I'm trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!

ffmpeg - www.deb-multimedia.org . I edit podcast videos for distribution to subscribers. High-quality video produces very large files but if they're only going to be watched on laptops, tablets, and phones, I can throw away a lot of bits without noticeably affecting quality on a phone screen.

And nothing does that better or faster than ffmpeg.

UpNote. I use it like a combination of the gollum wiki described by OP, but I just put everything in there. I have watch and reading lists for things I want to check out, writing projects, notes for TTRPG games, I keep extensive notes on healthcare-related stuff, and so on. I like UpNote because it's lightweight, has windows, linux, and android apps, and because it has a one-time $25 lifetime membership that does free syncing forever instead of a monthly subscription like most other things seem to. I've tried OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian, Joplin, AnyType, and a bunch of others and didn't like them for various reasons, but UpNote is both pretty small and also has a pretty full-featured editor that can do rich text, all kinds of formatting, media files, etc.

The only thing I've run into that UpNote wasn't ideal for is I started writing a novel a couple months ago and managing the structure and notes and all that got a little unwieldy so I picked up Scrivener. Still wish they had an updated linux client or there was some good, complete, feature-rich linux-native equivalent, but it runs pretty good under wine, so.

Man, I have so many apps, but here are a couple that I install first thing on a new install:
Timeshift is possibly at the top of the list.

Then Deja Dup.

Stacer

Strawberry

Open TV

Pinta is the main one that comes to mind. I don't use it every day, far from it, and that's a part of why I love it. On the rare occasion that I have to do some image editing, I load up Gimp and then proceed to fight against it for at least a whole day to make it do the simplest of things before finally ragequitting. Then I load up Pinta and actually get the task done in either minutes or hours at most.

It's like old school MS Paint, but better. Simple, intuitive, no huge learning curve, just enough features to get my nonprofessional tasks done. It should be a distro default.

solaar one of the best gui based apps for mouse settings

Sorry to thread jack. One little app I miss from Windows is a simple screengrab annotator? Wondering if people have anything to recommend.

Eg to circle some on screen text, add an arrow and maybe add some of my own text.

I cant get my Loigtech KB to screen grab, so I just use the Screengrab app in Mint, which is fine but zero annotation abilities.

I have tried Flameshot but it is a shitshow and doesn't work properly and is unstable (for me) and doesn't allow me to put it in the clipboard and paste in say Signal.

digiKam was the first Linux application I encountered that was so polished and useful for what it does that I tried to shoe-horn it into any and every DE I experimented with, as well as installing it onto my windows machines under KDE4Win.

Logseq for notes and task tracking. It’s an open source alternative to obsidian. Life saver for tracking stuff at work.

https://logseq.com/

Aside from ones listed here:

System Tools

• WinApps - Run Windows applications seamlessly integrated into your Linux desktop environment, like native including Adobe products.
• Waydroid - Run Android applications in a container on Linux with full hardware access.
• Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.
• AM (AppImage Manager) - Easy AppImage management for installing, updating, and organizing portable applications.
• Starship - Fast, customizable cross-platform shell prompt with Git integration and status indicators.
• InShellisense - IDE-style IntelliSense autocomplete and suggestions for your terminal.
• Tabby - Modern terminal emulator with tabs, split panes, and extensive customization options.
• Zeit - Qt GUI frontend for scheduling tasks using at and crontab utilities.
• KWin Minimize2Tray - KDE extension that allows minimizing windows to the system tray instead of taskbar.
• Flameshot - Feature-rich screenshot tool with built-in annotation and editing capabilities.
• CopyQ - Advanced clipboard manager with searchable history and custom scripting support.
• Safing Portmaster - Free open-source application firewall with per-app network control, DNS-over-TLS, and system-wide ad/tracker blocking.

Productivity Tools

• DSNote - Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation app for note-taking.
• NAPS2 - User-friendly document scanning application with OCR and PDF creation capabilities.
• Morphosis - Simple document converter supporting PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX and more formats.
• Obsidian - Powerful knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph visualization.
• BeeRef - Minimalist reference image viewer designed for artists and designers.

Media & Entertainment

• Popcorn Time - Stream movies and TV shows via torrent with built-in media player.
• Nicotine+ - Modern Soulseek P2P client for sharing and discovering music files.
• XnView - Versatile image viewer, organizer, and converter supporting hundreds of formats.

Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.

Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/

Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.

Great topic. I'm going to have to investigate some of these suggestions later.

Since my first pick, helix, was already mentioned here and i commented on it, I'll add gitui. Git can be very overwhelming for me. Gitui arranges frequently used git commands in a sensible, visual layout and makes it easy for me to understand and interact with git.

KDE Connect

• https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I've used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I'm sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone's lockscreen to pause the music.)

I'm starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.

There's more too I need to explore.

• https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect

(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a 'device unreachable' error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)

FreeTube, a desktop client to watch YouTube videos, without an account. Why not use a browser without an account? Well, it has a watch history, favorites and subscriptions as if you had an account - but its all "offline" account, without Google involved (besides watching their video). So it manages an account with subscriptions, without YouTube account. Plus it integrates an ad blocker and SponsorBlock, and has a few more features on its sleeve.

kdotool, a xdotool like program for KDE on Wayland. Just learned about it when setting up another application. But I will use it for independently too.

There are more, but this is what came to my mind right now.

Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.

Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I've ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.

Ed Along with rlwrap it gives me a very fast and powerful workflow.

Rlwrap It wraps around a program and gives it the ability to make use ofthe readline lib.

Screen I use it when I boot without X. Gives a very fast workflow, being able to switch between programs.

Mpv Multimedia powerhouse. Even works (pretty) well without X, with a framebuffer.

Ecasound Cli daw. Have several scripts to make a recording on the fly or to be able to jam.

1. xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without "installing" them on the target device, which is great because you don't have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.

2. Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.

3. wdfs - It's an old project that is patched by this random github user. It's the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user. I mount it from a bash script because that way I can use KDE wallet to store the credentials instead of having a plain text file somewhere on my fs, the script waits until the wallet is unlocked, then reads the credentials from it and mounts the webDAV to a path in my home. That is more accessible to apps and other scripts (e.g. recent files) instead of doing it via Dolphin, which generates a random string in the path every time when opening network storage.

GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.

For example: ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3 encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3. parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2} then copies each FLAC file's metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the --xapply option).

edit: copytags is https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that's useful for anyone.

KDE's Dolphin + Konsole's integration to Dolphin is great for seamlessly managing files with an UI and terminal hybrid.

Though closed source (overly dramatic music plays), the text editor Sublime Text works great, and at least with major version 3 (last I checked it was in version 4), it can be converted to AppImage without major issues (at worst, paths with spaces have issues).

Firejail is great for starting specific programs offline.

Newsboat is the best RSS feed reader I could find for Linux, specifically due to, with its inbuilt macros, I can set it up to open in new tabs several posts from a comically large amount of feeds.

Every day?

• Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I've been happily using for over a year. I don't foresee changing until I'm forced to switch to Wayland. I've used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
  • It's entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
  • It's tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
  • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
  • It's stable
  • It's fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
• Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I've tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I've always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
• Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
• Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I'm more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it's what initially drove me to Kakoune.

I'm currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it's actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it's wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in "the list" because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It's not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it's more stable.

I like game emulation and to manage my ROM library, I use Geode-GEM. It is simple but cusomizable app to manage your ROM based on console and emulator you have.

For me it's Perl's rename, which of course cones in a variety of package names depending on the distro you use. In trying to find a link, I landed on this stack exchange answer that gives a great overview of how the tool works and the different packages available on different distros.

I have to bulk rename files every day, and using regex and the other features of Perl's rename makes it so much easier to do.

Right now https://jeena.github.io/recoder/ which I just released and here is why (copied from the website):

🎬 Why Recoder?

I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, and suddenly nothing worked right. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife's iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.

😤 Too Much Fuss, Too Many Steps

Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.

My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.

🔄 Vertical Videos? Extra Pain

That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.

✨ Enter Recoder

I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.

Not Linux exclusive, but https://freefilesync.org/ and https://goaccess.io/ my beloved

Easy file sync and easy log checking

sshuttle https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

need it all the time, super minimal, easy to usw