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.
- 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
- 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
- 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 as firewall alternative)
- 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
- irssi
- weechat and weechat-matrix
- neovim
- I recently discovered this app called twitch-tui, it allows you to use the twitch chat from the terminal
All the apps I listed are free and open source
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.
Abaddon is light weight gtk discord app. Also has voice support.
- 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:
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.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")
Was gonna recommend Emacs, myself, but looks like you got it covered! Emacs is an amazing tool and is worth the journey
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.
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)
My nixpkgs list is something like
- Firefox
- Vim
- WezTerm
- Fzf
- Zoxide
- Starship
- Copyq
- mpv
- Obsidian
- Chromium
- Xbindkeys
- Xte
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.
The first things I install on a fresh linux install are always
htop
(task manager) andmicro
(nano but better).Have you looked at btop by chance? More visually appealing to me,, but still in terminal.
Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman
I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.
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.
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.
Too bad Floorp is now proprietary.
EDIT: Looks like, not anymore: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1bmbetfI’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.
Exactly, it was open-source, but then they decided to move some code to the private repos.
EDIT: Check out my first comment.
That's simply false information https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1bmbetf https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/ https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components
Oh, I didn't know that! Gonna edit my comments, thanks.
Still, this «don't fork my project, plz» thing is kinda bad, tbh.