You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
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?
➕ 💯
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?”.
🤷♂️ 🤦♀️
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.
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?
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.