Must install apps/tools
from Bieren@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 21:01
https://lemmy.world/post/28797211
from Bieren@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 21:01
https://lemmy.world/post/28797211
You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
threaded - newest
Whatever you need to be productive.
➕ 💯
This is the correct answer. 👆
Not one of the other replies (so far) addresses the question to the OP: “What do you want to accomplish with the machine?”.
🤷♂️ 🤦♀️
But OP is asking us. Presumably for the benefit of the community.
If you believe your answer would be more valuable to also include what you are trying to achieve, by all means, include that.
Brilliant.
This is like somebody asking you what you want for breakfast, and you say “Food”.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, observant, or something else. There have been many a meal where I was asked what I wanted to eat and it’s rare that I go beyond the words “surprise me”, knowing full well that the person asking would eat the same as I was offered, making the “surprise”, less of a risk and more of an adventure.
In this case, OP asked a completely unanswerable question to which there was absolutely no reasonable answer, since we know nothing about the person, their interests, their experience, the hardware they have access to, or anything remotely resembling a needs analysis.
So, even my answer, generic and random as it might appear, was based on how I use a computer, namely, to be productive. I’ve been using them for over 40 years, mostly like that, with some sojourns into art and personal expression, not nearly worthy of public scrutiny, but not specifically “productive” as such.
So … what were you attempting to say?
I didn’t interpret the original post as “What would a generic user consider necessary installs?” I interpreted it as “Could you suggest some software that you consider absolutely essential so that I could discover some that I might’ve overlooked?”
Gimp, Oh my ZSH and VS Code.
Helpful answer: vlc, libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, zathura, obs-studio
Real answer: gnome, run-or-raise, foot, fish, tmux, fzf, silver-searcher, neovim, neomutt, vifm
Curious why you would need Gimp and Inkscape? Wouldn’t one of them be enough? Is one of them better suited for certain tasks?
They serve two different purposes - Gimp for image editing, Inkscape for vector graphics.
Oh I see, thanks. I thought you could also edit images with Inkscape. I’m apparently not very well versed in these topics.
You can load bitmap images into Inkscape and manipulate them to a degree, but Gimp is much better at that. You can probably also load vector graphics (svg) into Gimp, but I’d assume they would be converted to bitmaps.
Vector vs bitmap is a good topic to be familiar with for anyone who works with computers, I keep running into professionals who really should know the difference but don’t.
Thanks for the explanation! I agree, this has been very helpful already. Now I go and do some reading on it.
Timeshift is number 1
Also it’s recommended to not reinstall a bunch of stuff and just install the app when you needed it that’s the power of Linux. Unless you just want to learn the software then disregard
I found Timeshift to be a disappointment. I tested it as I was setting my system up.
Result: The system still thought all the extra software packages were installed, but none of them actually worked. Like, if Timeshift is gonna uninstall packages that weren’t present in the last backup, shouldn’t it also unregister those packages as well?
To fix all that crap, I had to force reinstall all packages, which takes about as long as a full OS reinstall, but I was already happy with the rest of the configuration, so I ran…
sudo aptitude reinstall ‘~i’
Had similar experience with snapshots. Restore to the last working version just to find the same issue that’s been bothering me.
Then went back to the classic approach with 👻 images and Rescuezilla.
With NVME drive, it takes 7min to backup 60Gb, and 3min to restore it.
Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-O-Matic. Oh, wait, you said “Linux Mint”, not “every single OS, for work, personal, and mobile use”.
Fortune. Cowsay.
People replying - how about telling us why you consider your answer a must-install tool?
.
I believe Firefox is installed by default on Mint, so install uBO.
Transmission.
Veracrypt.
Audacious.
Potentially unpopular opinion: a bunch of rust replacements for the common terminal utilities: eza, bat, dust, fd, helix. Also fish and nushell, yt-dlp, and some of my favorite programming languages.
I just discovered bat and eza, which were already installed, along with fd though I haven't played with that one yet. I've really liked the first two at least
All of these alternatives and you missed the best one ripgrep (rg). The other ones in my opinion are nice to have. Recursive multi-threaded grep that respects gitignore files is a must for me.
I have it installed on a few of my machines but don’t really find it that useful. But then again that’s specific to my needs and usecases.
I also do this. There are some utilities I’d like to see included directly into most *nix distributions, like fd.
I use bin to manage the utilities, and can setup a new install by just bringing he binary and config. It works great–I highly recommend it.
Never heard of bin but this is cool as hell thanks for shouting it out!
Here’s an exhaustive list of modern replacements:
github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix/…/README.md
Nice list, thanks. A lot of them I was not even aware of.
Flat seal if you are a flatpak gamer. Also gamemode
Portmaster if you want to manually control each network connection. It has nice lists that blocks a lot of trash by default but it can break websites and games.
Xournalpp - a fantastic tool for journalling (on X/twitter) your peeing habits.
Tmux - a nice tool for telephoning elon musk
Wezterm - a utility for tracking the term limits of Wez Anderson style presidencies
Cheese - a fantastic tool for ordering dairy products online
OBS - a diagnostic tool for tracking ordinary bowel movements
Ncdu - a great overview tool of Nicolas Cage’s Dark Universe franchise
tree - plants a christmas tree each time its called
datamash - Provides great montages and mashupa of Data’s escapades from Star Trek
Imagemagick - Explores the magical music of Imogen Heap
CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager. Gimp is great but Pinta is easy for quick, minor image adjustments. System Monitor is an applet that displays system information by double clicking on a taskbar icon. If you use VPNs, the IP Indicator applet shows the country of your public IP or customized icon when matching ISP is found.
For me personally I install kitty terminal and integrate it with fish asap. Then I waste a bunch of time customizing it to my liking. My preferred text editor is Kate regardless of what DE I’m using and I usually get bleachbit for basic cleanup.
Hello Beryl. Could you help me with bleachbit settings (tick boxes)? Once when I used bleachbit, it changed back the icons of packages like Zen Browser that I have changed through Menu Edit. It also removed start up applications from the setting. I'm on Arch KDEplasma. So, I was wondering, which check box should I leave empty to preserve my icon customizations and startup apps?
Fish and Kate hell yeah 🤜 🤛
sl
and KDE plasmaonly neofetch
I recommend fastfetch nowadays since neofetch is no longer maintained
vim, htop , iotop, screen, nslookup.
mpv
pdftk
yt-dlp
Zram
Probably would run into these things needed in this order:
Then nodejs if it's a laptop, or Steam if it's a desktop.
kitty, nvim, fish, zed, mpv, btop, borg. Weird how all the gone ones have short names. Depending on the system, I would add tlp as well.
… and more I can’t remember right now, because it’s too early in the morning.
EDIT:
guix and/or nix
Both are functional package managers and manage dependency trees better than flatpak IMO (also the package description languages mean you can manipulate the package definitions at install time much easier)
If you can’t find a package in guix/nix then it behooves you to use flatpak
neovim, basic development utilities (gcc, make…), zsh, ssh, btop, nvtop, kitty, river, git, cargo, nix, flatpak, ytdlp, ffmpeg, firefox, chromium, python
Nice list. fzf?
And then mpv and im nearly done.
There’s a lot of letters here, but nobody is explaining what they mean. How do I know what I need? I’m not gonna install everything, or look up every single program to see.
.
I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.
I’m going to try to mention things I haven’t seen already written, though I may repeat some of the more important ones to me.
(In no particular order)
Terminal:
GUI:
I would like to add that I do use Arch, but I’m fairly sure 99% of these packages, if not all of them, are available for most other distros.
For CLI lovers: Check out Terminal Trove
Edit: I did see that someone mentioned no explanations on the apps, so I tried to put a little blurb on each.
You can try bass to run bash scripts in fish
Cool find but I will probably stick with ZSH
If you use the terminal and have a tendency to fat finger commands, I would recommend “The Fuck”.
It always makes me smile to type fuck into the terminal. 🙂
LocalSend for quick local network file sharing from my phone that just werks. I prefer it over kde connect because the latter uses lots of random ports that kinda bloat my firewall whitelist. I know there is an alternative called warpinator, but I don’t see a reason to change my preferences for now.
System :
Terminal :
home
,etc
andusr
folders, and I use GNU Stow to symlink them respectively to/home/username
,/etc
and/usr
, that way all my config is in the same place so I can back it up easily and have version control)ArchMint user)General GUI apps :
Internet :
Media :
I’m on Arch so the package names might be a bit different
Darktable. A replacement for adobe lightroom.
I’ve actually found RawTherapee to be slightly faster for what I’m doing (slight edits to my amateur photography)
It also has a good cli interface for mass processing via scripts.
vim and docker
I keep a list on my backup partition:
At the very least:
Yazi Eza Kitty Fish Fastfetch Feh Trash-cli Micro Spotify-player Nmcli Polybar Rofi (fuzzel for wayland) Librewolf