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I do my development work and run most of my agency (with multiple employees) with Linux. For some of the business things that most people don't assume Linux can
by rietta 6y ago
I do my development work and run most of my agency (with multiple employees) with Linux. For some of the business things that most people don't assume Linux can do, I use:
1. Xournal to annotate PDFs (aka sign contracts without printing them and scanning them back).
2. LibreOffice of course for most document related work
3. OBS Studio for recording webcam videos along with screen sharing
4. Audacity for audio editing (heck, I used this even when I was on Mac OS X)
5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now
6. pdfsandwich and Tesseract OCR for OCR/turning PDFs into searchable files
7. Chrome/Firefox are both first class and run all the modern day web application stuff
8. Tons and tons and tons of command line stuff that Linux is well known for
9. QEMU/KVM for hosting arbitrary virtual machines with almost native performance
10. GnuCash for double entry accounting for personal and volunteer society finances. I used GnuCash for a while to run the S Corp accounting when we were on Freshbooks and Harvest, but we've since graduated to QuickBooks Online for better invoicing and CPA office professional services support.
11. GIMP for photo editing
12. Inkscape for messing around with vector graphics
Once you get past locating the tools to do your job. Linux has everything.
- duhminick 6y agoCould try out Blender for your video editing. It also appears that DaVinci Resolve has support for Linux.
- rietta 6y agoI had totally forgotten about Blender since I never really understood 3D animation. But great idea. Thanks for both suggestions.
- schaefer 6y agoDoes anyone know of some modern blender tutorials aimed specifically at video editing? if possible, including capturing footage form the screen (screen casts).
- atsider 6y agoThis us a great addon I discovered recently, but nevertheless they have an introductory video about the Blender editor: https://github.com/GDQuest/blender-power-sequencer/blob/1.5.0/README.md https://github.com/GDQuest/blender-power-sequencer/blob/1.5....
- LilBytes 6y agoI'm showing my bias but my good friend Andrew runs Blender Guru on YouTube. Admittedly he covers everything from beginner to advanced so I don't know where your skill level sits, but Andrew has a lot of content.
- ubercow13 6y agoDaVinci Resolve has pretty unfortunate restrictions on what graphics card drivers you can use on Linux https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DaVinci_Resolve https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DaVinci_Resolve
- rietta 6y agoBrilliant! I found this as well https://www.fosslinux.com/24381/how-to-install-davinci-resolve-on-ubuntu.htm https://www.fosslinux.com/24381/how-to-install-davinci-resol....
- mirciulica 6y agoGreat list! > 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now Have you tried Kdenlive lately?
- qu83rt 6y agoI'd be using LaTeX for professional looking documents.
- JadeNB 6y agoLaTeX is great for professional-looking typesetting, and it has the power to do just about any layout tricks you want, but, in practice, you'll be fighting an uphill battle if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for. (I say this as a professional mathematician, who lives his life in LaTeX. It's fantastic for writing math, and trusting that all the kerning etc. will be handled properly. However, when I want any formatting tricks, even after 25 years I still have to turn to my local TeX guru, who more often than not says "you don't really want to do that with TeX.")
- yesenadam 6y agoNot sure what formatting tricks you mean, but that doesn't seem quite fair. When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer! And it's easy to make your own commands when existing ones don't do the job.
- maccard 6y agoThe canonical one is forcing image placements. Sure you can Google and get a result, but all of them are prefixed with "if you _realy_ wany to do this here's my preferred workaround, but you should let Tex do the type setting".
- JadeNB 6y ago> When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer! Yes, exactly! As I said: > if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for. There's an incredible package library out there, rivalling CPAN, and I love TeX and won't speak against it; but, if you try to step outside the package library (or even if you try to compose packages in sensible-seeming ways), as is very easy to do if you try to view TeX as a general-purpose typesetter, it rapidly becomes clear that there's a lot of magic going on that those packages hide away (more or less neatly, depending on their maturity), and that is hard to reproduce on your own, or add to.
- bavell 6y agoI'm in a very similar position and have had much the same positive experience you've had. I use most of the tools you listed plus a few others like Gitkraken (git gui), Blender (3d effects, logo, video overlays) and ffmpeg (occasional video optimization or editing).
- gitgud 6y ago1. "Xournal" is amazing, small install footprint, simple interface and can do everything you need with pdf's. 5. You should try [1] "Kdenlive", it has it's quirks (as all linux tools do) but it's probably the best open-source Linux video editor out there. [1] https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago"Quirks" is an understatement. Last I checked, you couldn't even have multiple timelines in the same project, every bit of editing had to be in the one same timeline.
- semi-extrinsic 6y agoFor video editing, Blender is the best FOSS tool I've tried. But you now get Davinci Resolve for free on Linux. It blows the FOSS competition out of the water, being a software with probably millions of dev hours funded by Hollywood studios behind it. Blackmagic decided to go the way of providing the basic tool for free in order to build user base amongst hobby video editors, and it's not a bad move IMO.
- guggle 6y agoWow, thank you for that, I didn't know Resolve. I do use KDEnlive but I can't say I'm satisfied with it.
- renewiltord 6y agoThank you for Xournal. I used LibreOffice for that but it added artifacts to my images (like a vertical black line to one if rendered as a PDF but not if rendered as a TIFF).
- coronadisaster 6y ago> 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now I wish that there was a better video editing alternative for a non-mac... Openshot and the others I tried crash too much (Openshot crashed for me today while trying to do simple trim)
- Cactus2018 6y agoThe new 2.5.1 version on OpenShot is a big stability improvement over 2.4 (which is the current repo version)
- coronadisaster 6y ago2.5.1 is the version of openshot-qt that I was using
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoHave you tried Davinci Resolve? It is one of the top 3 video editing suites, and it actually even runs on Linux native! It is even supported on redhat (but works on others too). Very stable as well (unlike Adobe's jokes).
- alpaca128 6y agoThe only one that I could always make work is Kdenlive. That said I never tried DaVinci Resolve as it's a bit beyond my use-cases, but I've heard good things about it.
- barbs 6y agoI've not had an issue with openshot personally, though I haven't had to much more than trimming. I use arch linux, so whatever the latest version released on that.
- PuffinBlue 6y agoI agree with you regarding crashes. Kdenlive has been much more stable for me but I don't really like it. Can't say exactly why but it just feels clunky.
- JshWright 6y agoI've been using Flowblade for video editing lately, and have been very impressed (granted, my needs are pretty simple).
- new_realist 6y agoThis sort of sounds like a vegan/vegetarian telling me that the veggie chicken tenders taste a lot like regular chicken tenders.
- Barrin92 6y agothis analogy works on a deeper level than you think because you can make some really great vegan meat replacements although the majority of people just stubbornly refuses to believe we're there yet
- masnao 6y agovegetarian meat (usualy from industrial satay, made with dissolved soy in whatever chemical bath) is what drives me away from pretty much every vegetarian/vegan place. this is why opensource that is just a cargo cult to copying even the bad decisions of commercial software harms more than help. id be fine tasting a nice indian meal made with vegetables. but instead I get gnome changing the side of the window close buttons (while at the same time removing the options dialog to change it back) just because the designer du jour liked copying osx instead of windows. it's fake-meat all over again.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoThis makes no sense. Gnome has its buttons on the same side as Windows. You are probably thinking about ubuntu which patched gnome to move the buttons to the left. And even ignoring that detail, the side the window buttons are on is entirely made up. Windows isn't the real OS with OSX as the fake windows clone. The gnome philosophy is to support a minimal number of configurations but to make sure they are all tested and work perfect. Other DEs allow full customizability but I have found them to be buggy. How many desktop environments actually let you switch the window button side? I haven't seen one, and if you know one, why are you using gnome instead of it?
- thayne 6y ago> How many desktop environments actually let you switch the window button side? KDE does. And Gnome used to.
- arminiusreturns 6y agoFor those asking about video editing, don't forget about Shotcut. I keep an eye on most gpl projects in github and I see consistent updates and communication from them, on top of it really advancing in features lately. Shout out to the shotcut team. https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut
- japanuspus 6y agoCan definitely vouch for Shotcut. I tried everything I could find a year or so ago, and Shotcut was by far the nicest to work with.
- rckoepke 6y agoThis feels off topic. I agree with these suggestions and appreciate the suggestion for Xournal, will look into that. But TFA focused on fundamental command line tools and shells, not office productivity apps.
- mongol 6y agoThere are thousands of articles on the classical command line tools grep, awk etc. With a subject "Linux Productivity Tools" I think this was both on topic and valuable.
- necovek 6y ago+1 I find the discussion here more appropriate to the "Linux Productivity Tools" title than the original article.
- mud_dauber 6y agoSeconded.
- pengaru 6y agoSolveSpace for engineering-oriented parametric CAD needs
- halbritt 6y agoKinda like this guy except I use google apps for documents and sheets, VSCode for an IDE and... I boot Win10 for Steam games, Fusion360 and AutoCAD.
- toastal 6y agoThere's so many games on Steam that run native on Steam or really well via Proton. I abandoned Windows a few years ago with video games being my last hold-out. If it doesn't work under Proton or isn't native, the game is a hard pass for me.
- halbritt 6y agoTo each his own. Windows isn't that awful these days and wrestling with Nvidia drivers on Linux is a PITA and entirely Nvidia's fault. Their drivers on Windows aren't that great, either.
- ddispaltro 6y agoAlthough it's difficult to use, I've found Natron for video editing to be not terrible, https://natrongithub.github.io/ https://natrongithub.github.io/
- minkiu 6y agoIt's like suggesting Nuke to do video editing, while possible, not the easiest and most likely you need previous experience with the software.
- ekianjo 6y agoFor 5, good alternatives: Shotcut and Kdenlive. and 13. Krita for digital painting
- carlreid 6y agoI'll also add Olive[1] as an alternative video editor. I tried shotcut this weekend for just a simple clip/split mashup of videos and it was so slow and cumbersome. Olive on the other hand was extremely responsive. [1] https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/ https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/
- emmelaich 6y agoThanks for this list! Wish I knew about Xournal earlier this year. Care to share any details about pdfsandwich and tesseract? As in, do you have some scripts to glue it all together?
- alpaca128 6y agoXournal++ is also worth a look. It's a fork that includes a few features I missed in the original, otherwise it's almost exactly the same.
- voldacar 6y agoIn your opinion, what's the best GUI for QEMU/KVM?
- RMPR 6y agoVirt-manager
- znpy 6y ago+1 for virt-manager. But you know what bothers me? Virt-manager is mature and feature-complete, and RedHat has discontinued it in favour of cockpit. Cockpit is cool and I like it, but it's not as complete as virt-manager.
- ufo 6y agoI'm a big fan of GNOME Boxes. The developers put a lot of care into the UI design and into choosing sensible defaults so most things work well out of the box. However, there are some kinds of advanced tasks that can only be done via virt-manager. I doesn't happen very often for me but when it happens it can be useful to know how to use virt-manager to configure the VMs that GNOME Boxes created. https://blog.agchapman.com/configuring-gnome-boxes-vms-using-virt-manager/ https://blog.agchapman.com/configuring-gnome-boxes-vms-using...
- coolspot 6y agoSee also xournal++ - https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp
- lighttower 6y agoNot affiliated in anyway. Just a very happy customer, but want to plug PDF Studio [1]. I've used Atril, Evince, Adobe, PDFXChange (through WINE) and this PDF Studio (not FOSS) is worth every penny. It even interfaces with docusign (but you don't need it since you can import real digital signature) their support is amazing, and linux is first class there. [1] https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/ https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/
- app4soft 6y agoAs for PDF editing there is Scribus, which is fully free open-source (FLOSS).[0] Scribus also available for Linux as AppImage.[1] [0] https://www.scribus.net https://www.scribus.net [1] https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/AppImages https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/AppImages
- matheusmoreira 6y agoI use Ledger for double entry accounting. https://www.ledger-cli.org/ https://www.ledger-cli.org/
- gspr 6y agoOhh this seems SO much nicer than Gnucash! Thank you!
- giu 6y agoJust an addition to point 1: There's also Xournal++ [0]; some parts are based on Xournal but it provides some additional functionality [1]. I switched from Xournal to Xournal++ four weeks ago and it's been a blessing. [0] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp [1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp#features https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp#features
- HuntinRoos 6y agoNice list! Thanks
- canistel 6y agoIn certain forms, text need to be filled in a series of square boxes. If there is an option to adjust character spacing, you can in fact fill such fields too using a monsospace font. But I am yet to come across an open source (or even free) tool (for annotating PDFs) which can adjust character spacing too. Can Xournal++ do it? If not, are there any other open source or free tools that can manage it?
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoIf all else fails, convert to SVG in Inkscape and edit it there. Export back to PDF when you're done.
- canistel 6y agoYes, only that it has to be done page by page and then you have to merge the pages back.
- enobrev 6y agoThis is an excellent list. I just want to add that jetbrains products (intellij, webstorm, etc) all run perfectly well on Ubuntu (and probably other distros?), with regular releases using their toolbox app.
- app4soft 6y ago> 8. Tons and tons and tons of command line stuff that Linux is well known for And this is what covered by "Linux Productivity Tools" slides.
- app4soft 6y ago> 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now Checkout Olive video editor.[0] [0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
- joyj2nd 6y ago1. Xournal to annotate PDFs (aka sign contracts without printing them and scanning them back). Will check it out. For PDFs I mostly use Master PDF Editor 2. LibreOffice of course for most document related work For me LibreOffice is a bad nightmare. I use the commercial Softmaker. 6. pdfsandwich and Tesseract OCR for OCR/turning PDFs into searchable files Good luck with that. My results with Tesseract were always abysmal. I use ABBYY Finereader with wine. I would pay for a native Linux version. They have a Linux command line tool that has a biblical price tag. 12. Inkscape for messing around with vector graphics Inkscape is good. I wish they would still develop Xara XL What I am missing in your List: Recoll. Find Stuff on your computer. One of my most important tools.
- ce4 6y agoTry scantools instead of pdfsandwich for creating searchable OCR'd PDFs: https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/ https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/ Easy to install and use and works great.
- ce4 6y agoI use scantools for creating searchable PDFs: https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/ https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/
- zuhsetaqi 6y agoFor OCR I use OCRmyPDF[0] on my Mac (also available for Linux and Windows). It does a very good job, is pretty fast, can even OCR images by converting them to PDF and you can use different languages. It also reduces the file size significantly. I really like it. [0]https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF
- neop1x 6y agoThanks for the list. Btw LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs [1] [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/13/using-libreoffice-as-a-pdf-editor/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/13/using-libreoffice-as-a-pdf...
- mraudiobook_com 6y agoThere are people that don't know Linux can run anything? Yikes.