Must install apps/tools
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?

#linux

threaded - newest

vk6flab@lemmy.radio on 27 Apr 21:07 next collapse

Whatever you need to be productive.

lupusblackfur@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 22:18 next collapse

➕ 💯

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?”.

🤷‍♂️ 🤦‍♀️

thefactremains@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 03:25 collapse

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.

zarkanian@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 11:32 collapse

Brilliant.

This is like somebody asking you what you want for breakfast, and you say “Food”.

vk6flab@lemmy.radio on 28 Apr 13:45 collapse

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?

zarkanian@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 16:28 collapse

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?”

vegetvs@kbin.earth on 27 Apr 21:12 next collapse

Gimp, Oh my ZSH and VS Code.

a14o@feddit.org on 27 Apr 21:20 next collapse

Helpful answer: vlc, libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, zathura, obs-studio

Real answer: gnome, run-or-raise, foot, fish, tmux, fzf, silver-searcher, neovim, neomutt, vifm

Kory@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 06:19 collapse

Curious why you would need Gimp and Inkscape? Wouldn’t one of them be enough? Is one of them better suited for certain tasks?

Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 06:53 collapse

They serve two different purposes - Gimp for image editing, Inkscape for vector graphics.

Kory@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 06:58 collapse

Oh I see, thanks. I thought you could also edit images with Inkscape. I’m apparently not very well versed in these topics.

a14o@feddit.org on 28 Apr 07:20 collapse

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.

Kory@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 07:41 collapse

Thanks for the explanation! I agree, this has been very helpful already. Now I go and do some reading on it.

lordnikon@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 21:22 next collapse

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

over_clox@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 21:35 collapse

I found Timeshift to be a disappointment. I tested it as I was setting my system up.

  • Install Linux Mint, obviously.
  • Install most main software I want.
  • Do a Timeshift backup.
  • Install more software I might want to try eventually.
  • Restore the Timeshift backup.

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’

lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 05:27 collapse

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.

Empricorn@feddit.nl on 27 Apr 21:30 next collapse

Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-O-Matic. Oh, wait, you said “Linux Mint”, not “every single OS, for work, personal, and mobile use”.

betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 21:33 next collapse

Fortune. Cowsay.

spittingimage@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 21:34 next collapse

People replying - how about telling us why you consider your answer a must-install tool?

[deleted] on 27 Apr 21:35 next collapse

.

scytale@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 21:36 next collapse

I believe Firefox is installed by default on Mint, so install uBO.

Transmission.

Veracrypt.

Audacious.

nimpnin@sopuli.xyz on 27 Apr 21:42 next collapse

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.

themadcodger@kbin.earth on 27 Apr 22:19 next collapse

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

Static_Rocket@lemmy.world on 27 Apr 22:27 next collapse

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.

nimpnin@sopuli.xyz on 28 Apr 08:46 collapse

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.

Xanza@lemm.ee on 27 Apr 22:38 next collapse

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.

paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 27 Apr 23:52 collapse

Never heard of bin but this is cool as hell thanks for shouting it out!

Rogue@feddit.uk on 28 Apr 07:06 collapse

Here’s an exhaustive list of modern replacements:

github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix/…/README.md

NanoooK@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 10:15 collapse

Nice list, thanks. A lot of them I was not even aware of.

sunzu2@thebrainbin.org on 27 Apr 21:49 next collapse

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.

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:24 next collapse

Xournalpp - a fantastic tool for journalling (on X/twitter) your peeing habits.

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:26 collapse

Tmux - a nice tool for telephoning elon musk

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:28 collapse

Wezterm - a utility for tracking the term limits of Wez Anderson style presidencies

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:29 collapse

Cheese - a fantastic tool for ordering dairy products online

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:30 collapse

OBS - a diagnostic tool for tracking ordinary bowel movements

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:34 collapse

Ncdu - a great overview tool of Nicolas Cage’s Dark Universe franchise

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:36 collapse

tree - plants a christmas tree each time its called

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:38 collapse

datamash - Provides great montages and mashupa of Data’s escapades from Star Trek

tetris11@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:39 collapse

Imagemagick - Explores the magical music of Imogen Heap

spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works on 27 Apr 22:28 next collapse

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.

Beryl@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 22:54 next collapse

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.

SBFalcon@kbin.earth on 27 Apr 23:45 next collapse

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?

Feyd@programming.dev on 27 Apr 23:54 collapse

Fish and Kate hell yeah 🤜 🤛

lengau@midwest.social on 27 Apr 23:19 next collapse

sl and KDE plasma

buwho@lemmy.ml on 27 Apr 23:49 next collapse

only neofetch

AArun@programming.dev on 28 Apr 01:22 collapse

I recommend fastfetch nowadays since neofetch is no longer maintained

chargen@lemmy.ca on 28 Apr 01:24 next collapse

vim, htop , iotop, screen, nslookup.

boreengreen@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 02:07 next collapse

mpv
pdftk
yt-dlp

9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 02:24 next collapse

Zram

tuckerm@feddit.online on 28 Apr 02:24 next collapse

Probably would run into these things needed in this order:

  • The text editor kakoune
  • Add uBlock Origin to Firefox
  • KeepassXC
  • tmux

Then nodejs if it's a laptop, or Steam if it's a desktop.

liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 Apr 05:04 next collapse

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.

Engywuck@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 05:34 next collapse

  • Kate
  • Yakuake
  • Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium
  • LibreOffice (I use Calc a lot)
  • Kate
  • Ocular
  • DoH-client
  • htop
  • ncdu
  • Windscribe
  • virt-manager

… and more I can’t remember right now, because it’s too early in the morning.

EDIT:

  • nano
  • mc (midnight commander)
WalnutLum@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 06:12 next collapse

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

kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 28 Apr 06:32 next collapse

  • Shell: Fish
  • Resource monitoring: Btop
  • Browser: Librewolf
  • Text editor: Vim (unless you do heavy programming then neovim)
  • Basic tools: git and wget
  • Themeing: GTK customizer
  • Terminal: Foot
737@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 28 Apr 06:36 next collapse

neovim, basic development utilities (gcc, make…), zsh, ssh, btop, nvtop, kitty, river, git, cargo, nix, flatpak, ytdlp, ffmpeg, firefox, chromium, python

beeng@discuss.tchncs.de on 28 Apr 07:39 collapse

Nice list. fzf?

And then mpv and im nearly done.

Matriks404@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 08:26 next collapse

  • Anki
  • Beyond Compare
  • Discord
  • GIMP (Not sure if it’s installed by default on Linux Mint) with PhotoGIMP patch.
  • GnuCash
  • GParted
  • KeePassXC
  • KWrite + Kate
  • Pinta
  • qbittorrent
  • Steam
  • Telegram
  • Thunderbird
  • virt-manager
  • VLC
  • Wine
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world on 28 Apr 08:49 next collapse

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.

[deleted] on 28 Apr 12:36 collapse

.

LambdaRX@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 09:13 next collapse

I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.

Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 28 Apr 09:21 next collapse

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:

  • Kitty (Main Terminal)
  • Fish (Terminal Prompt)
  • Neovim (Code/Text editing)
  • Zoxide (a directory changer; once you go to a directory, you can type z and a partial name to go back to it)
  • Atuin (a command history lister, can get a key and bring over commands from other systems)
  • Midnight Commander (CLI file manager)
  • Btop (CLI system monitor)
  • Palette (I do a lot of theming in different configs as well as HTML/CSS, so its nice to have something to quick convert hex to RGB).

GUI:

  • Timeshift (backup/restore)
  • Eddie (for AirVPN)
  • novelWriter (my FAVORITE writing tool for my books)
  • Floorp (Firefox fork browser)
  • Conky Manager 2 (desktop monitoring widgets)
  • Rofi (keyboard launcher)
  • firewalld (tried this out recently, good firewall)
  • Flameshot (ALWAYS; its my favorite screenshot tool)
  • MPV (I still get VLC, but opt for MPV most of the time for videos/streaming)
  • Speedcrunch (A+ calculator)
  • Steam
  • Lutris
  • Protonup-QT (to inject GE Proton into Steam/Lutris)
  • Stremio (a great little streaming tool)

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.

Mwa@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 09:46 next collapse

  • GIMP (with photogimp patch)
  • Steam
  • Librewolf (I could also opt for a chromium based browser)
  • Tor Browser (to browse onion links/throwaway browser)
  • Heroic Games Launcher
  • Prism Launcher
  • latest Java lts (either from adoptium or openjdk i dont care about flashy new features)
  • Libreoffice Still (similar to the second reason above and onlyoffice in appimage due to Libreoffice weird handling with ppsx files and powerpoints)
  • QEMU/KVM with virt manager
  • Gnome evolution (if it’s gtk desktop I could opt for other email clients)
  • Proton-GE
  • WINE
  • Ghostty(Kinda sucks it’s based on libadwaita and gnome forces this theme on you no matter your desktop)
  • Fish/ZSH(fish not having posix compatibility is kinda annoying)
  • MPV (I could still use vlc but I prefer mpv because it can stream youtube links)
  • ytp-dl(I can opt for a gui for convenience sake)
  • BTOP
  • Fastfetch
lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 28 Apr 11:59 collapse

You can try bass to run bash scripts in fish

Mwa@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 12:11 collapse

Cool find but I will probably stick with ZSH

Geodad@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 10:27 next collapse

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. 🙂

tomatoely@sh.itjust.works on 28 Apr 12:34 next collapse

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.

phantomwise@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 12:40 next collapse

System :

  • zram (who says you can’t just install more RAM 😄 )

Terminal :

  • kitty (terminal emulator)
  • fastfetch (must take screenshots to show off every new Linux install, it’s in the EULA)
  • zsh (thought I’d like to try nushell one of these days) with zsh-syntax-highlighting, zsh-completiions and zsh-suggestions
  • GNU Stow (to manage symlinks, I store my dotfiles in a repo witch contains home, etc and usr 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)
  • rsync (to sync backup folders)
  • btop (system monitoring)
  • clamav (antivirus)
  • brightnessctl (for screen brightness control, but I should probably use brillo instead www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGOaSS8nEQA)
  • yt-dpl (for downloading videos from YouTube/TikTok/wherever else)
  • ani-cli (for watching anime from the terminal, obviously a must-have for any Arch Mint user)
  • figlet (to write text from fonts made of ASCII art)
  • cpipes, asciiquarium, cbonsai, matrix for when I get bored in meetings
  • hollywood and rust-stakeholer if I ever need to pretend I’m doing something productive
  • lots of TUI apps from github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

General GUI apps :

  • Sway (tiling WM) though I’d really like to try niri (instead of several workspace it has a single one of infinite length that you can scroll through)
  • rofi and rofi-calc (app launcher that can also do a lot other stuff if you want like file browser, ssh menu, calculator, emoji selector, it’s very light and superfast), also rofi-emoji (emoji selector)
  • VSCode (code editor)
  • KeepassXC (password manager)
  • lutris, steam, protontricks, ProtonGE (gaming)
  • FontManager
  • Ventoy (for making USBs with multiple ISO on them)
  • LibreOffice

Internet :

  • Waterfox + LibreWolf (web browsers) with the following extensions : uBlock, Consent-O-matic, DownThemAll, KeepasXC-Browser, Copy PlainText, Copy Link Text, EPUB Reader, Markdown Viewer Web Ext, Sponsor Block, Return YouTube Dislike, YouTube Anti Translate, CanvasBlocker, Font Fingerprint Defender, WebGL Fingerprint Defender (I had to give up on User-Agent Switcher because it causes me to be blocked on too many websites)
  • qBittorrent (BitTorrent client)
  • FileZilla (FTP client)

Media :

  • XVview (image viewer)
  • ksnip (GUI screen capture)
  • Gimp (image editor)
  • Inkscape (vector image editor)
  • MPC and VLC (audio/video players)
  • Libation (to liberate Audible audiobooks from your account)
  • cheese (camera)

I’m on Arch so the package names might be a bit different

thequickben@lemm.ee on 28 Apr 12:45 next collapse

Darktable. A replacement for adobe lightroom.

balsoft@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 14:26 collapse

I’ve actually found RawTherapee to be slightly faster for what I’m doing (slight edits to my amateur photography)

BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 15:23 collapse

It also has a good cli interface for mass processing via scripts.

mark@fasheng.ing on 28 Apr 02:40 next collapse

vim and docker

BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.ml on 28 Apr 15:32 next collapse

I keep a list on my backup partition:

$ cat packages.list

appimagelauncher
base-devel
aws-cli
aws-session-manager-plugin
bat
bob
direnv

discord
docker-compose
dog
dotnet-sdk
erdtree
eza
fastfetch
github-cli
httpie
k9s
krita
kubectx
lazygit

mariadb-clients
megacmd
minikube
mpd
mtr
mumble
nvtop
obs-studio
ollama-rocm
qalculate-gtk
restic
siege
speedtest-cli

steam
terraform
tig
timeshift-autosnap
tree-sitter
virt-manager
virt-viewer
yazi
yq
ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd
ttf-liberation
ttf-meslo-nerd-font-powerlevel10k
ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols
ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols-common
ttf-roboto
wine
wine-gecko
wine-mono
winetricks
playerctl
php
php-gd
php-sodium
streamdeck-ui
speedtest-cli
zoxide
zsh
ripgrep
fd
dry-bin
kitty
xdotool
tmux
tmux-plugin-manager
sublime-text-4
trash-cli
HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.one on 28 Apr 17:57 collapse

At the very least:

Yazi Eza Kitty Fish Fastfetch Feh Trash-cli Micro Spotify-player Nmcli Polybar Rofi (fuzzel for wayland) Librewolf