Do you guys like Software? Good software makes computers dance on air. Bad software is the devil’s farts. Let’s talk about some of my favourites, some of the very best stuff I’ve found that helps keep Computing joyous.
Operating System
Linux
Link to Reddit page offering good advice for newcomers to Linux
So here’s the big boy right off the bat. Linux! A whole “Operating System”, plucky home-brewed rival to Microsoft Windows and Apple’s IOS. I could (and should) write entire books on why you should use Linux and how to use Linux and which Linux choices you can make – it’s a whole thing. But today, here and now, we’ll keep it short. Linux is awesome. Linux gives you the most Freedom of any OS out there, it largely avoids corporate structures where it can, but with that comes a lot of user-responsibility and, yeah, it can be trickier to get to grips with out of the box if you’re braving these waters unaided, though if my imaginary 90 year old grandfather can do it, anyone can*. Today’s list of Recommendware will be Linux choices first and foremost.
*The one caveat to this: anyone into professional video editing or graphics work. These vocations suffer from industry-grade software basically ignoring Linux as a platform and it is a tiresome feature of every “Have you tried Linux?” discussion online that invariably one of these people will appear to tell everyone they can’t move to Linux because their chosen software doesn’t work (or doesn’t work easily). How they keep magnetically finding these conversations is a mystery and vexes me because they negatively suck the energy away from the discussion of all the more common use-cases that Linux handles perfectly well.
Quick shout-out to my distribution (“Distro”) of choice, Garuda Linux. I like Arch-based distros (other Linux Lineages are available). I also like the white-knuckle bleeding-edge adrenaline of Rolling-Release distros (where software is constantly updating instead of in a fixed state for months at a time) and I like Gaming which is absolutely a big boy, full-blooded, triple-A capability of Linux now thanks to Steam/Proton. Garuda is a beautifully put-together distro, and the team offer lots of other wee bells and whistles such as Search Instances and Chat, and even roll their own Browser fork. Find out more about that below!
Desktop Environment
KDE
Link to Homepage
So you’ve picked a Linux Distro? Congratulations! Did you also pick a Desktop Environment [DE]? For newcomers, Linux likes to front-load a lot of BIG, impactful choices, and you might often not know what suits you until you’ve actually installed and lived with it for a while. I like KDE. It’s built for life’s tinkerers with lots of easily accessible GUI settings and buttons to toggle. It also comes with a veritable plethora of KDE’s other software designed for the platform like Dolphin, KDE’s snazzy and versatile File Manager or KDEnlive, their capable video editor.
Browser
Floorp / Firedragon
Link to Floorp Homepage / Link to Firedragon Homepage
Once you’re past the big choices and actually sitting in the OS itself, the next big thing folks look for is a way to connect to the Internet’s vast cornucopia of delights. You’ll find a lot of choice (scratch deeper and that choice almost disappears; an article for another time) but Firefox has long been a FOSS darling, which is an Initialism of Free and Open Source Software, and not (sadly) a reference to renowned Sci-fi artist Chris Foss. This is an interesting Recommend because I actually use another browser as my daily driver (Look at who hosts this Blog for a clue) but after years of finding Firefox lacking I was really impressed by Floorp. Like many Firefox forks it works a number of improvements into the default offering, but unlike many others it smartly takes cues from Vivaldi as well, most visibly in the many-featured sidebar. I’m a convert to a vertical tab bar and while Firefox still hasn’t implemented a way to do this easily (It’s coming, available in Nightly builds), Floorp just breezed in with a simple toggle.
Firedragon is Garuda Linux’s own fork of Floorp with permission of the Floorp developer, adding another set of enhancements and their own strong branding.
I tried, I really did, but I can’t not recommend Vivaldi. It’s a tinkerer’s dream. Just use it, okay?
Screenshots / Image Annotation
Spectacle
Link to Homepage
Now we’re getting into the more obscure stuff. For me, a tool that easily facilitates screenshotting which then lets me quickly add little annotation notes and lines and arrows and text and numbering etc etc, is an actual god-send, images being worth a thousand-worded alt-text. Moving to Linux in ’23 Spectacle really impressed me with its minimal simplicity over the horrendously unintuitive and clunky Windows thing I’d been using (ShareX). Sometimes you need a quick turnaround on an image as the best way to communicate a problem or idea and Spectacle does this so smartly.
Runner Up: Flameshot. Flameshot aims for a similar simplicity but absolutely collapses when you take smaller shots of regions and, get this, the GUI buttons all move elsewhere to stay visible. While I appreciate the attempt to have things remain available for my click-addiction it absolutely destroys muscle-memory and slows me down having to check where certain functions have landed at this new size configuration. It occurs to me there’s probably a toggle in settings I haven’t found yet so it’s a cautious recommend on that basis.
Command-line Terminal
Yakuake
Link to Homepage
Ahhh, Command-lines. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum that had no other method of interaction. My Atari ST was fully GUI. My first experience of Windows, 3.1, was an unholy chimera of Command-line and barely stable GUI (Seriously, Atari’s GEM desktop ran rings around it, laughing). Linux has both and Linux purists can still be found touting the ol’ ‘type everything you want to do’ paradigm as THE way to interact with your machine. Which makes it odd, then, that the Terminal is often treated like every other piece of software, unavailable until you specifically open the app. Yakuake (Pron: ‘Yah-quake’) solves that problem by having the app load at boot and stay hidden until you press a hotkey, whereupon it smoothly slides in from the top of the screen. Thanks to the way it remembers previously entered commands, updating my system is only three key-presses away (plus entering my root password #SudoPowerEvilOK)(BTW, If anyone gets that hashtag reference know that you are My People).
Terminal-gurus contend that using it for daily operations is “faster” than GUI. But what never gets talked about is how much up-front learning there is to use it, understanding the syntax of how the command is constructed and which flags to use in what circumstance, perhaps reading –help tips or Man pages (RTFM OMG), and wow working with files involves a LOT of typing out file-system addresses and god forbid you get one letter-case wrong. GUI’s may be slower (being naturally argumentative I’d like to see comparisons of use-cases before I’m convinced of this) but in most apps most folks can poke around to find what they need, mostly. There is bad GUI just as there is bad CLI so it makes direct comparisons tricky. What isn’t disputable is that CLIs are easier to help people with – you can just drop a line or two of commands into a post instead of needing a dozen screenshots to explain the nested pathway in a GUI. I suspect when Linux Experts lean towards CLI it’s with helping others in mind as CLI significantly reduces their workload.
I use CLI when I can. I’m still learning, and I suspect it’ll take years to get anywhere near average proficiency with it but I really enjoy that “I’m NEO in the Matrix” feeling it can give me.
Package Manager (Front-End)
Octopi
Link to Octopi Homepage
Linux makes finding software easy via large Repositories of pre-compiled (and sometimes uncompiled) software that Package Managers are designed to work with. Unlike, say, Windows where you need to visit every developer’s homepage to source new software, Linux puts it all in one library at your fingertips. My Arch-based distro uses Pacman to find, install and uninstall software but that’s CLI. Octopi is a GUI wrapper for Pacman, merely a GUI way of doing the same.
Well, I say “merely” but what makes this recommendable to me is how it wraps a few other functions into it. From putting a notification into my system tray alerting me to whenever new software is available (Oh no! Little green ghost icon has turned RED! *scream emoji*), to the one click switch between compiled repositories and the uncompiled AUR repo, to the simple way I can open the app and immediately type a search query that the app immediately presents results for…in many ways it’s become my go-to in certain scenarios over and above stabbing away clumsily at pacman’s esoteric commands. I mean, e.g. sudo pacman -S firefox to install Firefox but pacman -Ss firefox to search all available packages with the word firefox in it makes little logical sense to me. Why is Install ‘S’? Why am I typing Install-search to search? Make it make sense.
So that’s my first little list for your delectation and consideration. I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment if you do. Please comment if you don’t. I love to hear from folks, even when I’m flat-out blisteringly someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet wrong. 🙂
Peace out, y’all.
