What are your must-have programs?

Logseq.

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
- 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.
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.
- 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.

LibreWolf as my browser (it's a more secure and private version of Firefox, comes with a pre-installed adblocker and removes all the unnecessary junk) (Flatpak) with some of the following extensions:
- LibRedirect for redirecting privacy-invasive websites to private frontends
- ff2mpv
- Read Aloud (text-to-speech)
- Buster for solving CAPTCHAs
- Dark Reader
- Violentmonkey for userscripts like Lemmy Universal Link Switcher (it's really useful)
- DownThemAll
- Search by Image
- Server-Status (GitHub) shows information about a web server like country/region (via local GeoIP database lookup), SSL certificate information and more. Good open source alternative to Flagfox.
Thunderbird for emails (Flatpak)
Proton Mail Bridge (Flatpak)
Merkuro Calendar
Ptyxis (Flatpak) as my terminal. It's optimized for containers (e.g. distrobox). foot is a pretty good alternative if you want something more minimalistic and don't care about containers. There are countless other good options like Kitty, Alacritty, Konsole, WezTerm and many others.
Emacs as my IDE
KWrite, Kate or NotepadQQ for quickly editing text documents. There's also Apostrophe for GNOME.
QOwnNotes for local/Nextcloud-synced notes (Iotas for GNOME) There are other good options like Trilium Notes or Joplin.
Speech Note speech-to-text note-taking (https://piped.video/watch?v=zlLVgTB42Bo)
Akregator as my RSS client (Newsflash for GNOME)
Strawberry as my music player (Amberol or Rhythmbox if you're on GNOME)
Spot for Spotify (Flatpak)
Cider for Apple Music (unfortunately not FOSS anymore)
Feishin for connecting to my self-hosted Navidrome music server
rescrobbled for saving my music listening history to Last.fm. Also works with self-hosted ListenBrainz.
Jellyfin Desktop for connecting to my self-hosted Jellyfin media server
mpv as my video player (Celluloid on GNOME)
FreeTube for watching YouTube videos
This modded YouTube Music client that has an adblocker and many other cool features: https://th-ch.github.io/youtube-music/
Kasts for listening to podcasts (also has the ability to sync with gpodder.net or self-hosted GPodder on Nextcloud)
LibreOffice (Flatpak) There's also OnlyOffice.
Skanpage for scanning documents
GNUcash for accounting
Notesnook or Standard Notes for end-to-end encrypted note-taking
Anki Flashcards (Flatpak)
Logseq (FOSS Obsidian alternative)
Flameshot for screenshots (GitHub, Flatpak)
Kdenlive for video editing
GIMP, Krita and Inkscape for graphics stuff
Blender for animation stuff
Natron for VFX
LMMS and Ardour for music production
Virtual Machine Manager for creating/managing KVM/QEMU VMs (Boxes for GNOME)
Nextcloud Desktop for connecting to my home server
Signal Desktop (Flatpak) There's also Flare for GNOME, which uses GTK instead of Electron and feels more native (Flatpak)
Element (or NeoChat if you use KDE, Fractal for GNOME) for Matrix
WebCord for Discord. There are some native GTK clients like Abaddon and Dissent.
Paper Planes (Native GTK Telegram client)
Konversation or HexChat for IRC (Polari on GNOME)
Tokodon as my Mastodon client
qBittorrent for downloading torrent content. (You can use KTorrent on KDE and Fragments on GNOME)
Pika Backup for taking backups (There's a pretty good video about it: https://piped.video/watch?v=W30wzKVwCHo)
Timeshift for btrfs snapshots
Gradience to customize GTK4 appearance
Bitwarden for syncing my password database with my self-hosted Vaultwarden server (also works with their public cloud syncing option). Use KeePassXC if you prefer something entirely local.
LocalSend for sharing files on the local network (basically works like AirDrop) (also works over NetBird or Tailscale btw)
NetBird for creating a flat VPN network between my devices
KDE Connect for better integration with my phone. Also works over NetBird btw. Check out GSConnect if you're on GNOME.
KRunner for quickly finding files or applications (Ulauncher for other desktops, rofi for window managers)
Safing Portmaster (Firewall and DNS blocking solution. Check out OpenSnitch if you just need a firewall)
LACT for controlling AMD GPUs
Flatseal for managing Flatpak permissions (On KDE this is integrated in the system settings)
Bottles for managing Wine prefixes (Flatpak)

If you like gaming:

Lutris for managing my games
Heroic for Epic Games and GOG
Prism Launcher for Minecraft
Dolphin for emulating Wii and GameCube
Ryujinx for emulating the Switch
RPCS3 for PS3 emulation
Vita3K for PSVita emulation
PPSSPP for PSP
Cemu for Wii U emulation

For the CLI:

fish shell
starship
tmux
fd as an alternative to find
bat instead of less (written in Rust, has some nice syntax highlighting)
ripgrep
fzf
zoxide
yt-dlp
streamlink
ncmpcpp
ncspot
newsboat

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.
Abaddon is light weight gtk discord app. Also has voice support.
- Added it to the list.
This is fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to write all that down.
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

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.
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.

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?
- Chilax it is optional

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 🤦‍♂️
- My thought exactly
You should try Organic Maps.

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
- When it works (which mostly, it does not) it's awesome
- Doesnt work for me lol. But yes, totally.
  
  https://discuss.kde.org/t/15966
I didn't know you could install the Nextcloud Client as an Electron app
- The client

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- Yeah, I get you :c
- I'm using Green With Envy to manage the fan temp curves for my NVIDIA GPU.

Thrown away your current ssh client and get

https://xpipe.io/

That looks really good!

NewPipe

Tubular is a fork of NewPipe that includes SponsorBlock and some other cool features. LibreTube is a more modern alternative, which uses Piped on the backend, giving you some additional privacy, It also has SponsorBlock support built in.
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

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.

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.

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:

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.
- OK thanks, will check it out :)

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

tuptime: I’ve been looking for something like this
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

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).

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.
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

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.
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?

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

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.

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.

My nixpkgs list is something like

Firefox
Vim
WezTerm
Fzf
Zoxide
Starship
Copyq
mpv
Obsidian
Chromium
Xbindkeys
Xte

I like to pack services in containers so ctop has been a great basic ui to manage and monitor them in the shell

Localsend, distrobox+podman and ublock origin just to name a few

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

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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?!

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

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

Have you tried LocalSend? It's worked great for sending stuff to and from my phone and PC
- It also works over NetBird or Tailscale btw, which makes it really awesome
- I'll check it out.

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

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_(service)

It does collect your data though, and it's not open source. Omnivore is a good FOSS alternative
- We liked Readeck way better than Omnivore. Their browser extension is also very good.

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!

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

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

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

Thunderbird

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.
- Keep reading:
  
  The term "app" usually refers to applications for mobile devices such as phones.
- 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.
☝️🤓
- 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.