Someone may have mentioned this, but Syncthing changed my life.

Aside from ones listed here:

System Tools

• WinApps - Run Windows applications seamlessly integrated into your Linux desktop environment, like native including Adobe products.
• Waydroid - Run Android applications in a container on Linux with full hardware access.
• Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.
• AM (AppImage Manager) - Easy AppImage management for installing, updating, and organizing portable applications.
• Starship - Fast, customizable cross-platform shell prompt with Git integration and status indicators.
• InShellisense - IDE-style IntelliSense autocomplete and suggestions for your terminal.
• Tabby - Modern terminal emulator with tabs, split panes, and extensive customization options.
• Zeit - Qt GUI frontend for scheduling tasks using at and crontab utilities.
• KWin Minimize2Tray - KDE extension that allows minimizing windows to the system tray instead of taskbar.
• Flameshot - Feature-rich screenshot tool with built-in annotation and editing capabilities.
• CopyQ - Advanced clipboard manager with searchable history and custom scripting support.
• Safing Portmaster - Free open-source application firewall with per-app network control, DNS-over-TLS, and system-wide ad/tracker blocking.

Productivity Tools

• DSNote - Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation app for note-taking.
• NAPS2 - User-friendly document scanning application with OCR and PDF creation capabilities.
• Morphosis - Simple document converter supporting PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX and more formats.
• Obsidian - Powerful knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph visualization.
• BeeRef - Minimalist reference image viewer designed for artists and designers.

Media & Entertainment

• Popcorn Time - Stream movies and TV shows via torrent with built-in media player.
• Nicotine+ - Modern Soulseek P2P client for sharing and discovering music files.
• XnView - Versatile image viewer, organizer, and converter supporting hundreds of formats.

Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.

I really like units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.

~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in'
	6 ft + 2.8031496 in

GitHub Application Manager (GAM): https://github.com/fmstrat/gam

It’s like apt for installing directly from Github releases. A plug, sure, but I still use it regularly for things like FreeCAD, Cura, OrcaSlicer, and so on.

For me it’s Perl’s rename, which of course cones in a variety of package names depending on the distro you use. In trying to find a link, I landed on this stack exchange answer that gives a great overview of how the tool works and the different packages available on different distros.

I have to bulk rename files every day, and using regex and the other features of Perl’s rename makes it so much easier to do.

Great topic. I’m going to have to investigate some of these suggestions later.

Since my first pick, helix, was already mentioned here and i commented on it, I’ll add gitui. Git can be very overwhelming for me. Gitui arranges frequently used git commands in a sensible, visual layout and makes it easy for me to understand and interact with git.

Every day?

• Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
  • It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
  • It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
  • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
  • It’s stable
  • It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
• Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
• Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
• Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.

I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.

Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/

Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.

gnome-network-displays let’s you cast your screen to a wireless display (Miracast) or to a Chromecast device.

It works with KDE no problem and even under Wayland.

It creates a virtual display that can be organized like any other display: unify with another screen or extend the desktop using your DE’s default method/UI. And then it uses standard screen sharing conventions to send content to that virtual display.

I don’t know what kind of dark arts the developer(s) employed to make this possible, but the end result is simple wireless display in Linux that just works! A MUST for using Linux in a business setting.

Pinta is the main one that comes to mind. I don’t use it every day, far from it, and that’s a part of why I love it. On the rare occasion that I have to do some image editing, I load up Gimp and then proceed to fight against it for at least a whole day to make it do the simplest of things before finally ragequitting. Then I load up Pinta and actually get the task done in either minutes or hours at most.

It’s like old school MS Paint, but better. Simple, intuitive, no huge learning curve, just enough features to get my nonprofessional tasks done. It should be a distro default.

GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.

For example: ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3 encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3. parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2} then copies each FLAC file’s metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the --xapply option).

edit: copytags is https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that’s useful for anyone.

auto-cpufreq to automatic CPU speed & power optimizer to improve battery life for Laptops.

Syncthing for syncing folders and files directly between your devices.

Also whatever software or driver I loaded to make this HP Thunderbolt Docking Station work with Linux.

KDE Connect

• https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I’ve used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I’m sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone’s lockscreen to pause the music.)

I’m starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.

There’s more too I need to explore.

• https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect

(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a ‘device unreachable’ error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)

FreeTube, a desktop client to watch YouTube videos, without an account. Why not use a browser without an account? Well, it has a watch history, favorites and subscriptions as if you had an account - but its all “offline” account, without Google involved (besides watching their video). So it manages an account with subscriptions, without YouTube account. Plus it integrates an ad blocker and SponsorBlock, and has a few more features on its sleeve.

kdotool, a xdotool like program for KDE on Wayland. Just learned about it when setting up another application. But I will use it for independently too.

There are more, but this is what came to my mind right now.

Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I’ve ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.