Hello everyone,,,
I searched this sub and I saw a post that was about a year and figured maybe it is appropriate to get a more current consensus on the topic.

Used Linux way back when. Was my main OS for a period of time. Then I switched back to Windows. However, I've recently began using Linux again as my daily driver OS.

What do you consider must have applications? Aside from the apps that come w/ the distro I use, I've installed Anacona, VS Code, Atom, and Sublime on my box software.

What software do you download/install immediately after setting up your workstation?

My software requirements are pretty basic. I always make sure Geany, GCC, Gimp, LibreOffice, and Falkon are installed. Like a lot of people I use a lot of other software but not the same ones on on every computer.

VLC, Kaffeine (for digital TV, since I can't be bothered learning how to configure MythTV), mediainfo, ffmpeg, Audacity, gcc (and related things like make, etc, since I am/was trying to learn C), ISO Master and probably others that I can't currently remember...

Nothing wrong with polling people, however I feel it is the same about nearly any topic in the world. What ---- do you recommend? I feel you can get numerous responses.

You've said you're using Linux as part of your everyday environment, and you've noted some number of applications which you've installed. #1 is whether or not you're actually using them. #2 is what everyday things do you need from your desktop? And from there, have you found these things, or are there specific applications which you'd like to know the Linux alternatives?

For my answer, I actually rarely install new applications, I use what the desktop distribution provides. While I use Linux everyday, I also have a Windows boot which I use all the time because the tools we use at work are for that OS, and I've also found that as good as the Libre-, or Open- Office variations or other Word, Excel options there are for Linux, I invariably have compatibility issues with viewing or editing and passing along documents to those using the Microsoft Office programs. Thus I stay within that environment. A solution which has helped greatly is that we have several web portals that help us to edit pages and documents online, therefore I'm less using the specific Microsoft independent document tools, and can use Linux more readily.

Unless you get something very small like Slackware, any distro should give you a browser, email client, office suite, text editor, media player, pdf-viewer, and probably a graphics editor. I add accounting software and a font editor, some-one else might want a video editor or an ide for their favourite programming language.

I thought over the applications I use almost daily and came up with this list: Firefox, Sylpheed or Claws Mail, Pan, the GIMP, an RSS aggregator, vim, a GUI text editor (I prefer Kate), a GUI file manager (I prefer Dolphin), VLC, Kolourpaint, a podcatcher (I use podget).

A slight quibble. A full Slackware install is not small. The 14.2 *.iso is 2.77 GB.

On a basic command line set up, I would ensure that I have at least mc & mpg123.

(They nearly always have vi, so editing is taken care of, but having some music just makes the day go more pleasantly.)


As a mainline O/S, I would require a good web browser, video player, music player, & PySolFC &/or at least xpat2.

On the server, it would be tmux, OpenSSH, and vi, plus maybe Emacs and a few activity-specific utilities depending on the situation.

On the desktop it is Thunderbird, Firefox or Chromium, Blink or Jitsi, Clementine, VLC, and various terminals.

I do not "consider" - these are just apps that I would install very soon, with almost 100% certainty, if I had to re-install my desktop from scratch (ignoring obvious things like a display server or a shell):

mpv
firefox
geany
urxvt
gimp
geeqie
dmenu
dunst

And the Terminus font.

And if the windowmanager was openbox again, also obmenu-generator.

And I'm probably forgetting half a dozen super essential things.

I knew some-one would say that! There's certainly a lot there, but when I looked it seemed to be a mixture of providing every library you might ever need and providing things which I couldn't imagine needing. Also, when I said "small" I was talking about the repository. That iso is the repository! Even CentOS needs 2 DVDs and heaven knows how many would be needed for the Debian repository. I consider that any distro that doesn't have a professional-quality office suite is inadequate, but that's me. As I said, there cannot be a must-have list which applies to everyone.

Firefox, chromium, thunderbird, clementine, kdiff3, kate, ksudoku, smplayer + mpv (I hate the mpv ui without smplayer), konsole, krename, ark, glabels, remmina, pinta, spectacle. That's the ones I can't survive without.

Konsole (if not available as standard) and thunderbird (webmail is terrible).

Absolute essentials for me on my desktop.

Chromium, handbrake makemkv, asunder, libreoffice, rhythmbox, sigil, playonlinux, kmymoney. And a few other smaller ones. I really only do basic things... rip movies and music, write documents occasionally, and do my banking registers on it.

Server / HTPC

Kodi, openbox, bind9, isc-dhcp-server, apt-cacher-ng, transmission-cli/daemon/common, mythtv-backend, mariadb-server, openjdk for 2 minecraft servers, ltsp-server. A few other smaller miscellaneous ones as well.

Software that I always install after a fresh distro install are:


Firefox - it comes pre-installed with my "distro" KDE Neon
LibreOffice
VLC - this, too, comes with the distro
Amarok and Clementine
Audacity
digiKam
XNViewMP
GIMP
Krita

qBittorrent
RedShift


BTW, what distro you are on now?