You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
Fortune. Cowsay.
Helpful answer: vlc, libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, zathura, obs-studio
Real answer: gnome, run-or-raise, foot, fish, tmux, fzf, silver-searcher, neovim, neomutt, vifm
Curious why you would need Gimp and Inkscape? Wouldn’t one of them be enough? Is one of them better suited for certain tasks?
They serve two different purposes - Gimp for image editing, Inkscape for vector graphics.
Oh I see, thanks. I thought you could also edit images with Inkscape. I’m apparently not very well versed in these topics.
You can load bitmap images into Inkscape and manipulate them to a degree, but Gimp is much better at that. You can probably also load vector graphics (svg) into Gimp, but I’d assume they would be converted to bitmaps.
Vector vs bitmap is a good topic to be familiar with for anyone who works with computers, I keep running into professionals who really should know the difference but don’t.
Thanks for the explanation! I agree, this has been very helpful already. Now I go and do some reading on it.
For me personally I install kitty terminal and integrate it with fish asap. Then I waste a bunch of time customizing it to my liking. My preferred text editor is Kate regardless of what DE I’m using and I usually get bleachbit for basic cleanup.
Fish and Kate hell yeah 🤜 🤛
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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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.
People replying - how about telling us why you consider your answer a must-install tool?
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.
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.
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-cliI’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.
guix and/or nix
Both are functional package managers and manage dependency trees better than flatpak IMO (also the package description languages mean you can manipulate the package definitions at install time much easier)
If you can’t find a package in guix/nix then it behooves you to use flatpak
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
only neofetch
I recommend fastfetch nowadays since neofetch is no longer maintained
- 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
Zram