You just installed a shiny new fresh install of Linux mint. What are your must install apps/tools?
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.
Fortune. Cowsay.
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.
Úoiggugg🍹🧉
If you use the terminal and have a tendency to fat finger commands, I would recommend “The Fuck”.
It always makes me smile to type fuck into the terminal. 🙂
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-cli
I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.
- Kate
- Yakuake
- Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium
- LibreOffice (I use Calc a lot)
- Kate
- Ocular
- DoH-client
- htop
- ncdu
- Windscribe
- virt-manager
… and more I can’t remember right now, because it’s too early in the morning.
EDIT:
- nano
- mc (midnight commander)
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 🤜 🤛
- GIMP (with photogimp patch)
- Steam
- Librewolf (I could also opt for a chromium based browser)
- Tor Browser (to browse onion links/throwaway browser)
- Heroic Games Launcher
- Prism Launcher
- latest Java lts (either from adoptium or openjdk i dont care about flashy new features)
- Libreoffice Still (similar to the second reason above and onlyoffice in appimage due to Libreoffice weird handling with ppsx files and powerpoints)
- QEMU/KVM with virt manager
- Gnome evolution (if it’s gtk desktop I could opt for other email clients)
- Proton-GE
- WINE
- Ghostty(Kinda sucks it’s based on libadwaita and gnome forces this theme on you no matter your desktop)
- Fish/ZSH(fish not having posix compatibility is kinda annoying)
- MPV (I could still use vlc but I prefer mpv because it can stream youtube links)
- ytp-dl(I can opt for a gui for convenience sake)
- BTOP
- Fastfetch
You can try bass to run bash scripts in fish
Cool find but I will probably stick with ZSH
People replying - how about telling us why you consider your answer a must-install tool?
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
- 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
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.
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.
Darktable. A replacement for adobe lightroom.
I’ve actually found RawTherapee to be slightly faster for what I’m doing (slight edits to my amateur photography)
It also has a good cli interface for mass processing via scripts.