Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?
For me, there are two three things for personal information management:
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for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
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for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
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for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
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oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
Someone may have mentioned this, but Syncthing changed my life.
I really like
units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in' 6 ft + 2.8031496 inCool! Though I’ll probably still use krunner for this
unitsis really powerful. I worked with the team there to appropriately support Gaussian units since it seems no other tool would—took a bit of retrofitting to support fractional exponents like “grams^1/2”, but I have yet to find another tool that handles this even remotely correctly.
Every day?
- Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
- It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
- It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
- It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
- It’s stable
- It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
- Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
- Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (
rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux. - Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.
I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.
- Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/
Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.
I’m trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!
In that case, the curated list of applications in the Arch wiki could be invaluable for you:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications
- in other distributions, these packages normally have the same names.
Also, if you need something, I’ve found it often to be a good strategy to sit and write down what you personally need from a software - what are your requirements, and then go and search which available software matches these. The other way around, there are just too many alternatives: Any larger distro has tens of thousands of packages, and you won’t have time to try them all.
FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.
+1 Any chance you got it working with multiple monitors on kde Wayland? That’s seriously my single biggest issue right now
I honestly haven’t tried on KDE, but I can give it a shot this coming weekend and report back. I’m up for a distro hopping round anyway.
But in Gnome, dual screens, it works like a charm, also on Wayland.
Damn… I might consider swapping the other way then. KDE is great. Especially the file browser and “KDE connect” for android is fantastic. There’s just issues like these now and then
Gnome has an extension called GSConnect which is their re-implementation of KDE Connect. I have in my tablet and phone, and it’s flawless.
But don’t change yet, give me until the weekend, I’ll spin Fedora with KDE in my laptop, and come back with my experience with FlameShot.
No need to change if that’s what you like and it ends up working.
Flameshot does require some tweaking to work anyway, so I’ll need check if it’s the same in KDE.
Aside from ones listed here:
System Tools
- WinApps - Run Windows applications seamlessly integrated into your Linux desktop environment, like native including Adobe products.
- Waydroid - Run Android applications in a container on Linux with full hardware access.
- Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.
- AM (AppImage Manager) - Easy AppImage management for installing, updating, and organizing portable applications.
- Starship - Fast, customizable cross-platform shell prompt with Git integration and status indicators.
- InShellisense - IDE-style IntelliSense autocomplete and suggestions for your terminal.
- Tabby - Modern terminal emulator with tabs, split panes, and extensive customization options.
- Zeit - Qt GUI frontend for scheduling tasks using at and crontab utilities.
- KWin Minimize2Tray - KDE extension that allows minimizing windows to the system tray instead of taskbar.
- Flameshot - Feature-rich screenshot tool with built-in annotation and editing capabilities.
- CopyQ - Advanced clipboard manager with searchable history and custom scripting support.
- Safing Portmaster - Free open-source application firewall with per-app network control, DNS-over-TLS, and system-wide ad/tracker blocking.
Productivity Tools
- DSNote - Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation app for note-taking.
- NAPS2 - User-friendly document scanning application with OCR and PDF creation capabilities.
- Morphosis - Simple document converter supporting PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX and more formats.
- Obsidian - Powerful knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph visualization.
- BeeRef - Minimalist reference image viewer designed for artists and designers.
Media & Entertainment
- Popcorn Time - Stream movies and TV shows via torrent with built-in media player.
- Nicotine+ - Modern Soulseek P2P client for sharing and discovering music files.
- XnView - Versatile image viewer, organizer, and converter supporting hundreds of formats.
Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.
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