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Ask HN: What are your favorite Linux applications?

• folkhack 7y ago
  OS: Debian 10 + XFCE Terminal: highly-customized Terminator bound to F1 + XFCE Terminal for "floating" instances Text/Programming: Sublime Text, Intelij IDE, nano (yeah yeah bring your hate vim users - I know it well and I'm not a fan), Meld Markdown/docs: Typora (TRY THIS OUT IT'S AMAZING.) Browsing: Chrome, Chromium, FF, Brave (in that order); Postman for API work, Charles Proxy for reverse-engineering work Communication: Hangups (CLI), Discord Containers/Virtualization: Docker, VMWare Workstation (I run a full Win10 LTSB underneath with all quick-access to my Adobe Creative Suite, saves time not having to switch to the MBP) Transfer: Qbittorrent, Filezilla Misc: Remmina for RDP, Kazam for screen recording, pgAdmin4 for working with my Postgres DBs, ncspot (CLI) for Spotify client; KeePass2 for password management in a file-based DB; GParted for partitioning Ninja edit: Sublime Merge looks amazing... I will be trying this out ASAP.
  • physicles 7y ago
    I’ve been using Typora for about three years. One of my favorite pieces of software for sure.
    • sebelk 7y ago
      I prefer Mark Text because is powerful and free as in freedom :)
  • nickthemagicman 7y ago
    Haha, I get puzzled faces when I use nano too, but to quickly edit a file, it's actually less keystrokes than VIM. It's just not as l33T.
  • 8bitsrule 7y ago
    Huh. I've never run into a 'Linux app' that couldn't be authenticated at install-time. Different.
  • SanderSantema 7y ago
    As an open-source alternative to typora I can suggest Marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext which I believe is on par with typora features. Don't be alarmed by the fact that it's electron, it's pretty fast either way. And as far as I know typora is electron based too.
    • slipwalker 7y ago
      +1 for mark-text
  • croo 7y ago
    Try out Dbeaver instead of pgAdmin for database administration. It's a much, much better tool.
• Aperocky 7y ago
  For all cli apps, the importance of cli itself can't be understated. While there are only a few cli programs available to ALL unix users (grep/ps/awk/sed/xargs/etc), the value of the pipe are one of the defining features of CLI that amplify any program made to work in CLI. A command I often run: `ps aex | grep $common_denominator | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill` to deal with multiprocess testing runs demonstrate this well. The pipe character is what uniquely enabled unix shells to be the great software it is that GUI have almost no real way to replicate.
  • kbr2000 7y ago
    As Awk is a pattern-matching language, you can simplify it to something like this: ps aux |awk '/what/ {print "kill " $2}' This will give you a list of kill commands you can review, before piping to |sh to shake off those processes :) And when what you try to do sequentially might take too long, you can consider throwing GNU Parallel [1] in the pipemix! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_parallel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_parallel
  • jolmg 7y ago
    > ps aex | grep $common_denominator | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill That looks pretty equivalent to: pkill -f $common_denominator I suppose this is less portable, though.
• ohiovr 7y ago
  Blender 2.8 is a work of art. ffmpeg is terrific. Pretty happy with cinnamon desktop.
• jasoneckert 7y ago
  If I had to choose one application as my favorite, it'd have to be xbill. I can't explain why. And I'm not sure I'd want to.
• shortoncash 7y ago
  gcc
• brudgers 7y ago
  Darktable.
• weishigoname 7y ago
  I think packages management tools, like apt, dpkg, yum, dnf, are pretty useful.
• weitzj 7y ago
  Clipboard Manager: copyq Also for Windows and Mac. Gives you great sanity for all the clipboards, clipboard history. Fuzzy search in clipboard history Has a GUI and CLI
• inkstain 7y ago
  Some of my favorites already spoken for: but +1 for SublimeText with SublimeMerge and Typora. Also cannot do without SecureCRT and SecureFX
• ajflores1604 7y ago
  KDE connect
• usr1106 7y ago
  I have used emacs since before Linux and window systems existed. Emacs is a small windows manager like it is nearly everything else. Nowadays I only use a tiny fraction of its functionality, because I do run a window manager and a web browser. Still emacs is one of the first programs I install on every system. On embedded systems where emacs is not feasible I try to get remote editing via TRAMP https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode working.
  • dTal 7y ago
    Does TRAMP mode offer any advantages to sshfs?
    • snackematician 7y ago
      - 1 less step (just open the remote file directly, rather than running "sshfs" and then opening the file) - If you execute shell commands from emacs -- these will be executed on the remote machine when editing thru tramp - Tramp is not limited to ssh, but also allows emacs to access files in docker containers, as different users (e.g. root), in S3/GDrive/etc via the rclone backend, etc.
• usr1106 7y ago
  Text based diff is fine for basic use cases. When the results are too confusing to grasp what really has changed or I want 3-way diff meld can do wonders. Unfortunately it does not scale well and chokes on huge files (like Yocto build logs). Sometimes I use kdiff3. Wasn't there a 3rd one? Obviously I haven't used it for a long time, because I can't remeber it now.
• ddtaylor 7y ago
  Krita and Kdenlive are both great.
• teddyc 7y ago
  Trying to name some more obscure ones that I love. Tizonia is a CLI music player that can play music from your Google Music library. I like it bc I don't have to use a browser. Pianobar is a CLI client for Pandora, but I can run this on a Mac too so not sure if it counts. Same no browser required benefit. I love CLI music players bc they help you extend battery life vs browser based. Gpaste is a clipboard manager. It even stores images copied to the clipboard. Not sure if it counts but when I do a rectangle select screenshot in Ubuntu, it puts it in the clipboard (instead of putting a file on the desktop like Mac does) and then I can just paste it in the Jira ticket / GitHub pull request / Slack / etc. Probably a bit more that deserve mention that I am not considering right now.
  • mrtcve 7y ago
    Image output destination is configurable on Mac. Cmd + Shift + 5, then it's under options in the bar. I don't recall all the options but it's at least file/clipboard.
    • SanderSantema 7y ago
      ⌘⇧5 (CMD + Shift + 5) doesn't do anything on my macOS 10.13.6 system, ⌘⇧⌃4 (CMD + Shift + Ctrl + 4) is the default shortcut to take a rectangle screenshot and store it in the clipboard.
      • runjake 7y ago
        ⌘⇧5 was introduced back in 10.14.0 Mojave.
  • SanderSantema 7y ago
    Taking a rectangle select screenshot using ⌘⇧⌃4 (CMD + Shift + Ctrl + 4) will put the screenshot in your clipboard on macOS
• teddyc 7y ago
  Docker runs native. You get instant file sync. On Mac my options are dinghy or docker-sync, both of which drive me insane by either being too slow (former) or not syncing files fast enough or good enough (latter). This is probably the number one reason that I love Linux for development these days.
• raghava 7y ago
  bat (just a better cat) nl pigz parallel bc paste ministat httpie nc GUI: stellarium, conky There are definitely more. These are what I could remember now.
• sharma_pradeep 7y ago
  terminal
• SanderSantema 7y ago
  There are quite a lot of KDE apps which aren't that well known which together cover a large swathe of desktop usage and are quite nice. Most of them are here: https://kde.org/applications/ https://kde.org/applications/
• yellow_lead 7y ago
  calibre is a great app for reading EPUB, PDF, etc
• snacksnack 7y ago
  Apps from KDE are great. Dolphin is awesome.
• sunstone 7y ago
  Gnumeric
• manaskarekar 7y ago
  Baobab: Disk usage Analyzer https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Baobab https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Baobab Atril: Pdf Viewer, forked from Evince from the Gnome 2 days IIRC. Base 16 Colors: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16 https://github.com/chriskempson/base16 Unetbootin/TuxBoot: Creating bootable drives. gnome-do: Alfred/Spotlight (MacOS) like quicklauncher. Used to use this but now I've just defaulted to using Alt+F2 (remapped to Super + Space keys) to launch apps. https://do.cooperteam.net https://do.cooperteam.net Zim : "A desktop wiki" https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org
• dafsdfsd 7y ago
  flameshot for screenshots - https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot almost everything is perfect.
  • vanous 7y ago
    Amazing, thank you!
• vanous 7y ago
  Freecad and Meshlab for 3D editing. KeepassXC for password management. Gnome Shell extensions: - KdeConnect (phone sync/remote access) - Argos (script based utilities for top bar)
• nextos 7y ago
  The only 3 GUI applications I use regularly are Emacs, Firefox and XTerm (which, like Emacs, has amazingly low latency). All via a tiling window manager (StumpWM). I also use Signal Desktop, which is a rather plain Electron app. For some imaging tasks, GIMP and Inkscape are great. GIMP gave birth to GTK, one of the two major Linux GUI toolkits. Since the desktop ecosystem is very fragmented, I don't think there are any great GUI applications in Linux. On Macs, things are declining now too. A lot of the GUI innovation is happening on mobile. In Linux, niceties come from CLI and whole OS, like Nix.
• PhilippGille 7y ago
  SmartGit It wasn't mentioned here yet, and having used GitEye on Linux before and SourceTree on Windows, and seeing coworkers use GitKraken, I think SmartGit is by far the best Git GUI client of them. I know the Git CLI is popular, but most people I've seen begin to struggle with everything beyond a simple pull and push. With a Git GUI client things like squashing commits, interactive rebases, 3-way merges etc. are discoverable and intuitive. No reading of the documentation required.
• billconan 7y ago
  QtCreator
• mackrevinack 7y ago
  syncthing, sublime text and marktext would be my favourites, but you can get them on every other platform so I don't really think of them as Linux apps some of my fav linux only apps would lutris for managing your steam and gog library from a single gui neofetch is a nice way to get a fancy readout of your system specs https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch also just reading about ansible the last few days and i can see that becoming an instant fav for quickly setting up my computers. if I can get my head around it that is
• virtualmic 7y ago
  ranger [1] is not mentioned yet. I had never used a console based file manager prior to starting using this 3 months back and I have stopped using Dolphin (I am on KDE) now. [1] https://ranger.github.io/ https://ranger.github.io/
• jamesponddotco 7y ago
  GNOME Browser offers an extraordinary browsing experience, and most people seem to ignore it — probably because it lacks extension support, which I don't really care about. Being part of the GNOME project is also follows the GNOME design and maintain consistency with the rest of the desktop environment — a must for me. Aside from that, I mostly like applications that follow the GNOME HIG, like GNOME Terminal, Geary, Polari, and Fractal. My favorite text editor after vim is still Gedit, and it is a shame I can't use it on macOS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • flukus 7y ago
    Two things that keep me away from gnome browser. 1. The tab handling is awful, would be great if they added vertical tab support. 2. Like firefox, it doesn't play with dark desktop themes, you end up with text areas with black text on a black background.
• gitgud 7y ago
  Shutter is my favourite screen shot tool, quick selection of content and easy mark-up Kazzam is a simple (tiny) screen capture app, which does one thing and does it well.
• gradschool 7y ago
  sox - girlfriend teaches a dance class and needed a slower version of some of the music; she was impressed as all get-out that sox could slow the tempo without lowering the pitch (using fancy Fourier math)
• sebelk 7y ago
  vim vim and lastly vim
• sebelk 7y ago
  VNote an excelent app to taking notes