You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
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.
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-cliThere’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.
Úoiggugg🍹🧉
Fortune. Cowsay.
Whatever you need to be productive.
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?”
➕ 💯
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.
At the very least:
Yazi Eza Kitty Fish Fastfetch Feh Trash-cli Micro Spotify-player Nmcli Polybar Rofi (fuzzel for wayland) Librewolf
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. 🙂
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.
Fish and Kate hell yeah 🤜 🤛
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?
Qalculate
I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.
People replying - how about telling us why you consider your answer a must-install tool?
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.
- 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)
- 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
You can try bass to run bash scripts in fish
Cool find but I will probably stick with ZSH
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.
Here’s an exhaustive list of modern replacements:
https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix/blob/master/README.md
Nice list, thanks. A lot of them I was not even aware of.
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!
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
