Here is my list:

• emacs - emacs

Rsync for moving files and backing up.

• Resizing images: mogrify (part of the imagemagick suite)
• ffmpeg
• pdftk is king for rotating/cropping/appending pdfs
• LaTeX everything
• make/shell - to script/automate image and document editing
• pandoc is reasonably good for many things
• latex2rtf - to get plain text for word counts out of LaTeX source
• wc - word count, line count
• ispell -t - does spell check in the terminal. The -t is so that it'll mostly ignore LaTeX commands in the source

I'm sure there's more but I don't memorize them, they kind of get remembered when I need them.

syncthing to sync my files on all my devices

find -exec is essential to process multiple files

7z handles wildcards inside a find -exec so you can save 200 lines of sh compliance

mpv plays online media since it uses yt-dlp

• xournal for fake form-filling on PDFs - ugly and unintuitive but gets the job done
• img2pdf - does what it says on the tin
• ranger for managing files and launching stuff - not the coolest kid on the block but this is the single most impressive terminal app I have used in recent years, the key bindings and commands and defaults are so crazily intuitive that I hardly ever even need to consult the manual

https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor - automatically editing video and audio by analyzing a variety of methods, most notably audio loudness

https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng, https://pngquant.org/ and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner for optimizing images

Aria2c is the best downloader for large files. It also supports torrents.

I'd add:

• ghostscript - with some basic perl scripts, works great for pdf flattening/compressing, merging, splitting, adding bookmarks etc.
• poppler - pdfseparate, sometimes pdfunite
• zathura - pdf viewing
• feh - images
• sshfs - prefer it to rclone
• cheat
• emacs - org-mode, latex, dired/wdired, capture, eshell, vterm, tramp
• mc/midnight commander

Very similar to you. I do use gramma for spellchecking. My most used app overall is probably pandoc. I use it to make all my docs and presentations for work.

You can also use ghostscript (gs) or the image magick convert with PDF.

I use rsync quite often and ssh as well.

I use:

• qpdf for mucking around with pdfs, reordering, selecting pages, combining them, etc.
• ffmpeg for video and audio sicing and transcoding. Usually encompassing a command in a script because I forget the precise params every time ;p
• nvim for anything like Markdown (which can be converted to other things like LaTeX or pdf or html, sometimes in multiple stages)
• imagemagick for simple image conversion stuff.
• wget for downloads ^.^
• youtube-dl or yt-dlp for grabbing youtube stuff.

I use most of these that you listed, except that I don't use office apps at all, and do all my documents using LaTeX in neovim.

Also, I have small helper scrips for pdf manipulation for tasks that I do regularly, like making my handwritten notes ready for printing at my office since I don't like the algo my office printer uses to convert them to B&W. I also use sejda-console for merging PDFs as it has nice options for manipulating TOC during the merge.

Another nice utility is ffpb which is basically a wrapper around ffmpeg that gives it a nice progress bar.

For audio files sox and beets are my live saver.

For me, it's pretty much just app management via my package manager, some file management, and the big ones are using neovim as a text editor and cmus as my primary music player (I also use emms in emacs sometimes)

• pdfcrop (commonly included with LaTeX) for cropping margins - it cuts the pdf down to its contents then adds a margin of your choosing, extremely useful for forcing academic papers to have consistent margins, pdfcrop --margins 72 *pdf here* will create a document with a ~1in margin all around (it uses bp as its units)
• vips for resizing/converting images - it's a bit faster and lighter than imagemagick in my experience, although the main reason I use it instead of imagemagick is just because I like playing around with stuff I haven't used before :) It has an officially supported python binding too

Does anyone know of an application which can eliminate excessive glare in a picture?

Using lf, a file manager like ranger. Written in Go.

https://github.com/gokcehan/lf

@antihero I use ffmpeg to extract frames from images. Yt-dlp to download youtube videos. Rmlint, to remove duplicates. Gallery-dl to sometimes download from sites like instagram or twitter & finally mpd / ncmpcpp to listen to music....

I download files with axel

• convert - convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, etc. Almost nothing it can't do.