You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
Fortune. Cowsay.
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.
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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.
LocalSend for quick local network file sharing from my phone that just werks. I prefer it over kde connect because the latter uses lots of random ports that kinda bloat my firewall whitelist. I know there is an alternative called warpinator, but I don’t see a reason to change my preferences for now.
Whatever you need to be productive.
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?”
➕ 💯
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.
I believe Firefox is installed by default on Mint, so install uBO.
Transmission.
Veracrypt.
Audacious.
I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.
Timeshift is number 1
Also it’s recommended to not reinstall a bunch of stuff and just install the app when you needed it that’s the power of Linux. Unless you just want to learn the software then disregard
I found Timeshift to be a disappointment. I tested it as I was setting my system up.
- Install Linux Mint, obviously.
- Install most main software I want.
- Do a Timeshift backup.
- Install more software I might want to try eventually.
- Restore the Timeshift backup.
Result: The system still thought all the extra software packages were installed, but none of them actually worked. Like, if Timeshift is gonna uninstall packages that weren’t present in the last backup, shouldn’t it also unregister those packages as well?
To fix all that crap, I had to force reinstall all packages, which takes about as long as a full OS reinstall, but I was already happy with the rest of the configuration, so I ran…
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'Had similar experience with snapshots. Restore to the last working version just to find the same issue that’s been bothering me.
Then went back to the classic approach with 👻 images and Rescuezilla.
With NVME drive, it takes 7min to backup 60Gb, and 3min to restore it.
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
mpv
pdftk
yt-dlp- Kate
- Yakuake
- Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium
- LibreOffice (I use Calc a lot)
- Kate
- Ocular
- DoH-client
- htop
- ncdu
- Windscribe
- virt-manager
… and more I can’t remember right now, because it’s too early in the morning.
EDIT:
- nano
- mc (midnight commander)
I keep a list on my backup partition:
$ cat packages.list appimagelauncher base-devel aws-cli aws-session-manager-plugin bat bob direnv discord docker-compose dog dotnet-sdk erdtree eza fastfetch github-cli httpie k9s krita kubectx lazygit mariadb-clients megacmd minikube mpd mtr mumble nvtop obs-studio ollama-rocm qalculate-gtk restic siege speedtest-cli steam terraform tig timeshift-autosnap tree-sitter virt-manager virt-viewer yazi yq ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd ttf-liberation ttf-meslo-nerd-font-powerlevel10k ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols ttf-nerd-fonts-symbols-common ttf-roboto wine wine-gecko wine-mono winetricks playerctl php php-gd php-sodium streamdeck-ui speedtest-cli zoxide zsh ripgrep fd dry-bin kitty xdotool tmux tmux-plugin-manager sublime-text-4 trash-cliIf you use the terminal and have a tendency to fat finger commands, I would recommend “The Fuck”.
It always makes me smile to type fuck into the terminal. 🙂
neovim, basic development utilities (gcc, make…), zsh, ssh, btop, nvtop, kitty, river, git, cargo, nix, flatpak, ytdlp, ffmpeg, firefox, chromium, python
Nice list. fzf?
And then mpv and im nearly done.
