Digital flashcards are an important part of every learner’s toolkit. Unlike paper cards, you can quickly tweak a digital card, track your overall progress, and share your deck with others. In this article, let’s look at some of the best digital flashcard apps that you can install on Linux.
Table of Contents
- 1. Best Overall App: Anki
- 2. Best for Privacy: Mnemosyne
- 3. Best for Language Learners: Parley
- 4. Best for Accessibility: OpenCards
- 5. Best for Terminal Users: studyFlash
1. Best Overall App: Anki
Anki is a powerful and highly extensible digital flashcard app for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Touting itself as a tool that “makes remembering easy,” Anki comes with everything that you need from a flashcard app. It can create and collate cards as well as determine the best time to review your materials.
One of the biggest selling points of Anki is that it works across multiple devices through its AnkiWeb service. That means you can build your Anki deck on Ubuntu and immediately review it on your Android device. This makes it incredibly attractive to those who want a reliable app that works anywhere.
Apart from that, Anki also hosts a collection of third-party plugins. These range from simple extensions that can hide parts of your card to complex ones that leverage AI. As someone who likes to tinker with applications, Anki allows me to fine-tune how I want to study and recall my materials.
On a side note: check out some of the best Chrome extensions for students today.
2. Best for Privacy: Mnemosyne
Mnemosyne is a cross-platform flashcard app that likes to keep things simple. It has a sleek desktop UI that focuses on the core essentials of managing and recalling flashcards.
While Mnemosyne is as straightforward as possible, it also has a handful of powerful features. For instance, the program keeps track of every card you create and review, making it easier to get an overall picture of your learning progress. This can be helpful if you’re studying, as it allows you to find your knowledge gaps.
Unlike Anki and other web-based solutions, running your own self-host Mnemosyne sync server is also incredibly easy. The desktop app even has a handy prompt that guides you through the process of connecting a server. This makes Mnemosyne a great flashcard platform for privacy-conscious users who want to take control of their online data.
3. Best for Language Learners: Parley
Parley is a language-focused flashcard app that’s designed for container-based package managers in Linux and Windows. Made by KDE Edu, it provides a wide range of tools that allow you to memorize and review foreign language lessons.
One feature that I really like about Parley is that it comes with additional non-flashcard tools that can test what I studied. In this regard, Parley is similar to a learning platform, making it a convenient pick for self-taught learners.
Being a language-focused flashcard app, Parley also offers its own repository of foreign language cards right out of the box. For example, I was able to easily obtain a Japanese vocabulary deck, allowing me to quickly get up to speed with studying.
Good to know: looking to improve your foreign language skills? Learn some of the best language learning apps available today.
4. Best for Accessibility: OpenCards
OpenCards is a unique app that turns PowerPoint slides and Markdown documents into a deck of flashcards. This makes it one of the most approachable flashcard systems that you can install on your computer today.
Apart from accessibility, OpenCards’ reliance on presentation slides also allows you to include media that’s normally not possible on traditional flashcard apps. For instance, adding sound in OpenCards is as easy as attaching it in PowerPoint.
Lastly, OpenCards has a handy statistics panel showing your progress on a particular flashcard deck. It also provides a neat scheduler feature that you can customize to fit your learning style.
5. Best for Terminal Users: studyFlash
StudyFlash is a highly flexible terminal-based flashcard app for Linux. Just like other alternatives, studyFlash is equipped with all the tools to create and manage your flashcards.
What sets studyFlash apart is that you can also tweak how studyFlash handles review and topic mastery. This is helpful if you feel that the cadence of traditional flashcard apps is either too slow or too fast for you.
On top of that, studyFlash can directly import and convert Quizlet links into a reviewable deck. As someone who occasionally uses Quizlet to test myself on technical topics, this allows me to further extend my review sessions beyond the platform.
Exploring some of the best flashcard apps for Linux is just a small part of the diverse ecosystem of open-source education software. Take a deep dive into this topic by learning how my colleague turned his Raspberry Pi into his child’s first computer.
Image credit: Annie Spratt via Unsplash. All alterations and screenshots by Ramces Red.
Ramces Red –
Staff Writer
Ramces is a technology writer that lived with computers all his life. A prolific reader and a student of Anthropology, he is an eccentric character that writes articles about Linux and anything *nix.
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