You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
At the very least:
Yazi Eza Kitty Fish Fastfetch Feh Trash-cli Micro Spotify-player Nmcli Polybar Rofi (fuzzel for wayland) Librewolf
Whatever you need to be productive.
➕ 💯
This is the correct answer. 👆
Not one of the other replies (so far) addresses the question to the OP: “What do you want to accomplish with the machine?”.
🤷♂️ 🤦♀️
But OP is asking us. Presumably for the benefit of the community.
If you believe your answer would be more valuable to also include what you are trying to achieve, by all means, include that.
Brilliant.
This is like somebody asking you what you want for breakfast, and you say “Food”.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, observant, or something else. There have been many a meal where I was asked what I wanted to eat and it’s rare that I go beyond the words “surprise me”, knowing full well that the person asking would eat the same as I was offered, making the “surprise”, less of a risk and more of an adventure.
In this case, OP asked a completely unanswerable question to which there was absolutely no reasonable answer, since we know nothing about the person, their interests, their experience, the hardware they have access to, or anything remotely resembling a needs analysis.
So, even my answer, generic and random as it might appear, was based on how I use a computer, namely, to be productive. I’ve been using them for over 40 years, mostly like that, with some sojourns into art and personal expression, not nearly worthy of public scrutiny, but not specifically “productive” as such.
So … what were you attempting to say?
I didn’t interpret the original post as “What would a generic user consider necessary installs?” I interpreted it as “Could you suggest some software that you consider absolutely essential so that I could discover some that I might’ve overlooked?”
CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager. Gimp is great but Pinta is easy for quick, minor image adjustments. System Monitor is an applet that displays system information by double clicking on a taskbar icon. If you use VPNs, the IP Indicator applet shows the country of your public IP or customized icon when matching ISP is found.
Gimp, Oh my ZSH and VS Code.
Flat seal if you are a flatpak gamer. Also gamemode
Portmaster if you want to manually control each network connection. It has nice lists that blocks a lot of trash by default but it can break websites and games.
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Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-O-Matic. Oh, wait, you said “Linux Mint”, not “every single OS, for work, personal, and mobile use”.
I’m going to try to mention things I haven’t seen already written, though I may repeat some of the more important ones to me.
(In no particular order)
Terminal:
- Kitty (Main Terminal)
- Fish (Terminal Prompt)
- Neovim (Code/Text editing)
- Zoxide (a directory changer; once you go to a directory, you can type z and a partial name to go back to it)
- Atuin (a command history lister, can get a key and bring over commands from other systems)
- Midnight Commander (CLI file manager)
- Btop (CLI system monitor)
- Palette (I do a lot of theming in different configs as well as HTML/CSS, so its nice to have something to quick convert hex to RGB).
GUI:
- Timeshift (backup/restore)
- Eddie (for AirVPN)
- novelWriter (my FAVORITE writing tool for my books)
- Floorp (Firefox fork browser)
- Conky Manager 2 (desktop monitoring widgets)
- Rofi (keyboard launcher)
- firewalld (tried this out recently, good firewall)
- Flameshot (ALWAYS; its my favorite screenshot tool)
- MPV (I still get VLC, but opt for MPV most of the time for videos/streaming)
- Speedcrunch (A+ calculator)
- Steam
- Lutris
- Protonup-QT (to inject GE Proton into Steam/Lutris)
- Stremio (a great little streaming tool)
I would like to add that I do use Arch, but I’m fairly sure 99% of these packages, if not all of them, are available for most other distros.
For CLI lovers: Check out Terminal Trove
Edit: I did see that someone mentioned no explanations on the apps, so I tried to put a little blurb on each.
kitty, nvim, fish, zed, mpv, btop, borg. Weird how all the gone ones have short names. Depending on the system, I would add tlp as well.
There’s a lot of letters here, but nobody is explaining what they mean. How do I know what I need? I’m not gonna install everything, or look up every single program to see.
Úoiggugg🍹🧉
neovim, basic development utilities (gcc, make…), zsh, ssh, btop, nvtop, kitty, river, git, cargo, nix, flatpak, ytdlp, ffmpeg, firefox, chromium, python
- Shell: Fish
- Resource monitoring: Btop
- Browser: Librewolf
- Text editor: Vim (unless you do heavy programming then neovim)
- Basic tools: git and wget
- Themeing: GTK customizer
- Terminal: Foot
- Anki
- Beyond Compare
- Discord
- GIMP (Not sure if it’s installed by default on Linux Mint) with PhotoGIMP patch.
- GnuCash
- GParted
- KeePassXC
- KWrite + Kate
- Pinta
- qbittorrent
- Steam
- Telegram
- Thunderbird
- virt-manager
- VLC
- Wine
I believe Firefox is installed by default on Mint, so install uBO.
Transmission.
Veracrypt.
Audacious.
Xournalpp - a fantastic tool for journalling (on X/twitter) your peeing habits.
Tmux - a nice tool for telephoning elon musk
Wezterm - a utility for tracking the term limits of Wez Anderson style presidencies
Cheese - a fantastic tool for ordering dairy products online
OBS - a diagnostic tool for tracking ordinary bowel movements
Ncdu - a great overview tool of Nicolas Cage’s Dark Universe franchise
tree - plants a christmas tree each time its called
datamash - Provides great montages and mashupa of Data’s escapades from Star Trek
