What are your must-have programs?
Trying to discover new/unheard Linux desktop programs (Sorry for the confusion).
Edit: I apologise for confusing a lot of people. I meant Linux desktop “programs” coming from Windows/Mac. I'm used to calling them “apps”.
Edit: 🙌 I’m overwhelmed with the great “programs” people have recommended in the comment section. Thank you guys.
Logseq.
I tried it and really wanted to like it, but the Android client's UI is just unusable for me. as much as I prefer going FOSS whenever I can, I tried Obsidian and stuck with it. it's electron on desktop and definitely not native UI on mobile, but feels much more polished.
Yeah, the Android app is horrible. I only use it if I don't have my PC in arm's reach.
It feels sluggish, buggy, is overloaded, I always get sync issues (usually the last words I just typed go missing), and some features (especially the graph overview) don't work at all sometimes. And the whole app sometimes feels like an alpha version, which is just a no-go...
I really hope the mobile app gets polished more over the next months. Many people nowadays mostly use mobile devices, and having such an unpolished app really hurts the image. And, PLEASE devs, test your software before shipping it out. Especially the mobile app is broken half the time.
I still gladly pay the 5$/ month for the optional sync and to support the devs.
I was never able to fully get into Logseq, might give it another try at some point.
Do it!
I had some initial problems in the beginning, because I was used to linear note taking apps like OneNote or Joplin, but once I watched a guide on how it works, it clicked and now it's my second nature. I even began to write my hand written notes in Logseq style!
TL;DR, if you don't wanna watch any guides/ read docs:
[[Link]] or #Tag, which are the same. They crosslink different topics and reveal connections. Do you feel like offloading stuff into your notes helps your cognition?
Yeah, definitely, especially at work.
It really helped me to switch off my "work brain", because I know, that everything I did today is written down, and I don't have to keep things in my mind anymore after work.
Doing that was a blessing for my stress level and mental health.
It also gives me the edge above my colleagues that I "remember" everything I did in the last months, which is nice when my boss wants to know details of a project I did a year ago.
I basically can't even remember what I did 5 minutes ago (ADHD says hello), but I know exactly where I can find that knowledge. This frees up my working memory (psychological term, not related to work) immensely. It's basically like transfering more tasks onto your hard drive instead of keeping it in the RAM.
It's also great to give me an graphical overview of all I think and work on all day, and unveals connections I never thought of between different topics.
For private use, it's also great as a journal, though I gave up on that because I'm too busy for it and it cost too much time in my everyday life. But I still use it daily for normal note taking, e.g. results of some experiments at home, hobbies, thoughts, and much more.
I don't use Logseq, I use Silverbullet, and yes, it helps A LOT. I have lots of random notes on random pages on how to do things at work, or on my personal servers or whatever. You know that feeling of "I've already had to deal with this, how the hell did I do it?" It's completely gone.
If you use a good organization system with a hierarchy that makes sense and tags you can easily find stuff, so you can turn off your brain from having to remember all of that and it can focus on the thing you need to actually solve now. Don't know if you're old enough to remember a time before cellphones, we had to remember our friends number, nowadays this is not a concern, because your phone will remember the number for you, it's like that but for everything, very liberating.
I tried it on desktop but the fact that it's "paragraph-based" so to say is annoying. I'd like to format text freely and hit return to go to a new line, not create bullet points for everything I write. It seems a bit contrived in this way, but perhaps I just haven't found how to make it work the way I want yet
I'm actively looking for a Logseq replacement, since they require CLA signing and can pull the rug at any moment.
We discovered Trilium and will be trying it out to see if we can migrate.
If you like gaming:
For the CLI:
Brilliant list! Starred this to go through it in detail later.
EDIT: A good deal of overlap with me on the type of applications I already use, so looking forward to discovering other hidden gems I haven't yet found.
Amazing list, thanks for sharing.
This is fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to write all that down.
Abaddon is light weight gtk discord app. Also has voice support.
Added it to the list.
I also like lutris. But it being "for games" doesn't do it justice I think. It is basically just a wine environment manager. It advertises as being for games but it should work with just about any windows executable.
Because you asked about "apps", people are replying with mobile apps. I think you wanted to write "programs" considering the community. Maybe you should edit this
That makes sense. Maybe I'm just old but they are called as programs since punched cards, as well as on Unix, Linux, Windows (until recently apparently).
Not exactly sure but I think the term "application >> apps" started with mobile phones. So, to me they are different. At least that evokes this meaning in my mind. It seems not with younger people though.
I would assume that "application" (or its short form "app") implies some kind of GUI.
Generally speaking, all runtimes have been traditionally called programs. (On Unix systems runtimes are often synonymous to executables. I guess the term runtime is used more often by devs on the Windows and Java platform, and I think it is specifically an antonym of library, but not sure because I don't develop on those often) Applications traditionally referred to programs that were exposed to the user through a mouse interaction by intention. On macOS an app has the .app extension and is thus a special type of a program.
Although, depending on the context, an "application" might just mean programs because even official tech manuals aren't perfectly rigorous.
On Linux and Windows it is similar. They don't have a specific extension (some .exe binaries on Windows are meant to be run through the commandline.)
Software is the antonym of hardware, as I wrote in another comment.
Honestly I'm surprised that people here don't share this. The terminology was rather cleanly separated before iPhone. Unfortunately, due to smartphones the word "app" entered the mass population and it lost meaning as usual.
True but isn’t it safe to assume the OP meant desktop (considering the community)? There aren’t that many people using Linux phones.
I suppose since more than one response is related to mobile apps, it’s not a safe assumption that the OP intended for desktop apps/programs.
People started saying apps to programs on computer as well. No idea who's fault it is. Apple's? Only old people call it software or so.
I don't know about you specifically, but I'm surprised how many people haven't heard of Krita, a FOSS image editing app with an optional AI Image Generation plugin.
Huh, didn't know Krita had a plugin for that. Is it for Stable Diffusion?
It uses Stable Diffusion, yes (specifically comfy UI for the backend), but it has a much better in app UI that any stable diffusion web UI I've tried.
STOP ADDING AI TO EVERYTHING PLEASE
Am I going to be able to use a computer in any way at all in the future without having freaking world power-sucking, thieving, inaccurate, laughable AI doing stuff for me?
EDIT: realized this was for desktop, so removed the original list of mostly android apps. Here's my go to desktop apps:
Lollypop - music player
Invoiceninja - open source invoicing service
Meld - file/folder comparison
Librewolf - hardened Firefox
Joplin - notes
QEMU/Virt-Manager - virtualization for that one windows app you still need
KeepassXC - password management
Element-desktop - Matrix client
Gparted - no fuss partition management
Lutris - game launcher that works with epic games (among many others)
PDFarranger - best PDF management I've found on Linux
Soundconverter - easy to use file converter
Restic - backups
Fdupes - duplicate file finder
Freetube - privacy respecting YouTube client
Paperless-ngx - very well built electronic document storage. Must be run as a server.
Linux, system:
Linux, Flatpak:
Android:
Add KDE connect
Doesnt work for me lol. But yes, totally.
Emacs.
Emacs is an app platform in and of itself, and the vanilla installation comes with dozens of its own apps pre-installed. Like how web apps are all programmed in JavaScript, Emacs apps are all programmed in Lisp. All Emacs apps are scriptable and composable in Lisp. Unlike on the web, Emacs encourages you to script your apps to automate things yourself.
Emacs apps are all text based, so they all work equally well in both the GUI and the terminal.
Emacs comes with the following apps pre-installed:
Some apps that I install into Emacs include:
I'll stick with nano over Esc+Meta+Alt+Ctrl+Shift, thanks. I mean, it's an interesting operating system, but too bad its default text editor sucks.
(This from someone who used to use "pull the power plug to exit" vim...)
Of course people who pull the power plug to exit Vi would be the type of people to confuse app platforms with operating systems.
Was gonna recommend Emacs, myself, but looks like you got it covered! Emacs is an amazing tool and is worth the journey
It comes also with a doctor, you can invoke it with "M-x doctor". I discovered Emacs in the 80s, used it a lot in uni in the 90s, Emacs is a religion, or an OS, it's so powerful it's incredible. Nowadays I'm mostly using code for coding, or simply nano for small scripts/text.
Doctor, Doctor, my brother thinks he's a chicken!
Too much fun! Like many other Comp. Sci. students, I spent way too many hours trying to get Eliza, an automated psychiatrist from MIT, to say something shocking. Weizenbaum, the developer, "was surprised and shocked that individuals, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program." In this sense AI is nothing new because Eliza passed the Turing Test in 1967.
Emacs is a religion, or an OS
Philosophy is a subset of religion, and there is a definitely an Emacs philosophy about making absolutely all software hackable, and controlling the computer using text.
App platforms are a subset of operating systems. People confuse the two because most app platforms are inseparable from the operating system on which they run. But some software, like the Web, or Java, or to some extent .NET/Mono, are app platforms that run the same apps across multiple operating systems. Emacs is an app platform.
How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the "distros"?
Honestly, just download/install from your package manager and then start using it. One of the best built-in modes is called Org mode. Don't try anything crazy because it's easy to get overwhelmed. It took me some periods of stopping and starting before things felt natural and became my daily driver.
How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the “distros”?
I always recommend using the default setup for any software. The same goes for learning GIMP, Krita, Blender, FreeCAD, or whatever else, even though you can customize them all to your liking.
It is usually a good idea to try and learn the workflow that was intended by the people who developed this software, you could learn something from trying to use the computer in the same way that the professionals do. Same for Emacs: professional software developers have used it for almost 50 years, the default keyboard shortcuts are set the way they are partially for random historical reasons, but partially because they often make a lot of sense.
If you are interested, please check out my blog series on getting started with Emacs, called Emacs for Professionals
Syncthing and KeepassXC for syncing 2FA between devices. (I use Bitwarden for passwords)
Do you want to have 2fa keys on all your devices? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?
Everyone needs to make their own choices about this but IMO it's fine.
Pretty much everyone saves recovery codes in their password manager anyway, which is the same thing.
No, 2FA stops someone from getting into your account if they have the password.
Analogous to the Krita post, I am surprised nobody seems to know KolourPaint. It's similar to MS paint. I use it, when I need to make a quick sketch, whiteboard style, e.g. when sharing my screen with a coworker.
Otherwise, I really must have Dolphin and Okular.
I love dolphin's split mode (quickly toggled with F3) and its ability to seamlessly navigate all kinds of protocols for my NAS, webdav for nextcloud storage, MTP for the phone...
Okular has annotations which have been super useful to me. And it's so easy to switch between viewing single page, two-page and multi-page. Which is great for skimming text documents and presentations. The auto reload ability is great when iterating on a document (e.g. latex doc or matplotlib chart).
Otherwise, of course firefox and thunderbird, not much to say here Please don't use chrome. It's market share makes Google the de-facto owner of www technology. But I guess I'd be preaching to the choir here.
I use CoreCtrl to fix my GPU's atrocious fan curve, which is a necessity since normally it overheats to high hell. With CoreCtrl, I have a nice fan curve that makes my GPU rarely, if ever, run hotter than 70°C.
Thrown away your current ssh client and get
That looks really good!
NewPipe
Have you ever tried grayjay? Its like freetube but pipes into all services like twitch, odysse,rumble, kick And youtube. All into one app Its also is open sourced
It's not really FOSS, just the software-equivalent of CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND.
I have but found it clunky...
Unfortunately it's not FOSS, just source-available
edir to mass-rename
fd is more convenient than find
aria2 makes downloads go brr with parameters -x 10 -k 5M and is integrated with multiple tools like yt-tlp, yay
Oh, and pass for password-management
ssu makes root console tools password-less. That and rdo for gui-tools (both a bit over 100 loc) made me uninstall sudo.
Making a note of fd and edir for later. Thanks.
An web browser. 99 percent of my mobile activities are done in Firefox. I have Organic Maps for routing, a local mobile payment app and a local sharing electric sooter app.
This is pretty much all apps I use.
Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman
I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.
If anyone's interested and using KDE, there's Yakuake, which is also a Quake-style terminal that fits in nicely with that environment
I mostly use terminal unironically. Duf (to check system storage) Youtube-tui (written in rust tui for youtube) Btop (for system management) Iftop (see where my pc is calling to) Tuptime (has full system uptime from install to now. It just for fun to see how long my system has been alive)
Ive also gotten into atuin to find command i used and cant remember the command.
Also obligatory Megalist of terminal apps
tuptime: I’ve been looking for something like this
oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner for optimizing images
auto-editor for removing silent portions from video recordings
I prefer Scour for SVGs, but as long as we can agree that svgo is trash, we can be friends.
A good kit IMO, in order of priority:
If you like the terminal also add:
Enjoy!
I would suggest yazi in place of ranger. Both are good, yazi just feels faster and has more features.
OK thanks, will check it out :)
BleachBit is a must have and PhotoGIMP is pretty neat.
The first things I install on a fresh linux install are always htop (task manager) and micro (nano but better).
KDE Itinerary. To keep all your travel (rail tickets, hotel reservations...) documents and Infos in one place.
Tokodon/Tuba a great mastodon client for KDE and GNOME respectively
Lollypop a beautiful and useful Mediaplayer and Jukebox for GNOME.
Geary a great mail client by the same developer as Lollypop, also for GNOME.
Someone already mentioned Logseq, but I'm really enjoying Obsidian for my note taking needs. It's similar, but I have found Obsidian to be very nice. Not FOSS, but I really like what the devs are doing.
Same I tried logsec but it needs a bit more polishing and most importantly the excalidraw plugin is not that good.
Same here. I have tried:
My nixpkgs list is something like
I use XSane and TheGimp to scan and edit my paintings, Firefox with privacy extensions to browse, VLC to play videos, Gnome Mahjongg to waste time playing. I used to use Resolve to edit videos, I'll soon start using Kdenlive. As a visual artist I have a thing for film emulation that Kdenlive can't do, but it's something I'll have to leave behind.
What do you mean with film emulation that Kdenlive can't do?
QuodLibet: I'm waiting for Amarok 3 to be ported but right now this is the best music collector/player in my experience.
Agreed
Have you tried Strawberry?
Yes, I've tried pretty much everything. Strawberry is pretty good but it doesn't have a grid view for albums, it also shows the contents in a way that is not very intuitive imo (I want albums in publication order with original release date). I sincerely expect something new from the next Amarok in terms of intuitiveness of use, I hope the good man who is bringing it back wants to innovate something in this sense.
For terminal, the first thing I install is Midnight Commander - dual pane file manager. https://midnight-commander.org/
For all of my physical Linux machines - Cockpit and Cockpit-File Sharing plugin.
Desktop
And for some inspiration - the "Awesome Linux Software" list (Not mine) similar to the other Awesome lists you see around. https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software
I like to pack services in containers so ctop has been a great basic ui to manage and monitor them in the shell
OpenBSD user, in no particular order, definitely missing some stuff: pdksh (OpenBSD) or oksh (Linux/MacOS), su, unix/posix utils (man (most important), find (second most important), apropos, awk, grep, df, du, dd, ed, etc), mg, openssh, got, heirloom-doctools/troff, bc-gh (bc calculator with a bunch of extensions), xclip, xdotool, xeyes (very important), yt-dlp (youtube-dl seems dead these days), some C compiler (clang/gcc), httpd, opensmtp, ffmpeg, libressl/openssl, pf, tmux (I prefer to use my window manager, but if I'm in tty or need to retain a shell session, tmux is useful), ping, ifconfig, traceroute, netstat, nc/netcat, unwind (or other dns server like unbound)
There's no doubt there are a great variety of Linux packages in use.
Recently I did a CD install of Debian 12 (Bookworm) desktop with Gnome, which loads a bunch of stuff over the Net. Here are extra packages that I installed manually. The first set is used by and with an automated configuration script that I wrote, so they have to come in to begin with.
| Title | Description | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| info | Gnu info processor | "Config" |
| curl | Command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax | "Config" |
| dbus-x11 | Simple interprocess messaging system (X11 deps) | "Config" |
| emacs | Editor | "Config" |
| gconf2 | GNOME configuration database system (support tools) | "Config" |
| mc | Midnight Commander - a powerful file manager | "Config" |
| python3-iniparse | Access and modify configuration data in INI files | "Config" |
| python-lxml-doc | Python XML documentation | "Config" |
| python3-lxml | Pythonic binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries | "Config" |
| sakura | Simple but powerful libvte-based terminal emulator | "Config" |
| Title | Description | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| "apcupsd" | "APC UPS Power Management" | "Monitor" |
| "artha" | "Handy off-line thesaurus based on WordNet" | "Utils" |
| "backintime" | "Simple backup/snapshot system" | "Utils" |
| "brasero" | "CD/DVD burning application for GNOME" | "Utils" |
| "bwm-ng" | "Small and simple console-based bandwidth monitor" | "Monitor" |
| "ccze" | "Robust, modular log coloriser" | "Utils" |
| "certbot" | "Automatically configure HTTPS using Let's Encrypt " | "Utils" |
| "claws-mail-dillo-viewer" | "HTML viewer plugin for Claws Mail using Dillo" | "Mail" |
| "claws-mail-feeds-reader" | "Feeds (RSS/atom) reader plugin for claws mail" | "Mail" |
| "claws-mail-plugins" | "Claws mail" | "Mail" |
| "claws-mail-spam-report" | "Spam reporting plugin for claws mail" | "Mail" |
| "cmake" | "Cross-platform, open-source make system" | "Retroshare" |
| "conky-all" | "Highly configurable system monitor" | "Monitor" |
| "copyq" | "Advanced clipboard manager with editing and scripting features" | "Utils" |
| "cups" | "Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - PPD/driver support, web interface " | "Utils" |
| "dcraw" | "Decode raw digital camera images" | "Photo" |
| "devilspie" | "Automatically resize windows" | "Utils" |
| "dict" | "Dictionary client/server and a selection of dictionaries, too" | "Utils" |
| "dictd" | "Dictionary server" | "Utils" |
| "diction" | "Utilities to help with style and diction" | "Utils" |
| "exiv2" | "EXIF/IPTC photo metadata manipulation tool" | "Photo" |
| "festival" | "General multi-lingual speech synthesis system" | "Utils" |
| "ftp" | "Classical file transfer client" | "Utils" |
| "gedit" | "Popular text editor for the GNOME desktop environment" | "Editor" |
| "gimp" | "GNU Image Manipulation Program" | "Photo" |
| "git" | "Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system" | "Utils" |
| "gnome-audio" | "Audio files for GNOME" | "Utils" |
| "gnome-extra-icons" | "Optional gnome icons" | "Utils" |
| "gnucash" | "Personal bookkeeping and finance" | "App" |
| "golang" | "Go programming language compiler" | "yamn" |
| "hplip" | "HP Linux Printing and Imaging System (HPLIP)" | "Utils" |
| "hplip-gui" | "HP Linux Printing and Imaging - GUI utilities (Qt-based)" | "Utils" |
| "hugin" | "Panorama photo stitching program" | "Photo" |
| "imagemagick" | "Image manipulation programs" | "Photo" |
| "libbz2-dev" | "High-quality block-sorting file compressor library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libcurl4-openssl-dev" | "Development files and documentation for libcurl (OpenSSL flavour)" | "Retroshare" |
| "libglib2.0-dev" | "Development files for the GLib library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libjpeg-turbo-progs" | "Programs for manipulating JPEG files including loss-less rotation" | "Photo" |
| "libmicrohttpd-dev" | "Library embedding HTTP server functionality" | "Retroshare" |
| "libopencv-dev" | "computer vision core library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libqt5opengl5-dev" | "Qt 5 OpenGL library development files" | "Retroshare" |
| "libqt5multimedia5" | "Qt 5 Multimedia module" | "Retroshare" |
| "libqt5network5" | "Qt 5 network module" | "Retroshare" |
| "libqt5x11extras5-dev" | "Qt 5 X11 extras" | "Retroshare" |
| "libreoffice-base" | "Database component for LibreOffice" | "Utils" |
| "librsvg2-bin" | "Command-line and graphical viewers for SVG files" | "Photo" |
| "libsqlcipher-dev" | "Sqlcipher shared library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libssl-dev" | "Secure Sockets Layer toolkit - development files" | "Retroshare" |
| "libspeex-dev" | "The Speex codec library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libspeexdsp-dev" | "The Speex extended library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libupnp-dev" | "Portable SDK for UPnP devices" | "Retroshare" |
| "libxslt1-dev" | "XSLT 1.0 processing library" | "Retroshare" |
| "libxss-dev" | "X11 Screen Saver extension library (development headers)" | "Retroshare" |
| "lm-sensors" | "Utilities to read temperature/voltage/fan sensors" | "Monitor" |
| "mosquitto" | "MQTT version 5.0/3.1.1/3.1 compatible message broker" | "Home Automation" |
| "mosquitto-clients" | "Mosquitto command line MQTT clients" | "Home Automation" |
| "net-tools" | "NET-3 networking toolkit" | "Utils" |
| "numlockx" | "Enable numlock in X11 sessions" | "Unknown" |
| "openhab-addons" | "OpenHAB Home Automation" | "Home Automation" |
| "otpclient" | "Simple GTK+ software to generate OTPs (TOTP and HOTP)" | "Utils" |
| "pandoc" | "General markup converter" | "Utils" |
| "pcmanfm" | "Extremely fast and lightweight file manager" | "Utils" |
| "python-is-python3" | "Symlinks /usr/bin/python to python3" | "Devel" |
| "python3-babel" | "Tools for internationalizing Python applications - Python 3.x" | "Devel" |
| "python3-calmjs" | "Node.js Python framework for building toolchains and utilities" | "Devel" |
| "python3-cheetah" | "Text-based template engine and Python code generator (Python 3)" | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-configobj" | "Simple but powerful config file reader and writer for Python 3" | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-dateparser" | "Python parser for human readable dates" | "Devel" |
| "python3-doc" | "Python documentation" | "Devel" |
| "python3-ephem" | "Compute positions of the planets and stars with Python 3" | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-nltk" | "Natural language processing" | "Utils" |
| "python3-pycryptodome" | "Cryptographic Python library" | "eoas" |
| "python3-pyqt5" | "Python 3 bindings for Qt5" | "Devel" |
| "python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia" | "Python 3 bindings for Qt5's Multimedia module" | "Devel" |
| "python3-serial" | "pyserial - module encapsulating access for the serial port " | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-setuptools" | "Python distutils enhancements (setuptools compatibility)" | "Devel" |
| "python3-tz" | "The Olson timezone database" | "Utils" |
| "python3-usb" | "USB interface for Python (Python3)" | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-venv" | "Venv module for python3" | "WeeWX" |
| "python3-vobject" | "Parse iCalendar and VCards in python" | "Android" |
| "python3-xdg" | "Freedesktop.org standards" | "Tonto2" |
| "qgit" | "Qt application for viewing GIT trees" | "Utils" |
| "qrencode" | "QR code encoder into PNG image" | "Photo" |
| "qtcreator" | "Integrated development environment (IDE) for Qt" | "Retroshare" |
| "qtmultimedia5-dev" | "APIs for multimedia functionality" | "RetroShare" |
| "qtox" | "Tox client" | "Retroshare" |
| "qttools5-dev" | "Qt 5 tools development files" | "Retroshare" |
| "rapidjson-dev" | "Fast JSON parser/generator for C++ with SAX/DOM style API" | "Retroshare" |
| "rblcheck" | "Query real-time black list (RBL) servers" | "Mail" |
| "retroshare-gui" | "Secure communication with friends" | "Retroshare" |
| "rsync" | "Fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool" | "Utils" |
| "sane" | "Scanner graphical frontends" | "Photo" |
| "sqlite3" | "Command line interface for SQLite 3" | "Firefox Devel" |
| "sqlitebrowser" | "GUI editor for sqlite databases" | "Unknown" |
| "ssh" | "Secure shell client and server (metapackage)" | "Utils" |
| "tcl8.6-dev" | "Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.6" | "Retroshare" |
| "tesseract-ocr" | "Command line OCR tool" | "Unknown" |
| "timeshift" | "System restore utility" | "Utils" |
| "torsocks" | "Use socks-friendly applications with Tor" | "QTox" |
| "trash-cli" | "Freedesktop.org trash implementation" | "Utils" |
| "tree" | "Displays an indented directory tree, in color" | "Utils" |
| "ttf-bitstream-vera" | "Bitstream Vera family of free Truetype fonts" | "Utils" |
| "whois" | "Intelligent WHOIS client" | "is_tout.py" |
| "xsane" | "Graphical frontend for Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE)" | "Photo" |
| "zbar-tools" | "Bar Code Scanner and Decoder" | "Photo" |
| "zip" | "Archiver for .zip files" | "Utils" |
Here are third-party packages I admire. These are not available in Debian repositories although some provide Debian-compatible repositories of their own.
Tor Browser Bundle: Anonymizing Network Browser
This is available from https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/ as a tarball. This should be unpacked and the whole tor-browser_en-US directory moved to the ~user folder. This is so that the browser can auto-update at user authority as the need arises.
RetroShare: Secure Communications with Friends
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
metar: A Package to Parse METAR Coded Weather Reports
~/lab_pip/bin/activate
pip install metar --upgrade
weeWX: Open source software for backyard weather stations.
From http://weewx.com/docs/debian.htm. Although a Debian package exists, doing any development practically requires that all the code be in user-space, so don't install the package. Download it instead.
OpenHAB: Home Automation
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
Ant: GTK3/4 Themes by eliverlara
From https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest.
This is for claws-mail. It provides better contrast.
Localsend, distrobox+podman and ublock origin just to name a few
I also use Floorp! Firefox is my favourite mobile browser, with the address bar at the bottom for easy access, and also easy-access, reliable tab sync, with Floorp on the desktop for its workspaces feature + the ability to use the old Firefox style (with minimal tabs) with a simple toggle.
The only browser that could measure up to it (meaning it has the same feature set for both desktop and mobile) is Vivaldi (Correction: Last time I used it, Vivaldi was missing a crucial feature: the ability to only show bookmarks on a new tab) but that often feels too complicated and takes too long to set up. If Vivaldi had the ability to, say, sync up all your settings and customisations, as well as tabs, I'd probably be using it right now, or at least consider it. I mean, neither is fully open source, but I'm more likely to trust the Vivaldi team than Ablaze (the company behind Floorp).
@theshatterstone54 @governorkeagan
I'd rather use Mull. Firefox based, but without all the Mozilla garbage.
Firefox. Syncthing. KeepassXC. (g)vim. ssh. git. htop. less.
Gvim is the worse of both worlds
I love it. But I configured away all the gui features (menus, graphical tab & scroll bars, etc)
Let's agree to disagree. It does what I need.
A lot of good stuff here. The three things that are most notable for me are:
Notepadqq
Fsearch
Librewolf
I am currently deciding wether to use librewolf or floorp, do you by chance have an opinion on that?
I really like Lunatask. It's a task/habit management app kind of like Todoist, but it works better for me personally. The premium version is quite expensive, but the free one is quite okay to work with. And it's still in development so a lot of features are missing (you can't set a time for a task for example which I find ridiculous).
Also Ghostwriter, it's a really nice minimalistic markdown editor. I wish it was a bit more customizable but I guess I could try emacs for that.
Not exactly unheard of:
Terminal:
Vim or Neovim, Tmux or Zillij.
Web browser:
Firefox or a fork, but personally I’m fine with the standard Mozilla offering with a couple of extensions.
Photos:
Big fan of darktable as a lightroom replacement.
Any flavor of vi, Gnu Screen, lrzsz, bash with the usual cli tools (awk, sed, grep, tail, head, rev, cat, tac, and recently jq and yq). Also openssh client. Some flavor of netcat is also crazy useful too. This is a good home for me to do my thing.
Edir: oh, and git. How did I forget git?!
Emacs is the only app you'll ever need once you've mastered it.
Is it even possible to master emacs?
Profanity & Dino are nice chat clients
When I finally learned about Pocket just a few years ago it surprised me greatly that I didn't know about it before and now I use it daily:
There are a lot of awesome programs on Linux, I recommend browsing Flathub to find them
K9S, it is a TUI kubernetes manager that really integrates well into my workflow.
https://www.byobu.org/ can eschew both screen and tmux Mosh (the mobile SSH client, not linking here) if installing it on the remote server is an option
Htop vim and ncdu to name a few terminal apps.
+1 for vim. Although I usually use a stripped down gvim.
Didn't know ncdu, will try.
I prefer btop to htop, the interface is much nicer.
For the terminal (and within vim) another must-have is fzf.
ncdu is like Filelight but for terminal. It’s awesome!
Thunderbird
Haven't seen anyone mention Alacritty yet, that's my favorite terminal emulator.
Apparently people still believe that floorp is proprietary. That's not true, some of it's components went closed-source for a while to switch licenses. Now it's back to being open-source
They are called "programs", not "apps". The word "app" was created for the iPhone and originally meant a "mini" slimmed down application meant for mobile devices, not a catch-all term for any user program running on a CPU.
/getoffmylawn
This is simply not true.
To add, you could have looked this up before posting a hostile comment on a relative newcomer's post. This is how linux communities develop reputation of being exclusive & unfriendly.
Way to out-pedantize a pedant. Also, wikipedia isn't exactly a credible source. While I wouldn't personally split hairs on the use of "app", TimeSquirrel isn't wrong in that the use of that short-form wasn't ubiquitous until the time of smart-phones, and more specifically, the iPhone.
Also, since we're quoting sources, take a look at https://www.britannica.com/technology/mobile-app which specifically states "app" meaning "mobile device software".
☝️🤓
I prefer https://i.imgur.com/E0QsRiQ.png
Sir, this is an AppleBees.
Score one (negative) for the gatekeeper!
You fail the Janus test
This. I really don't understand the down-votes - using the correct words makes life easier for everyone, including the OP.
App and program are interchangeable terms, it doesn't matter.
