For me, it’s hands down Flameshot. The best screenshot tool in the world - I’ve got it hooked up to my PrtScrn
key for super easy screenshots.
I also love Kwrite as a Notepad++ alternative, and KolourPaint as a MSPaint alternative
The most popular that I use are:
-
- -Firefox
-
- -Librewolf
-
- -Jellyfin (i was astonished that this piece of software wasn’t mentioned before)
-
- -SMPlayer (imho the best front end for MPV)
-
- -
shutdown
command (i use it daily)
- -
-
- -Lutris
-
- -Wine
-
- -Piper (to manage keybings on the mouse with a gui) (is also the only one that I found that works with my G502, if you have an alternative please tell me, i want to check it out)
-
- -ckb-next (for managing leds and keybindings for my keyboard)
-
- -openRGB
Honorable mention: Molly (the FOSS version, a privacy focused client for Signal)
Edit: Almost forgot about QEMU+kvm for virtualization
-
Cant go without kdeconnect anymore
If you enjoy KWrite & KolourPaint, give Spectacle a go for screenshots. Works amazing on my end and it’s built into most KDE OS spins along with KWrite and Kolour. While I know the name Flameshot, I’ve never actually needed it as Spectacle is solid!
Syncthing is one of the most useful pieces of software I’ve ever used. It just works, and it works well.
Im dipping my toes in self hosting and syncthing is just :chefs kiss:. I use it only with Obsidian, Signal & Aegis so far (and will sync my configs as well on linux), and the safety net it gives is just awesome.
This 💯. Syncthing is the holy grail of sync apps. Nothing else I’ve used comes close.
Konsole
-
Amberol is probably one of the biggest hidden gems in GNOME apps. It’s a simple easy music player whose background color changes based on the song’s artwork.
-
Parabolic is another GNOME app for downloading videos from youtube using yt-dlp. It’s super easy to use and even allows for multiple concurrent downloads.
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mpv is one of those rare moments where using a proprietary implementation is objectively worse. Must install on any personal computer/mobile device.
I use Lollypop for music, well in reality i just use MPV for that too lol but i downloaded that “just in case”
Mpv is a good engine, but I prefer something like smplayer+mpv for all the extra functionality. I also like that VLC has tons of features, like full file/codec info and stats. I know there are other ways to get that info, but it’s very easy in vlc.
Excuse my silly question, but what does mpv do that vlc doesn’t?
Both are comparable in terms of video playback (both use hardware acceleration and ffmpeg) but mpv’s appeal is that it’s ultimately a minimal (as in lack of apparent GUI) command line tool rather than a fully featured application like VLC. I like mpv because of it’s non-features which is why it’s the backend for a lot of Desktop environment video players.
If you want minimalism I advise you to use a tiling window manager instead of Gnome. If you want Wayland absolutely, use Hyprland.
I use POP!_OS right now so I’m waiting for System76 to release their
cosmic-epoch
to have the definitive non-GNOME/KDE wayland desktop environment.
MPV has automatic native wayland support, VLC doesn’t (yet, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player#Wayland_support)
I haven’t found any other large differences in functionality when it comes to simply playing video (only thing I use either one for).
MPV handles decoding much better than VLC, in my experience trying to watch fansubs
VLC is also less accurate to the source than mpv is.
See the notice on this wiki that contains some comparisons.
I don’t know the full details but this is a quote I have seen from reddit about VLC:
- uses wrong matrix for RGB conversion (results in wrong colors)
- uses point upscaling for chroma planes
- introduces strong banding
- wrong chroma location (MPEG-1 for everything)
- Old subtitle renderer that in more Typesetting heavy situation will say fuck you
- all the other bugs (including some that haven’t been fixed in years) make it equally unsuitable media player.
It is probably possible to get things in order by digging into the settings in VLC, but mpv prioritizes accuracy by default.
For me I got mad at VLC cause it was opening video track in separate window for some reason.
I have MPV setup to play any YouTube link when I press ctrl cmd m with a YouTube video url in my clipboard.
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For those who don’t know: Celluloid is a GTK4 frontend for MPV that mostly just makes it look neater.
How does Amberol hold up with libraries in the high thousands? So many nice looking music played keep struggling with my music folders.
Really makes me miss Winamp sometimes.
Amberol does hold up really well with high threshold music folders in my experience. I had a 24+ hours worth of music that loaded successfully in less than a minute.
Amberol has a “restore playlist” feature which loads your last playlist quickly.
Why not Audacious if you want something like Winamp?
-
Cinnamon is hands down my favourite DE. I always see people talking about GNOME and KDE, to me Cinnamon is the best of both worlds. Strongly recommend it with the Orchis GTK theme, which is made for GNOME but works fine on Cinnamon.
My favourite graphical app in the more traditional sense is Firefox. If CLI apps are allowed, I’m a big fan of GNU Nano, a CLI-based minimalistic editor, basically Emacs Lite.
I don’t see how nano is anything like Emacs… Though if you like nano you might also like micro.
I’ll definitely give it a try, thanks! I tend to categorise all CLI editors in my head as either Emacs-like or Vim-like, based mostly on keyboard shortcuts. Nano’s shortcuts look more like Emacs than like Vim, so, Emacs Lite.
Firefox with tree style tabs, with the user CSS that removes tabs and combines bookmarks bar into the title bar.
Away from computer right now but I’ll take a screenshot in an hour or so.
And Emacs. :)
Back at my computer now!
OK, here’s my screenshot:
So, you can see the tree style tabs (TST) in the sidebar area on the left. I’m using the “photon” theme for TST. with another extension for TST called TST Colored Tabs. If you middle-button-click a link, it’s opened in a new tab like usual, but TST also assigns it as a child tab of the page you were viewing. It’s incredibly useful for keeping track of where you are and what you’re doing. Especially in my DevOps job, I have dozens of tabs open and chaos would reign supreme if I used top-of-window tabs like standard. You can see the bookmarks toolbar has been dragged up into the title bar using the customize toolbar window accessed by right clicking on the title bar.
To accomplish this you need to enable a setting in about:config called
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
, set that to true. Then exit Firefox.Then create a directory called
chrome
in your profile directory, which on Linux is in~/.mozilla/firefox/PROFILENAME/
, which you can get from theabout:profiles
page. Inside thechrome
directory, you create a file calleduserChrome.css
and add this stuff to it:#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items { opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; } #main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } #sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header { display: none; } /* Display the status bar in Firefox Quantum (version 61+) permanently at the bottom of the browser window. Code below works best for the Dark Firefox theme and is based on: https://github.com/MatMoul/firefox-gui-chrome-css/blob/master/chrome/userChrome.css This userChrome.css file was last modified on: 28-Jun-2018. Tested to work with Firefox 61 on Windows. Related blog post: http://www.optimiced.com/en/?p=1727 */ #browser-bottombox { height: 20px; border-top: solid 1px #505050; } .browserContainer>#statuspanel { left: 4px !important; bottom: 0px; transition-duration: 0s !important; transition-delay: 0s !important; } .browserContainer>#statuspanel>#statuspanel-inner>#statuspanel-label { margin-left: 0px !important; border: none !important; padding: 0px !important; color: #EEE !important; background: #333 !important; } window[inFullscreen="true"] #browser-bottombox { display: none !important; } window[inFullscreen="true"] .browserContainer>#statuspanel[type="overLink"] #statuspanel-label { display: none !important; } /* Begin section to move system UI buttons to the same UI bar/box as the addressbar */ /* Adding empty space for buttons */ #nav-bar { margin-right:100px; } /* For dragging whole window by mouse*/ #titlebar { appearance: none !important; height: 0px; } /* Fix for main menu calling by Alt button THIS BREAKS THE UI!! */ /* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar { margin-top: 10px; } */ /* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */ #TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container { display: block; position: absolute; top: 5px; right: 1px; }
And there you go! TST has more tips and configuration details in its Github project: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab and https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss
emacs
withdoom
FTW.Looking forward to learning how to get tree tabs in FF.
I updated my original comment above yours. I hope my comments/instructions are understandable, please let me know if I wasn’t clear on anything!
Definitely the clipboard manager. On kde, it’s klipper. This is actually such an underrated piece of software that I can’t live without. Windows has one too, but they added their’s a little after all the linux desktop environments got one by default.
If based on the thing I used most then it has to be Firefox!
If you want something more trivial but personal,
openttd
- the best game ever. :)Have you tried kdenlive? If so, how would you say they compare?
Yeah but i prefer ShotCut because of its simplicity and speed.
I’ve used both and I prefer kdenlive
By far it’s Kate, even though I’m now a neovim user. It’s just a great IDE.
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I still can’t believe Discord operates in the 2015 GNU/Linux mindset of handing the user a DEB package and telling them to f off. But then again it labels its chatrooms “servers” in the client so what do I know.
I believe the linux Deb is still “unofficial”
I’m not gonna mention the basics like Kate. They’re great but nothing new.
My 2 hidden gems that I use on a daily basis are:
Wow, I’ve never seen QOwnNotes before! It looks appealing. I’ll have to check it out