In no order I install, Terminator,Guake,VirtualBox,Parcellite,PSI+,K3b,SMPlayer,ZenMap,Wireshark,Okluar,Calibre, and a few other network tools....

Software after installing Linus Cinnamon now at 18.3
 

Set the firewall, Opera, Chromium, and Vivaldi and a slew of add ons to them. I have an i5 processor and 8 gigs ram. I have since added two office systems for word documents, Konqueror,
I am about to add new disks for Linux Mint 19.1 "Tessa" - Cinnamon (64-bit).

wallch, libre office, vlc, gparted

mc, zsh, aptitude, scite, but I usually only use rolling releases of Debian, so this is less frequent

I use the latest Ubuntu distribution, so a lot comes with it. I just ensure that LibreOffice, Gimp. Inkscape, and VLC are installed and up-to-date.

Software install on new OS
 

libmythes
mythes-en
hunspell-en-us
smplayer
clementine
xorg-xrandr
print settings
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr
thunderbird
ristretto
gimp
gutenprint
libreoffice-fresh
yaourt
etcher
chromium

LibreOffice
 

Firefox then LibreOffice are the first software installed after I get internet access.(I have an on-going problem with the ReakTek drivers; Ubuntu updates something and the driver is trashed.)

When I install Linux it is typically because I am setting up a LinuxCNC build.

This means that I will have the following:

• LinuxCNC
• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Gedit
• Glade 2.8

Jerry

Timeshift is the first and most important.

I then usually install remmina, openssh, chrome, tex, tex studio, wps office and conky.

First things installed
 

I would install the following (though I use Mint 19.1 so a lot are already installed by default):

LibreOffice
Firefox
VirtualBox
Pinta
Gimp
Putty
RhythmBox
System Monitor
TeamViewer
Evolution
Remmina
Brasero
VMWare Player
GParted
Kodi
Mahjongg
Chromium
FileZilla
bleachbit
Darktable

Linux Fresh Install Apps
 

Sophos CLI AntiVirus
FirewallD
gedit
gthumb
Acpi
Aptik
Audacity
Bluefish
Clipit
ClipGrab
ConvertAll
Double Commander
ffmpeg
Firejail
Foxit Reader (PDF Reader)
Google Chrome
Gparted
Hardinfo
JAVA (OpenJDK 8)
JAVA (Oracle Java 8)
Oracle JAVA (JDK)
JLiveCD
Kalzium
KStars
Lame
LibreOffice (Remove)
My-Weather-Indicator
Notepadqq
Ntfs-config
ntfs-3g
syslinux
p7Zip-full p7zip p7zip-rar
Procinfo
PulseAudio Volume Control - pavucontrol pulseaudio pulseaudio-equalizer pulseaudio-utils gir1.2-cvc-1.0 gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio
PulseEffects
Screenfetch
SoftMaker Free Office 2019 (Office suite)
Testkdisk
TOR Browser
ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Unattended Upgrades
VLC
WinFF
Xfburn
XSane

Depends on the distro, but often Ktorrent, VLC and firefox.

In general order of installation, my most common:

grub (about 1/4 of the time), still under evaluation;
AlienBob's multilibs (if it's a 64 bit pc);
Libre Office (always);
printer drivers (always for a desktop);
wine (always - games and Registax);
gslapt (sometimes, mostly so that I can say "but I CAN use automatic package installation").

There are others, but I usually wait until I need them.

Google-Chrome-Stable,
Timeshift,
PlayonLinux,
Leafpad,
Wine,
Winetricks,
K3B,
Upgraded GIMP to full,
Aisleriot
pretty much gets me going, then get the windows games up & running.

First up in Fedora
 

After Fedora KDE is installed, I have a script that installs groups:

dnf -y group install \
"3D Printing" \
"Administration Tools" \
"Ansible node" \
"Authoring and Publishing" \
"Books and Guides" \
"C Development Tools and Libraries" \
"Cloud Infrastructure" \
"Cloud Management Tools" \
"Container Management" \
"Design Suite" \
"Development and Creative Workstation" \
"Domain Membership" \
"Fedora Eclipse" \
Editors \
"Educational Software" \
"Electronic Lab" \
"Engineering and Scientific" \
"FreeIPA Server" \
"Games and Entertainment" \
"Infrastructure Server" \
"LibreOffice" \
"Medical Applications" \
"Network Servers" \
"Office/Productivity" \

"Python Classroom" \
"Python Science" \
"Robotics" \
"Sound and Video" \
"System Tools" \
"Text-based Internet"

Then the following packages are installed:

dnf -y install \
avogadro \
cproto \
geany \
graphviz-doc \
graphviz-perl \
inchi \
lshw \
parrot \
perl-SQL-Statement \
perl-Test-Pod \
perl-Test-Pod-Coverage \
perl-Text-CSV_XS \
sharutils \
sloccount \
wireshark \
aspell-de \
aspell-fr \
checkstyle \
cpptest \
cppunit \
MAKEDEV \
mingw32-minizip \
nagios \
nscd \
pax \
skanlite \
sound-juicer \
cmake-gui \
cmake-fedora \
csound \
digikam \
doxygen-doxywizard \
inchi-doc \
libmemcached \
openbabel \
openbabel-gui \
parley \
perl-openbabel \
synergy \
tigervnc-server \
webcpp \
zbar \
atop \
dcfldd \
dolphin-plugins \
eric \
inxi \
juk \
kdesdk-kcachegrind \
kdesdk-umbrello \
libreoffice \
libvisio-tools \
mosquitto-devel \
mumble \
perf \
remmina \
scrot \
simon \
stellarium \
taskjuggler \
veusz \
vsftpd \
xinetd