I made it to Linux! What is your must-have FOSS or Free Software for linux?
Thank you so much, comrades! I am feeling pretty comfortable with linux mint, and now would like some suggestions for some absolutely necessary FOSS or free license software for the OS. So far I have the standard, Firefox, ThunderBird, LibreOffice, yada yada. Thank you again to everyone on the linux comm!
Here's some creative software that replace the functionalities of Adobe software & more.
photo editing: GIMP
vector images: Inkscape
drawing/painting: Krita (GIMP also fine for this)
video editing: kdenlive
3d modelling, animating, etc.: Blender
audio editing: Tenacity (Audacity fork made after the buyout without telemetry)
DAW: LMMS
media player: VLC or mpv
if there's any other specific software you're looking for a FOSS alternative to, don't hesitate to ask. You always have more options on Linux than you'd think.
Welcome! Some of my must-have FOSS software for GNU/Linux are:
ONLYOFFICE: Similar functionality to that of MS Office, but free and open-source, very nice compatibility with .docx documents and all the excel formulas I use are still there.
Boxes: If you like or need virtual machines, Boxes is one of the best FOSS solutions out there, I have made Windows, BSD and Linux virtual machines using Boxes and they work flawlessly, and the drag-drop feature to send files from the host to the guest machines is absolutely nice.
Konversation: In my opinion the best graphical IRC client, with HexChat also worth noting.
Kdenlive: I have used many video editors in my life, both FOSS and proprietary, but Kdenlive is the one who made me stay. I have even remastered old 80s Betamax videos using only Kdenlive.
TeXstudio: If you like LaTeX, this editor is absolutely wonderful and it works out of the box.
Prism Launcher: If you like Minecraft, this is the only launcher that actually worked on my Fedora installation, and it's so easy to install mods, resource packs, shaders, etc. that I already consider it to be the best FOSS launcher for both premium and non-premium instances.
HandBrake: I just love this open-source video transcoder so much.
fre:ac: I have used this FOSS audio encoder since I was a kid when I wanted to convert mp3 music to a format that my DSi could read. Nowadays I still use it to convert from and to any type of audio and it just never fails.
RaccoonLock: A modern-looking and private password manager that is wonderful if you just want to store your passwords locally in your PC and you do not care about syncing them with other devices (although such feature is partially possible through the creation of backups).
It's also worth mentioning other FOSS software like VLC, VS Code (though it's not entirely FOSS, with Codium being an actual FOSS version), OBS Studio, GParted, PDF Mix Tool and FreeTube. Welcome to the GNU/Linux world! I hope you enjoy it and you find these utilities useful :).
Another nice-to-have is KDE Connect, it connects your desktop with your phone to sync notifications, send files, control media playback, use as remote input, share clipboard, send commands, and more
I personally recommend LibreWolf over Firefox. It is a fork of Firefox, but it includes some additional settings for better privacy.
Flameshot is a pretty useful screenshot tool that functions similar to the Snip tool on Windows.
If you're going to be installing apps via Flatpak, I recently learned of an app called Warehouse that allows you to view all the Flatpak apps you installed, the user data associated with each app, and their file location.
If you want another option for LibreOffice, you can try OnlyOffice, but I personally prefer LibreOffice.
If you're looking for a text editor that's like Notepad++, I recommend checking out NotepadQQ.
Finally, if you want a notebook app similar to Microsoft OneNote, I'd like to recommend Joplin.
For Flatpak apps, along with Warehouse, Flatseal allows you to view and edit permissions for each app, which is not only useful but sometimes mandatory when an app has misconfigured permissions
Logseq is a pretty nice FOSS alternative to Obsidian I came across recently.
Tmux is absolutely necessary for any terminal work.
Wezterm is my favorite terminal emulator because you can easily disable all of the shortcuts except very few you want (tmux handles most of terminal stuff for me).
Some new alternatives to old command line utilities:
bat is cat but 1000 times better. I love it so much!
fun fact
I also recently learned that it's safer, because you can have a file that has some bad command, then the backspace character several times, and cat doesn't display the characters "deleted" by the backspaces (but it still executes).
Bat doesn't do that.
I use zoxide plus fzf which ends looking like this.
My default go-to for a better cd was teleport when I still was on bash. The tp command can be aliased to cd. I don't think it will run on other shells though.
Personally, instead of Tmux, I'd recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it's somewhat better.
I know about Zellij, but in its current state, I think it doesn't make sense for me to switch.
I really lobe my Tmux setup, and I don't think I would be able to replicate it on Zellij, mainly because of Tmux plugins I use. I also don't think that Zellij currently has any advantages over Tmux except for better default config and user friendliness that I don't need.
I'm looking forward to the Zellij ecosystem getting better tho. Some day, I will probably make the switch. The WASM tabs feature looks extremely promising!
KiCAD for PCB design.
PulseView for USB logic analyzers.
DSRemote for remote control of Rigol oscilloscopes.
FreeCAD for 3D CAD.
SDR++ and SDRangel for SDR.
Fldigi, wsjtx & QSSTV for ham radio digital modes.
Blender: If you're interested in 3D modeling or Animation
Inkscape: If you have any need for a vector graphics program thats a bit like Adobe Illustrator
OBS: If you need to do any screen recording or livestreaming
Haruna Video Player: It plays videos and can also play youtube videos if you paste in a link. (This also pulls in yt-dlp as a dependency, which allows you to download youtube videos and the like from a terminal)
btop: A nice looking system resource monitor that runs in a terminal
For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent Distrobox.
You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.
for a bit more context, ncdu is a Disk Usage analyzer that runs in the terminal. If you've ever used WizTree on windows, its kinda like that. Really useful to see whats taking up space on your disk
Welcome!
As for the basics:
Bleachbit (system cleaner)
Flatseal (Flatpak permission managed)
Elisa (music player)
GTKHash (GUI way to verify checksums)
FreeTube (YouTube front end)
Okular (PDF viewer & editor)