somewhat time consuming to customize to your needs.

Other open-source options:

  • https://github.com/karpathy/ulogme

    ulogme is small and simple: There are two backend components: a tracking script that records activity and a small local web server wrapper that serves the activity logs to the frontend (visualization pages). The tracking script currently records active window titles (at frequency of once every 2 seconds) and keystroke typing frequency.

    https://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivity/

  • https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch

    The goal of ActivityWatch is simple: Enable the collection of as much valuable lifedata as possible without compromising user privacy.

    We've worked towards this goal by creating a application for safe storage of the data on the users local machine and as well as a set of watchers which record data such as:

    • Currently active application and the title of its window
    • Currently active browser tab and it's title and URL
    • Keyboard and mouse activity, to detect if you are AFK ("away from keyboard") or not

    It is up to you as user to collect as much as you want, or as little as you want (and we hope some of you will help write watchers so we can collect more).

  • https://github.com/selfspy/selfspy

    Selfspy is a daemon for Unix/X11, (thanks to @ljos!) Mac OS X and (thanks to @Foxboron) Windows, that continuously monitors and stores what you are doing on your computer. This way, you can get all sorts of nifty statistics and reminders on what you have been up to.

Related questions (automatic tracking):

Related questions (manual tracking):

Nathaniel M. Beaver
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