Linux

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

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.

My nixpkgs list is something like

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

• 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.

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

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.

Firefox. Syncthing. KeepassXC. (g)vim. ssh. git. htop. less.

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.

• 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

Profanity & Dino are nice chat clients

• AppImageLauncher
• Freetube
• Ondsel
• Nextcloud