Welcome! Some of my must-have FOSS software for GNU/Linux are:
ONLYOFFICE: Similar functionality to that of MS Office, but free and open-source, very nice compatibility with .docx documents and all the excel formulas I use are still there.
Boxes: If you like or need virtual machines, Boxes is one of the best FOSS solutions out there, I have made Windows, BSD and Linux virtual machines using Boxes and they work flawlessly, and the drag-drop feature to send files from the host to the guest machines is absolutely nice.
Konversation: In my opinion the best graphical IRC client, with HexChat also worth noting.
Kdenlive: I have used many video editors in my life, both FOSS and proprietary, but Kdenlive is the one who made me stay. I have even remastered old 80s Betamax videos using only Kdenlive.
TeXstudio: If you like LaTeX, this editor is absolutely wonderful and it works out of the box.
Prism Launcher: If you like Minecraft, this is the only launcher that actually worked on my Fedora installation, and it’s so easy to install mods, resource packs, shaders, etc. that I already consider it to be the best FOSS launcher for both premium and non-premium instances.
HandBrake: I just love this open-source video transcoder so much.
fre:ac: I have used this FOSS audio encoder since I was a kid when I wanted to convert mp3 music to a format that my DSi could read. Nowadays I still use it to convert from and to any type of audio and it just never fails.
RaccoonLock: A modern-looking and private password manager that is wonderful if you just want to store your passwords locally in your PC and you do not care about syncing them with other devices (although such feature is partially possible through the creation of backups).
It’s also worth mentioning other FOSS software like VLC, VS Code (though it’s not entirely FOSS, with Codium being an actual FOSS version), OBS Studio, GParted, PDF Mix Tool and FreeTube. Welcome to the GNU/Linux world! I hope you enjoy it and you find these utilities useful :).
To answer your question about lack of dock and system tray, I use the top left hot corner to snap windows in Activities often, and I launch mostly from the built in Applications menu. Don’t use the dock much. As for system tray, it’s a fairly minimal work computer so I boot it every day, run slack, browser, etc. and I know there’s nothing really on the background. Don’t need an icon for slack, it’s always on my screen. In my GNOME-based work environment it’s either running and I can see it or it’s closed.
I only use an extension for tray icons. I use it kind of like how I would use a tiling window manager with a keyboard based workflow and non tiling windows. I just hit the super key and type app names to launch stuff and drag windows around with the super key. Instead of alt-tabbing I hit the super key to see the overview and click on the window I want.
In the newest gnome versions, there’s a menu that shows you what apps are in the background, so if you know what apps are already open. I’m not a huge fan of that but I wouldn’t really care if my tray icons didn’t work because its close enough.
The Windows style systray is redundant, I dont understand how you guys think you need it. Android style systray (system notifications) would be far better.
I’ve always found that the right click menu is the same for taskbar, systray, and app drawer. Main reason I say its redundant, at least with an Android like system the apps can display information and options in the notifications.
I’m using pure GNOME with the exception of a single extension which tiles windows on my screen on a grid(gTile) because I have a massive screen and five windows. I also have an icon pack if you’re counting that. Rest of it is stock and I quite like it. It gets out of my way when I’m trying to work and the alt+tab and other features are always fast. Top left hot corner is a godsend.
I dont want weird archives or anything, just to copy my filesystem to another drive.
For proper backups, you do want “weird archives” with integrity checks, versioning, deduplication and compression. Regular files cannot offer that (at least not efficiently so).
Respectfully, I love how powerful KDE is but my god they can’t make things visually consistent to save their lives!
From inconsistent icons, to different KDE apps using wildly different design languages, to padding being inconsistent all throughout the DE and their apps, to fonts and their sizes kinda being all over the place
But at least a custom theme is trivial to install and solves most of it
I wish they would include mobile in these stats, it would better show consumer operating systems and the Android bump would let people know Linux isn’t as niche as they thought
Edit: Apparently they have this but they don’t label it as Linux
So many options. As others have mentioned, rsync, borg, restic, etc. You might want to look into filesystem snapshots. If you use something like BTRFS you can create instant snapshots and send them to a second BTRFS formatted disk or even a remote system with a BTRFS filesystem.
ZFS would also work here.
I use btrbk for automatic BTRFS snapshots and backing them up to remote systems.
If you want built-in encryption you can use Borg or Restic, which also has the advantage of deduplicating within a single backup set. Restic can also backup to an s3 bucket, in case you want to use a cloud service.
Yes of course. On the btrbk homepage they even describe how to set it up so that a backup gets triggered automatically when you plug in a designated backup drive.
My setup is to create local snapshots and keep X amount of local snapshots. Copy snapshots to a remote server and keep a different amount of snapshots there. Finally I also have a backup drive and btrbk is setup to copy all my local snapshots to that backup drive when it’s plugged in.
I don’t plan to use it personally (Silverblue enjoyer here), but I can definitely see it as a more future-oriented alternative to Mint, especially for beginners.
It seems to have a similar philosophy (user friendly and stable), with the difference that it might be more suited for younger users that aren’t spoiled by traditional desktop workflows (Windows, KDE, etc.) yet.
My generation (those younger than 25) grew up using phones and tablets and will appreciate a simple, immutable system with Gnome way more than those who are older.
I use timeshift on my arch, debian and fedora systems. First backup mirrors your whole drive, every new backup kinda does it like docker, files which stayed the same are being symlinked to the og backup and for file changes it puts the newer file into the next backup, file deletions just don’t get links, so you have versioning. U can set how often backups will happen daily/weekly/monthly and how many are kept, doing backups manually is an option too. also you can set what folders to include, exclude and all that good stuff.
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