I made it to Linux! What is your must-have FOSS or Free Software for linux?
Thank you so much, comrades! I am feeling pretty comfortable with linux mint, and now would like some suggestions for some absolutely necessary FOSS or free license software for the OS. So far I have the standard, Firefox, ThunderBird, LibreOffice, yada yada. Thank you again to everyone on the linux comm! sankara-salute
I literally had to run the windows version of handbrake in virtual box because for some reason the linux version can't save to the same directory as the input files while batch processing.
basically the same otherwise, fine for single files.
I’ve had no issues saving to same folder as source when doing batch transcoding queues on Arch Linux. As long as the input and output files does not have the same filename it’s fine.
Logseq is a pretty nice FOSS alternative to Obsidian I came across recently. Tmux is absolutely necessary for any terminal work. Wezterm is my favorite terminal emulator because you can easily disable all of the shortcuts except very few you want (tmux handles most of terminal stuff for me). Some new alternatives to old command line utilities:
bat is cat but 1000 times better. I love it so much!
fun factI also recently learned that it’s safer, because you can have a file that has some bad command, then the backspace character several times, and cat doesn’t display the characters “deleted” by the backspaces (but it still executes). Bat doesn’t do that.
Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.
I know about Zellij, but in its current state, I think it doesn’t make sense for me to switch. I really lobe my Tmux setup, and I don’t think I would be able to replicate it on Zellij, mainly because of Tmux plugins I use. I also don’t think that Zellij currently has any advantages over Tmux except for better default config and user friendliness that I don’t need. I’m looking forward to the Zellij ecosystem getting better tho. Some day, I will probably make the switch. The WASM tabs feature looks extremely promising!
I use zoxide plus fzf which ends looking like this.
My default go-to for a better cd was teleport when I still was on bash. The tp command can be aliased to cd. I don’t think it will run on other shells though.
For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox.
You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.
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 :).
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