What are your must-have programs?

land@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 212 points –

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.

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Logseq.

::: spoiler What is Logseq?
It's a non-linear note taking app that allows smart linking and is made as a second brain.

It makes use of the Zettelkasten system, where, in theory, you make notes of everything and categorize it. Over time, you offload your brain and make it free for more productive stuff.

Logseq is often considered as a FOSS alternative to Obsidian. :::

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.

Have you tried QOwnNotes? I think it's pretty good

I have not, I’m using Standard Notes at the moment. I’ll have a look at QOwnNotes though, thanks for the recommendation

QOwnNotes

Thank you for recommending this. I started using Joplin about week or two ago, but this one seems even better for me.

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:

  • Indentation matters. Logseq works with a parent-child hierarchy
  • You usually don't open or create new pages, you write everything in your journal and link stuff there.
  • Use links, either with [[Link]] or #Tag, which are the same. They crosslink different topics and reveal connections.
  • Make use of plugins. There are thousands of it. Especially the Graph Analysis plugin should be included by default.

I used Obsidian extensively at a previous job. The linking of notes was super helpful! I don’t think it’ll work as well for my needs at the moment (at work) but I’ll give it a go

What do you do at your job? As long as you don't work at an assembly belt in a factory, you will still probably get benefits out of it.

Examples:

  • Notes about colleagues or customers
  • Project ideas
  • Random thoughts
  • Writing down meetings and mails
  • And much more!

Mainly data entry. I'm writing bullet form (pro for Logseq) justifications that the QA uses to understand my ratings (the data entry aspect). I will occasionally work on the same task so I open up the original note and just add to it.

I know that I could use Logseq to link - [[link]] - the different task projects together (maybe). Something like Project -> individual task.

My notes look like this currently:

A: 

- some thoughts

B: 

- more thoughts

C: 

- this is bad

D: 

- this is good

I would then copy and paste all of that into a text box on our system (per task) where the QA can use that to understand my ratings of the task. My role title is Advanced AI Data Trainer, it sounds more impressive than it is. It's glorified data entry.

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.

Fuck you I'm sold. That sounds so useful if I can stick with it enough.

That sounds so useful if I can stick with it enough.

That's my main issue for private use. At my job, I never had problems sticking with the habit of writing everything down. I work in a science job, and documentation is key there. So, I basically get paid for exactly that.

But in my free time, the whole concept of task management, knowledge offloading, and more, is a bit harder for me, especially when I come home tired.

Welcome in the life of someone with ADHD. I need my life to be organized, but have a hard time with exactly that. It's like needing to find your contact lenses because you dropped them...

All of this makes sense, but I still can't wrap my head around the "finding" of information. How do you search for it? Do you remember keywords or the location of the note (this I feel like maybe defeats the purpose of Logseq's write anywhere idea)

I use a mix of

  • Search bar, very powerful
  • The graph overview, which allows me to "hunt" for the thing I need
  • Filters
  • And a lot of tags, aliases and crosslinks

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.

Trillium is great. I've been scrolling through here to see if anyone mentioned it, and was gonna put it out there if nobody had.

I haven't tried it out on android (if that even exists), though.

Well, I just realized they don't support multi user which is kind of a deal breaker for us, since we are a couple sharing a homelab. We always wanted to share a few files when using Logseq and it seems this won't be solved with Trilium either. This sucks.

1 more...

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.

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.

This is fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to write all that down.

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

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.

Considering the community, that's what should happen. However sometimes people don't realize which community they are in and they just look at the title. If the first person who replied started with mobile apps, others possibly didn't notice because of them and continued adding up.

However sometimes people don't realize which community they are in and they just look at the title.

Guilty as charged. After reading the title it didn't even cross my mind that it could possibly refer to anything other than mobile apps so I saw no reason whatsoever to look at what community it was posted in as the app I came to think of as a good recommendation is cross platform.

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.

Not exactly sure whose fault is this but if OP still wants to use the term "app", they should at least mention it's "desktop apps", or just go with "programs" which is the proper term. Because even with "desktop apps" I still understand it is as web apps more likely.

Distrobox supports waydroid to use android apps on wayland. There are many small purpose built apps for android than can be useful on desktop.

No one seems to be mentioning apps in this specific kind of context, and I don't consider a locked down and stripped orphan kernel to be "Linux" but a lot of this stuff it FOSS and can now run on both.

10 more...

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?

First of all, I actually find it quite helpful, AI is not bad in itself, just the people who use it for things it's not designed for are misguided. Secondly, did you miss the part where this AI is optional?

The fact that it's optional now is irrelevant. Most people aren't going to disable AI and will thus use a horrible, broken feature that has never been proven to work reliably. And what is "optional" now becomes the standard later. Best to kill it now before it becomes the complete ruination of the tech industry.

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.

On linux?

Whoops, didn't notice the /c this was posted to 🤦‍♂️

Hahaha if Aegis was available on Linux I'd switch to it instantly.

I second that. It's been brutal trying to find a good FOSS 2FA app for desktop.

If you're already using keepassxc, you can import OTP codes and use that. That's what I do when my phone is not around to use aegis. It's not as pretty, but it works.

I have a few codes duplicated in my keepass vault for the services I log in to often on desktop. The autotype is super nice in those cases. Other than that I do generally prefer having a separation between password manager and 2fa data though. Probably only a theoretical safeguard in my case, but simple enough to keep in place for the time being.

If you’re in the GNOME ecosystem, you could give Authenticator a shot. It’s worked quite well for me so far.

I'm on KDE 🥲 That Gnome app has been almost enough to get me to switch though. There's a few Gnome apps that KDE doesn't have a comparable parallel to.

You could try https://2fas.com/ open source mobile application with browser extensions and cloud sync for backups.

Or www.bitwarden.com password manager is also open source and for a small "premium" supports 2FA for mobile/desktop/browser.

I haven't heard of 2fas before, they seem pretty interesting. I'm inclined to keep my password and 2fa vaults out of the cloud (thus Aegis and Keepass) so I'm interested in how the browser extension syncs data with a phone. If it uses a shared network or ephemeral data transfers that would be pretty nice.

Linux, system:

  • KDE Plasma (Dolphin, Kate, Kfind, Merkuro, shell, Spectacle)
  • Librewolf / hardened Firefox (system app because of user namespaces, which Flatpaks cant create)

Linux, Flatpak:

  • syncthingy
  • thunderbird
  • libreoffice
  • KDE: Okular, Gwenview, maybe soon digiKam
  • Qt: qBittorrent, Keepassxc
  • GNOME/Circle: Celluloid, PDF Arranger, Carburetor, Decoder, G4music, Railway, SimpleScan (or Skanlite), Impression, GIMP
  • GTK: localsend, GPU Screen recorder
  • Electron: Freetube, Signal, Cryptomator, Nextcloud
  • Podman: StirlingPDF

Android:

  • Fossify Gallery, Calendar
  • Material Files
  • Markor
  • Antennapod
  • Florisboard (or maybe Futo, but I dont need the fancy stuff yet)
  • Shelter
  • localsend
  • Obtainium
  • dict.cc
  • Grayjay
  • k9mail
  • soundbound (spotify), seal (ytdl)
  • öffi, kleine Wettervorschau
  • SaveTo...
  • mjpdf

Add KDE connect

Doesnt work for me lol. But yes, totally.

https://discuss.kde.org/t/15966

Exactly that for me too, I've opened multiple bug reports over the years, and IIRC, even Worte with one of the devs. I think it needs a good amount of extra work on connectivity and user feedback to clearly system why something isn't working

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:

  • a text editor for both prose and computer code
  • note taking and organizer called Org-mode (sort of like Obsidian, or Logseq)
  • a file browser and batch file renamer called Dired
  • a CLI console and terminal emulator
  • a terminal multiplexer (sort-of like "Tmux")
  • a process manager (sort-of like "Htop")
  • a simple HTML-only web browser
  • man-page and info page browser
  • a wrapper around the Grep and Find CLI tools
  • a wrapper around SSH called "Tramp"
  • e-mail client
  • IRC client
  • revion control system, including a Git porcelain called "Magit"
  • a "diff" tool
  • ASCII art drawing program
  • keystroke recorder and playback

Some apps that I install into Emacs include:

  • "Mastodon.el" Mastodon client
  • "Elfeed" RSS feed reader
  • "consult" app launcher (sort-of like "Dmenu")

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.

80s/90s was the good old time, no web, only irc, gopher, usenet, things like this

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.

Do you want to have 2fa keys on all your devices?

Yes

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

I use different password between KeepassXC and Bitwarden. (On my phone one of them is unlocked by fingerprint because I am lazy but not both)

And I don't store KeepassXC password in Bitwarden.

While my solution isn't perfect (if someone key logged my computer I am very screwed), I think it's better than (1) have a much higher chance of losing my 2FA tokens altogether (2) put all hope on Bitwarden being not compromised

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.

I wish it had Nvidia support. Even though I have it installed, it’s useless for me. Currently trying to find a fan control/curve tool/program that works with Nvidia GPU.

I'm using Green With Envy to manage the fan temp curves for my NVIDIA GPU.

Do you mind sharing your fan curve? Also, I can’t unlock the additional feature of Green with Envy. (I think there’s a command for that).

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.

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.

I think that the question is primarily about Desktop Apps, since this is the Linux community.

Mmmh. To me apps are the things installed on a smartphone. The things I install on a computer I call programs.

But the same applies there for me, too. I basically do everything in the browser.

I understand your point. "Program" is a more wider term. Javascript executed in your browser could be a program too. App is just a short term for a standalone program with a GUI, IMO.

It's just how languages change with time. For example what we simply call "libs" today used to be called by their full name "program libraries". You don't often see someone calling them like that anymore. I feel that communication nowadays requires us to constantly check the context in order to avoid misunderstandings. It's maybe a reason why I don't write that much online anymore.

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.

Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman

I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.

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

https://sh.itjust.works/post/11871260

YouTube-tui is so good but it crashes in kitty and it's image protocols are not that good. There's a rewrite going on. Wish it would fix it.

If you build from github it works in kitty and crashes if you scroll to fast. It kinda works, hope they rewrite it

yeah I know. It's super irritating, cause kitty image protocol is one of the best but the author hasnt properly acknowledged the issue yet.

A good kit IMO, in order of priority:

  • Cherrytree; nominally for making hierarchical lists but you can basically use it as a wiki for your entire life. You can theme it yourself too, if you think it looks too retro out of the box.
  • Syncthing, for keeping files synced between devices without having to use a server.
  • Qbittorrent, for getting files you need. Remember to install search plugins.
  • KeepassXC. Password manager (local, not on a server, use in combination with Syncthing).
  • Convertall, for unit conversions.
  • Calibre, for managing an ebook library, converting formats, removing DRM, transferring to ereader etc.
  • Rhythmbox, for music library, podcasts, internet radio.
  • Shotwell, for photo and video library. Easy to use, supports tags (metadata written to image files).
  • GIMP, for image manipulation. It's extremely versatile, comprehensive and versatile. 3.0 is due out soon and will include non-destructive layer effects. Heavyweight piece of software, so expect a learning curve.
  • Ardour, for music production. Heavyweight, steep learning curve.
  • Flowblade for video production. Lightweight, easy to learn.
  • Libreoffice, desktop publishing.
  • Librewolf; privacy-focussed web browser.
  • Thunderbird; highly organisable email client.
  • Freetube, for watching youtube videos without all the ads and tracking. Local subscriptions and playlists, which you can export to use with Newpipe on Android. Also lets you download video and audio.

If you like the terminal also add:

  • ranger; file manager
  • newsboat; RSS feed reader
  • yt-dl; download videos from youtube and many other sites ;)
  • w3m; command line web browser. I like to use this in combination with newsboat.

Enjoy!

I would suggest yazi in place of ranger. Both are good, yazi just feels faster and has more features.

The first things I install on a fresh linux install are always htop (task manager) and micro (nano but better).

Have you looked at btop by chance? More visually appealing to me,, but still in terminal.

I find it really hard to read for getting the information I need quickly, too much going on with too much useless info.

That's fair, there is more info and suffering font sizes. I usually minimize the disk use window myself.

I have used both, but have stuck with nano. Why do you personally choose micro over nano?

It has shortcuts that feel a little more natural to me and the ootb theming makes files more easy to navigate.
I know you can also theme nano but I'm lazy

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.

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

  • Thunderbird

  • Firefox

  • Vivaldi

  • Gnome

  • Chromium I use Firefox, wife uses Chromium and My WFH job I use Chrome. Vivaldi is a backup browser, I've been messing around with.

  • QEMU/LibVirtd - So I can run a Windows VM for my old Canon Lide 60 scanner which scans clearly there, otherwise in Linux, it's contrasted super grey for some reason.

  • Kopia-UI - Backup system which supports NFS Shares - set and forget type of setup.

  • VLC - Need I say more? Lol

  • OnlyOffice - Better aesthetically IMHO than LibreOffice

  • PDF Arranger - Works well to re-arrange pages or rotate them after scanning them in. (I self host Sterling PDF and will probably switch to that later)

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

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.

Yeah I've tried One Note, Evernote and notion before coming across Logseq and Obsidian. I'm really enjoying it. I haven't given Excalidraw much use in obsidian but I may do so in the future.

It's a game changer for me. Obsidian plugin allows previewing these drawings in notes, and we can also link notes in the drawings. The built in canvas feature is simply bad. All it needs to do is center the text inside boxes. Wish the devs made it open source and this problem could get fixed but apparently they don't believe in it.

Same here. I have tried:

  • Joplin
  • Standard Notes
  • loqseq
  • simple notes
  • craft and a few others, but I keep coming back to obsidian. Currently self-hosting it using one of the plugins, that helps me easily sync between pc, MacBook, android and iOS.

Nice! Yeah you've definitely tried a bunch of apps.

What service are you using to self host obsidian? And is it cheaper than paying for obsidian sync?

Nextcloud and Janitor plugin. In my opinion, obsidian sync is not worth it. You have many ways to sync your data across different devices. Even using GitHub or Sorj.

Edit: For my usecase, Janitor plugin works the best. You could try it.

Edit:

My nixpkgs list is something like

  • Firefox

  • Vim

  • WezTerm

  • Fzf

  • Zoxide

  • Starship

  • Copyq

  • mpv

  • Obsidian

  • Chromium

  • Xbindkeys

  • Xte

QuodLibet: I'm waiting for Amarok 3 to be ported but right now this is the best music collector/player in my experience.

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.

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?

On Resolve there various helper for-film-emulation plugins, and also third parties like Dehancer and Cineprint (which are exceptional), that do near-perfect film emulation. These things don't exist on Linux video editors. They barely exist for Premiere/FinalCut. It's a Resolve-first ability.

I think I didn't expressed myself correctly, what do you mean with film emulation?

Film emulation is a whole "sub-genre" of photography and video, where creators are trying to emulate the look and feel of various types of films, like kodachrome, fujifilm, etc. In fact, most movies and music videos have a layer of such emulation during their color grading process. I also treat my videos that way for a more cinematic look.

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.

Not necessarily unheard of but Floorp has been pretty great for work. I think all of the other applications I use are well known within their respective niche (e.g JOSM)

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).

I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said. My biggest reason for not using Vivaldi is due to it being based on chromium. I’m trying to do my best to reduce the market share of chromium based browsers

Too bad Floorp is now proprietary.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to use vanilla Firefox instead but also have a web panel like Floorp. Being able to open and close a webpage on the side like that is pretty handy. Vivaldi has the same feature but I don’t want to use that.

Would it be impractical to open another window and align the window somehow?

For the most part, that works fine. It’s more of a convenience feature since I can quite easily switch between different sites I have saved in the panel.

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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.

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?

LibreWolf is much better for privacy, it's specifically optimized for that. It also ships much less bloat by default.

Librewolf is great. Secure and private by default. For compatibility it is nearly as good as Firefox.

Floorp is better in my opinion. It has vertical tabs, pwa. These are such useful options for me.

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.

  • sshfs. I use it for everything.
  • autossh
  • git. It always annoys me how Debian doesn't come with it out of the box. Gets me every time I set up a new server.
  • Signal desktop app.
  • Nvim with lazy-nvim
  • Emacs (org mode)
  • Krita
  • Strawberry Music (can organize and transcode music)
  • Easy Effects (for poorly balanced YouTube videos or voice chat)
  • Calibre
  • YARG (I like plastic guitar)

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_%28service%29

I discovered warpinator recently, useful for transferring files to my android phone.

  • AppImageLauncher
  • Freetube
  • Ondsel
  • Nextcloud

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?!

Profanity & Dino are nice chat clients

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!

K9S, it is a TUI kubernetes manager that really integrates well into my workflow.

  • Obsidian - great markdown-based note app
  • NewsFlash - fast and elegant RSS news reader
  • Bottles - program to run Windows apps and managing them easily
  • BreakTimer - a life-saver for me; it allows you to set a break after given amount of time
  • LibreWolf - privacy-focused fork of Firefox

There are a lot of awesome programs on Linux, I recommend browsing Flathub to find them

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

Haven't seen anyone mention Alacritty yet, that's my favorite terminal emulator.

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".

And stuff like this is why Linux communities get a bad rep lol. No one cares that the the term all only came along with the iPhone, it's a common term now so get used to it.

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This. I really don't understand the down-votes - using the correct words makes life easier for everyone, including the OP.

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