Amberol is probably one of the biggest hidden gems in GNOME apps. It's a simple easy music player whose background color changes based on the song's artwork.
Parabolic is another GNOME app for downloading videos from youtube using yt-dlp. It's super easy to use and even allows for multiple concurrent downloads.
mpv is one of those rare moments where using a proprietary implementation is objectively worse. Must install on any personal computer/mobile device.
Both are comparable in terms of video playback (both use hardware acceleration and ffmpeg) but mpv's appeal is that it's ultimately a minimal (as in lack of apparent GUI) command line tool rather than a fully featured application like VLC. I like mpv because of it's non-features which is why it's the backend for a lot of Desktop environment video players.
Mpv is a good engine, but I prefer something like smplayer+mpv for all the extra functionality. I also like that VLC has tons of features, like full file/codec info and stats. I know there are other ways to get that info, but it's very easy in vlc.
Amberol does hold up really well with high threshold music folders in my experience. I had a 24+ hours worth of music that loaded successfully in less than a minute.
Amberol has a "restore playlist" feature which loads your last playlist quickly.
Firefox with tree style tabs, with the user CSS that removes tabs and combines bookmarks bar into the title bar.
Away from computer right now but I'll take a screenshot in an hour or so.
And Emacs. :)
Back at my computer now!
OK, here's my screenshot:
So, you can see the tree style tabs (TST) in the sidebar area on the left. I'm using the "photon" theme for TST. with another extension for TST called TST Colored Tabs. If you middle-button-click a link, it's opened in a new tab like usual, but TST also assigns it as a child tab of the page you were viewing. It's incredibly useful for keeping track of where you are and what you're doing. Especially in my DevOps job, I have dozens of tabs open and chaos would reign supreme if I used top-of-window tabs like standard. You can see the bookmarks toolbar has been dragged up into the title bar using the customize toolbar window accessed by right clicking on the title bar.
To accomplish this you need to enable a setting in about:config called toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets, set that to true. Then exit Firefox.
Then create a directory called chrome in your profile directory, which on Linux is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/PROFILENAME/, which you can get from the about:profiles page. Inside the chrome directory, you create a file called userChrome.css and add this stuff to it:
#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items {
opacity: 0;
pointer-events: none;
}
#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
display: none;
}
/*
Display the status bar in Firefox Quantum (version 61+)
permanently at the bottom of the browser window.
Code below works best for the Dark Firefox theme and is based on:
https://github.com/MatMoul/firefox-gui-chrome-css/blob/master/chrome/userChrome.css
This userChrome.css file was last modified on: 28-Jun-2018.
Tested to work with Firefox 61 on Windows.
Related blog post: http://www.optimiced.com/en/?p=1727
*/
#browser-bottombox {
height: 20px;
border-top: solid 1px #505050;
}
.browserContainer>#statuspanel {
left: 4px !important;
bottom: 0px;
transition-duration: 0s !important;
transition-delay: 0s !important;
}
.browserContainer>#statuspanel>#statuspanel-inner>#statuspanel-label {
margin-left: 0px !important;
border: none !important;
padding: 0px !important;
color: #EEE !important;
background: #333 !important;
}
window[inFullscreen="true"] #browser-bottombox {
display: none !important;
}
window[inFullscreen="true"] .browserContainer>#statuspanel[type="overLink"] #statuspanel-label {
display: none !important;
}
/*
Begin section to move system UI buttons to the same UI bar/box
as the addressbar
*/
/* Adding empty space for buttons */
#nav-bar {
margin-right:100px;
}
/* For dragging whole window by mouse*/
#titlebar {
appearance: none !important;
height: 0px;
}
/*
Fix for main menu calling by Alt button
THIS BREAKS THE UI!!
*/
/* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar {
margin-top: 10px;
} */
/* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */
#TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container {
display: block;
position: absolute;
top: 5px;
right: 1px;
}
I'm a bit of a fan of Okular. It just does a good job displaying PDFs and is not annoying. The table of content works well if the document has one. There is text select and block select for when you need to get content out of the PDF. You can tell Okular to ignore DRM with a simple checkbox in the settings, for files that "don't allow" selecting and copying text or "don't allow" printing.
Im dipping my toes in self hosting and syncthing is just :chefs kiss:. I use it only with Obsidian, Signal & Aegis so far (and will sync my configs as well on linux), and the safety net it gives is just awesome.
Ansible + Podman from Red Hat really a game changer in Industry Standard. Sometimes I want to just say, Fk Docker because they don't listen from security perspective, until Red Hat made Podman, and they are thinking.... (3 years), then implement the rootless container... same on HPC.. fk docker...
I'm not gonna mention the basics like Kate. They're great but nothing new.
My 2 hidden gems that I use on a daily basis are:
QOwnNotes for markdown note taking. Only competent desktop app I found that comes without any electron bullshit.
Nyrna to send a game to sleep when I want to take a break or get interrupted. Saves me from booting it up again when I want to pick up where I left off.
Being a flutter dev (and shameless fanboy) I will suggest people try:
appflowy - a FOSS near-clone to Notion.
spotube - FOSS music streaming using the spotify API for metadata and youtube for music playing/downloading. Completely free of ads and works surprisingly well as long as the music you like is mirrored to YouTube.
honourable mentions:
Plex, Nextcloud, Radarr, Sonarr, qbittorrent. Not your usual apps for these kinds of threads but they're absolutely top-tier for linux home servers.
It's not a drop in replacement for spotify, of course. It just uses Spotify's public API for fetching playlists and routes them through Youtube to play the audio of music videos hosted there, but as a free option it's one of my faves :).
If you want podcasts or certain spotify-only remixes you'll still need spotify.
It is, and I've used it for a while. I don't recall why I stopped it, it was a long time ago; perhaps I didn't notice any meaningful difference in performance? Stock kernels are good enough for most purposes.
Way better UI, no hussle with configuration, flatpak support is seamless. Very good experience over all, such a smooth game adding -> configuring -> playing experience.
I agree with FarLine that bottles is way better than Lutris. I still believe Heroic launcher is better than bottles for Epic/GoG/Prime games, but Battle.net and sc2 for example was so much easier to get up and running on bottles compared to lutris!
Honestly I didn't know Kirta was free because the first time I saw it was on Steam, later found out it was free but it's such a good product I'm happy I found it there first.
The question is weird to me, but I'll plug Strawberry Music Player. It's a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok from when Amarok was still good.
I dunno if it counts, but I use libreoffice more than anything else. It's a very well made piece of gear.
I've written multiple novels with it, short stories, essays, a home brew ttrpg system, etc. It doesn't just do "good enough", it is on par with anything else I've ever used.
Honestly, I installed it on my windows PC recently, and I found it really clunky. And it sounds like there's no dark mode?
I do IT for a living, and for as big of a bitch Office is, it does work pretty damn good... When it's working. I felt like I went back in time a decade when I was working with Calc.
I'm not trying to fight, but I'm genuinely curious, do you only use Writer? Have you worked with Word lately to compare how they've changed? Thanks
Dark mode is coming to the latest release of LibreOffice, or very soon, so I've heard.
It's possible in current and recent older versions to change the default colours to almost-but-not-quite emulate a dark mode. I have to admit it's not a quick thing to do, nor is it perfect once done, but it can be attempted. (That said, maybe I gave up changing things at "good enough" which is why it's not perfect.).
Oh, I've used it, and it isn't worth the price. They could offer it for free and I still can't say I'd switch. It isn't that there aren't differences, there are. They just aren't enough to matter.
Writer, that's the bread and butter. Calc is mainly for tracking timelines, "lore", etc. Draw isn't a common use.
Dark mode isn't as superior when writing long form though. It's nice, but it's easier to catch weird patterns for me (dyslexia). Calc vs excel, well that's not really a competition for professional use, though calc functions well enough for the kind of use I put it to.
I've replaced Flameshot with Spectacle on my system because it is preinstalled on Plasma, has almost the same set of features and, in my experience, work snappier. Also, Flameshot can have issues working on Wayland
-Jellyfin (i was astonished that this piece of software wasn't mentioned before)
-SMPlayer (imho the best front end for MPV)
-shutdown command (i use it daily)
-Lutris
-Wine
-Piper (to manage keybings on the mouse with a gui) (is also the only one that I found that works with my G502, if you have an alternative please tell me, i want to check it out)
-ckb-next (for managing leds and keybindings for my keyboard)
-openRGB
Honorable mention:
Molly (the FOSS version, a privacy focused client for Signal)
Edit:
Almost forgot about QEMU+kvm for virtualization
I use KeePassXC on the daily, so that's definitely going on the list. Spectacle does screenshots amazingly well. neovim is a great fork of vim, handles all my text editing and IDE work. GIMP is basically a given for image editing. And also a fan of LMMS for whenever I work with audio/music.
Based on time spent using them, Firefox, Steam, and Terraria. Wait, do games not count?
The real answer is actually probably Gnome itself. The DE, I mean. The workflow suits me perfectly, and I even like a lot of the basic Gnome apps, although their naming convention get on my nerves sometimes (your official web browser is called "Web" and your official music player is called "Music"? But the one that makes me actively angry is calling their official text editor... "Text Editor." C'mon, folks.)
This has been the case for me since Gnome 3 dropped. Which was quite a surprise for me since I thought of Gnome 2 as a less user friendly, uglier XFCE and kinda hated it. I still kinda feel that way about Mate, but Memo kicks ass and it's much better than Gnome 2 was overall.
Interesting, maybe it's because I wasn't in the community yet when Gnome 2 was a thing but I always disliked Gnome 3 and love Gnome 40. The changes aren't even that big but I simply wasn't able to adopt to the Gnome 3 workflow and with 40 it clicked immediately.
Oh I definitely prefer 40+. And I think the changes are actually fairly big; not the basic idea of the workflow, but the way it's implemented has definitely gotten better.
Oh man I thought I was the only one when it comes to the naming conventions. I've seen it on Cinnamon as well and it's absolutely annoying if you want to figure out the exact name of the software, only to get hit with "Text Editor" but I suppose this does make it easier for those new to Linux to get accustomed to their new environment (probably also the real reason they do this) though I still wish we could switch that behavior off somehow.
Well... kind of. The difference is that the official Gnome text editor's actual name is Text Editor. It's not a case of the desktop calling, for instance, Pluma or Xed "Text Editor". The Gnome music app is literally called " Music."
Mixxx is the only Linux-native DJ software that I know of, but it's still amazing. If it's missing featutes compared with Serato or Recordbox I'm not good enough to miss them yet, and the features it doea have are damn impressive.
Likewise, Inkscape and Gimp are both great. I know that Gimp takes a lot of heat for not being as "good" as Photoshop, but it's just different. The few times I've tried Photoshop were as painful to me as Gimp seems to be for others. And since I don't need the CMYK functionality that Gimp is missing, I'm happy with Gimp.
LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but using anything else for documents is like stone knives and bearskins in comparison.
I still can't believe Discord operates in the 2015 GNU/Linux mindset of handing the user a DEB package and telling them to f off. But then again it labels its chatrooms "servers" in the client so what do I know.
The clipboard history app is great, but I still wish it let you pin/bookmark things you don't want it to auto-delete. There was a pull request to add it in a while ago, but it was nixed because it would make the tool "too competent" and app-like. Except that it's a pretty standard feature of clipboard managers, wouldn't make things any more complicated for those who feel like ignoring it, and none of the alternative apps work with global shortcuts on Wayland!
I really like the disk usage analyzer in gnome. The ui/visualization is really intuitive and useful, and I often wish for something similar on windows.
I'm not sure what the gnome disk usage analyzer looks like but WizTree on windows is excellent at showing you where stuff is and how much space it takes up
Wiztree looks interesting, I'll see if I can install it, although my work machine is pretty locked down, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's off limits.
Perhaps a controversial opinion, but I quite like Mailspring as a desktop email client. It looks and feels much more modern than Thunderbird or Evolution.
Shortwave is by far my favorite radio app. Simple interface, auto records songs, access to thousands of radio stations from all over the world, and when scaled down, it turns into a little retro radio interface!
Cinnamon is hands down my favourite DE. I always see people talking about GNOME and KDE, to me Cinnamon is the best of both worlds. Strongly recommend it with the Orchis GTK theme, which is made for GNOME but works fine on Cinnamon.
My favourite graphical app in the more traditional sense is Firefox. If CLI apps are allowed, I'm a big fan of GNU Nano, a CLI-based minimalistic editor, basically Emacs Lite.
I'll definitely give it a try, thanks!
I tend to categorise all CLI editors in my head as either Emacs-like or Vim-like, based mostly on keyboard shortcuts. Nano's shortcuts look more like Emacs than like Vim, so, Emacs Lite.
a ton of tui's (mutt, ncspot, cointop, btop, dry, etc)
obsidian
vscode
rofi, thunar
blender and daz3d (wine)
discord, element
The only real piece of software I don't like is Zoom; it's the most badly behaved app I've ever seen. Suck my balls Zoom, stay in your own god damned workspace.
Theoretically, I haven't tried. It's for a online D&D campaign, so I like having Zoom and Discord on a second monitor because my main monitor already has maps, character sheet, Obsidian for taking notes, etc.
Most of my video calling is over Teams or Discord, so I may have been thinking of Webex which used to give you a http link that would force you to download the client software and launch it.
I use lunarvim quite a bit, however the application I work with has over 65k code files and sometimes telescope just doesn't cut it. I also use a number of VSC plugins that I just cannot for the life of me get working in neovim, like the gauge.org LSP stuff.
The Caja file manager. Hell the MATE desktop environment in general is just perfect for me. Xfce is acceptable too, though the inclusion of CSD in recent Xfce releases has made me a bit more wary of it when it comes to theming.
I also use Waterfox as my browser. A Firefox fork that has the option to put tabs below address bar (where they belong imo) out of the box without needing to muck around with the userChrome.css file.
ArmorPaint for painting on 3D Models, but I learned recently about 3DCoat, and it has a Linux version…
I like listening to Podcasts (while I work on my PC) with KDE's “Kasts”. Use my Nextcloud provider to sync my listening status on the Desktop with my Android Podcast App (AntennaPod) for a flawless continuation on mobile.
I guess it's probably also available for servers but the most innovative and interesting peace of software I used in years is Distrobox, I like the AUR and love Debian and Fedora so that's a bridge I have been waiting for!
I just read the comments under this thread and while most of them mention standard stuff (the things most people use on Linux) there are some interesting things in there too! :)
Well, the permanently open applications on my system are: claws-mail, Pale Moon (browser forked from Firefox), konqueror (TDE file manager), konsole (TDE terminal), and Aqualung (music player). Other good friends include kate, Inkscape, and OpenSCAD (despite its flakiness). And I get a lot of mileage out of DOSBox.
If the OP hadn't specified desktop software, I'd also name Portage.
Definitely the clipboard manager. On kde, it's klipper. This is actually such an underrated piece of software that I can't live without. Windows has one too, but they added their's a little after all the linux desktop environments got one by default.
I just use the one built into gnome, it's the best one I've found yet having come from lightshot on windows, it just works exactly how I'd expect it to and doesn't get in my way
As for my favourite think it's gotta be either obsidian or Vscode/ium
They are essentially built with the same text editing component, more specifically, kwrite makes use of kate through kparts for the editing component only, to provide a more stripped down interface as compared to kate.
So usually, when I have both and want the most features, its technically unnessessary bloat to have kwrite installed? (Except I feel like I want a stripped down interface for that moment I guess)