Midnight Commander (mc), emacs, Google Chrome, TexLive, auctex (with elpa in emacs), software for computations: gfortran, Maxima, etc.

Anyone care to opine on advantages or disadvantages of each?

You would be best popping libreoffice vs openoffice into a web search engine and selecting articles that are fairly up-to-date. There are a huge number of articles out there discussing the topic.

HTOP, Chromium, Keepass,XFBurn, Terminator

I've done so, but they mostly regurgitate the same talking points. Was more interested in individual experience.

Originally the big point I recall was that LO incorporated Novell's bugfixes, and OO did not, which produced significant differences in stability and performance. (In the early days I had both installed side by side, and LO won hands down. But that was a long time ago, and I haven't even looked at OO since.)

Lots of interesting answers here with a few new programs to try.
Heres my list
midnight commander
gparted
remmina
parcellite
filezilla
filelight

add EPEL
install nss-mdns
remove selinux
install google-chrome
sudo yum clean all | sudo rm -fr /var/cache/yum | sudo yum -y update

le editor because I hate vi and nano, and it doesn't require a GUI
On the desktop...

• Fluxbox
• chrome and/or firefox
• audacity
• GIMP
• xine
• Libre Office

Those are the ones that get installed unconditionally as soon as the base system is installed. Everything else can wait until I try to do something and say "Oh yeah, I forgot to install $PACKAGE"...

Web browsers: Pale Moon, Basilisk, WaterFox, brave, TOR Browser, and iridium.

Mediaplayers: mpv and vlc.

Terminal Emulators: Roxterm, mate-term (even though I don't use Mate), and guake.

Xapps (specifically xreader, xviewer, and xed), because I like having programs that aren't tied to any particular desktop environment.

Others: GIMP, KeePass2.

GParted... it's always left off on a default Mint install. After that, Aptik.

ncdu, nfw, vim, mpd, ncmpcpp, git, google-chrome

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to install some of the many options--A slow learner trying to become familiar with Linux -- with which I am enamored.

On a very old machine usually - depending on what a light-weight Linux already has - I see to install

-seamonkey ( is already in LXLE; hope seamonkey will go on, otherwise I need a mail and browser replacement as I am not longer happy with Firefox after a few privacy things) or palemoon or dooble

- audacious

- musescore 3

- Mirage and/or Nomacs for graphics - gimp is already in LXLE.

- Libre office writer and Focuswriter

- Gedit

- clamTK as antivirus, just in case

- TLP linrunner (already in LXLE)

- Audacity

- vlc

Actually after Lubuntu 18.04 got too slow for my oooooold machine I switched to LXLE and they got very nice things pre-installed, so for me there is no need to install too much afterwards. Some graphical interface for GnuPG2 is nice, just testing which are low on resources, as (rather a newbie still) I always hear KDE things would not be too great for very old machines.

1 members found this post helpful.

How old is 'very old' ?

My own experience is that performance depends a LOT more on the distro under it than on the desktop on top of it.

Frex, my previous linux test box: 2006; Athlon 3200+ 2.2GHz (single core, very weak on floating point), 4GB RAM. Mint-Cinnamon, PCLinuxOS-KDE, Sparky-LX?? all ran very well; Mageia-KDE struggled; Fedora and *buntu with any desktop were so slow they were unusable (tho Kbuntu was perhaps the least awful); Debian never made it to the desktop.

Current linux test box: 2008, Core2Duo 3.2GHz, 8GB RAM. I see generally the same results here, just faster: Distro matters more than desktop. It runs PCLOS-KDE for everyday and it is slick.

The first thing I do for a new system (all I use nowadays are Raspberry Pis running Slackware for ARM) is compile NEStopia-- a cross platform NES emulator that works great on the Pi. I'd hate to be stuck without a NES emulator. D: