First I remove whatever obstacles the distribution has placed in the way of a root login.

Then I install LibreOffice, Vivaldi, Xsane, KAddressbook, KMyMoney, Digicam, Kwrite, Dolphin, Konsole, K3b, and Gparted if they haven't already been installed by the distribution. With Debian I will install Synaptic in place of their other package manager (I forget its name.)

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Steve Stites

Aptitude package manager

1 members found this post helpful.

Sheesh. Big question.

If I install a distro and do a bit of exploring, I often find what I need preinstalled. That's with full-featured distributions though.

I just got done installing Arch, then Gentoo.

This thread reminded me to get some things that don't come with them, because NOTHING comes with them, by and large.

First and foremost? Music playback software. Usually Audacious. Then Audacity, so I can record some of my vinyl LPs. Of course, for my installs of Arch and Gentoo I had to install sudo. A text editor (prefer nano, but vi and vim are definitely on the short list). Google Chrome, or Chromium (please don't yell at me for being a sellout). Terminal emulators. File managers. I'm running Xfce Terminal and Thunar File Manager, because those rode the coattails of Xfce when I installed it to my Gentoo system, and they work across all my DEs from what I can tell. But I'll get a couple more. Thus the plural. And I've to get LibreOffice for both, if I can.

I guess I'm too obsessed with music.

No matter the intended use of the system, one of the very first packages, if not the first, is Midnight Commander. I started using it in 1996. There are times when I use a GUI file manager but they always seem limited compared to the Swiss Army chainsaw of file managers!

Synaptic
VLC
Gimp
Thunderbird

Opera browser
Skype
Wine
Virtualbox
Msfonts
Card games (Windows versions)
Raw Therapee
Gparted
VLC

The first thing I do with Ubuntu is replace the Nautilus file manager with Nemo. Nautilus is horrible. If you are coming from Windows or OS X you will always be frustrated with any file manager with Linux. There are no really good file managers on par with Windows or OS X in the Linux world. All of them pale in comparison in one way or another. The three things that frustrate me with Nemo is that there is no preview, no drag and drop to the desktop and of all things, there are no up and down arrows on the scroll bar. If Nemo added those, it would be pretty close the Windows and OS X. There are a few other things that would be nice, but those three thing above are missed a lot.

Chrome

LibreOffice is a must. Then I install Vuescan and make it work on an Epson Workforce 630 series printer/scanner and an Epson V600 Scanner. That is a must.

The Chrome broser
Then, Evolution,
Gnome Extension and Tweaks,
Gimp and Pinta image handling
Followed by my web development tools

And, now - I keep on finding new apps

Thank you
Alex

Vivaldi browser. VLC if it's not already present and Audacity.

Shot well, simple scan, French spell and grammar checker, Stellarium, Password Gorilla, PCB plus extras, gpp plus extras.

First I remove all traces of snapd (and re-install concerned software with .deb version).

emacs (+tons of melpa packages), synaptic, dbeaver, keepassXC, scid + stockfish, hexchat, simplescan, tor, stellarium, wireshark, openshot, gimp, rosegarden, vlc, xfburn, pidgin, qemu, etc...apache/php/mysql, gufw. This would be a starting point.

Pretty sure it was Ubuntu somewhere around 2003 or so. Did't have a clue so I ended up dual booting along Windows xp on an old Vaio desktop. Never used it full time but I use it about 50% now, with Mac OS as my 2nd choice and Windows well behind. I've settled on Ubuntu Mate and I prefer old Thinkpads, I have several X220, x230, and a 440P.

Generally happy with what is intalled, but being a scientific user:

Synaptic
geany and gedit (if not already installed)
gfortran
gnuplot
lyx (that install also the whole Latex family also, --long--)
python3
numpy
scipy
matplolib
cython
numba (actually I begin by this one it draws most of the python things above)