• LibreWolf as my browser (it's a more secure and private version of Firefox, comes with a pre-installed adblocker and removes all the unnecessary junk) (Flatpak) with some of the following extensions:
  • LibRedirect for redirecting privacy-invasive websites to private frontends
  • ff2mpv
  • Read Aloud (text-to-speech)
  • Buster for solving CAPTCHAs
  • Dark Reader
  • Violentmonkey for userscripts like Lemmy Universal Link Switcher (it's really useful)
  • DownThemAll
  • Search by Image
  • Server-Status (GitHub) shows information about a web server like country/region (via local GeoIP database lookup), SSL certificate information and more. Good open source alternative to Flagfox.
• Thunderbird for emails (Flatpak)
• Proton Mail Bridge (Flatpak)
• Merkuro Calendar
• Ptyxis (Flatpak) as my terminal. It's optimized for containers (e.g. distrobox). foot is a pretty good alternative if you want something more minimalistic and don't care about containers. There are countless other good options like Kitty, Alacritty, Konsole, WezTerm and many others.
• Emacs as my IDE
• KWrite, Kate or NotepadQQ for quickly editing text documents. There's also Apostrophe for GNOME.
• QOwnNotes for local/Nextcloud-synced notes (Iotas for GNOME) There are other good options like Trilium Notes or Joplin.
• Speech Note speech-to-text note-taking (https://piped.video/watch?v=zlLVgTB42Bo)
• Akregator as my RSS client (Newsflash for GNOME)
• Strawberry as my music player (Amberol or Rhythmbox if you're on GNOME)
• Spot for Spotify (Flatpak)
• Cider for Apple Music (unfortunately not FOSS anymore)
• Feishin for connecting to my self-hosted Navidrome music server
• rescrobbled for saving my music listening history to Last.fm. Also works with self-hosted ListenBrainz.
• Jellyfin Desktop for connecting to my self-hosted Jellyfin media server
• mpv as my video player (Celluloid on GNOME)
• FreeTube for watching YouTube videos
• This modded YouTube Music client that has an adblocker and many other cool features: https://th-ch.github.io/youtube-music/
• Kasts for listening to podcasts (also has the ability to sync with gpodder.net or self-hosted GPodder on Nextcloud)
• LibreOffice (Flatpak) There's also OnlyOffice.
• Skanpage for scanning documents
• GNUcash for accounting
• Notesnook or Standard Notes for end-to-end encrypted note-taking
• Anki Flashcards (Flatpak)
• Logseq (FOSS Obsidian alternative)
• Flameshot for screenshots (GitHub, Flatpak)
• Kdenlive for video editing
• GIMP, Krita and Inkscape for graphics stuff
• Blender for animation stuff
• Natron for VFX
• LMMS and Ardour for music production
• Virtual Machine Manager for creating/managing KVM/QEMU VMs (Boxes for GNOME)
• Nextcloud Desktop for connecting to my home server
• Signal Desktop (Flatpak) There's also Flare for GNOME, which uses GTK instead of Electron and feels more native (Flatpak)
• Element (or NeoChat if you use KDE, Fractal for GNOME) for Matrix
• WebCord for Discord. There are some native GTK clients like Abaddon and Dissent.
• Paper Planes (Native GTK Telegram client)
• Konversation or HexChat for IRC (Polari on GNOME)
• Tokodon as my Mastodon client
• qBittorrent for downloading torrent content. (You can use KTorrent on KDE and Fragments on GNOME)
• Pika Backup for taking backups (There's a pretty good video about it: https://piped.video/watch?v=W30wzKVwCHo)
• Timeshift for btrfs snapshots
• Gradience to customize GTK4 appearance
• Bitwarden for syncing my password database with my self-hosted Vaultwarden server (also works with their public cloud syncing option). Use KeePassXC if you prefer something entirely local.
• LocalSend for sharing files on the local network (basically works like AirDrop) (also works over NetBird or Tailscale btw)
• NetBird for creating a flat VPN network between my devices
• KDE Connect for better integration with my phone. Also works over NetBird btw. Check out GSConnect if you're on GNOME.
• KRunner for quickly finding files or applications (Ulauncher for other desktops, rofi for window managers)
• Safing Portmaster (Firewall and DNS blocking solution. Check out OpenSnitch if you just need a firewall)
• LACT for controlling AMD GPUs
• Flatseal for managing Flatpak permissions (On KDE this is integrated in the system settings)
• Bottles for managing Wine prefixes (Flatpak)

If you like gaming:

• Lutris for managing my games
• Heroic for Epic Games and GOG
• Prism Launcher for Minecraft
• Dolphin for emulating Wii and GameCube
• Ryujinx for emulating the Switch
• RPCS3 for PS3 emulation
• Vita3K for PSVita emulation
• PPSSPP for PSP
• Cemu for Wii U emulation

For the CLI:

• fish shell
• starship
• tmux
• fd as an alternative to find
• bat instead of less (written in Rust, has some nice syntax highlighting)
• ripgrep
• fzf
• zoxide
• yt-dlp
• streamlink
• ncmpcpp
• ncspot
• newsboat

EDIT: realized this was for desktop, so removed the original list of mostly android apps. Here's my go to desktop apps:

Lollypop - music player
Invoiceninja - open source invoicing service
Meld - file/folder comparison
Librewolf - hardened Firefox
Joplin - notes
QEMU/Virt-Manager - virtualization for that one windows app you still need
KeepassXC - password management
Element-desktop - Matrix client
Gparted - no fuss partition management
Lutris - game launcher that works with epic games (among many others)
PDFarranger - best PDF management I've found on Linux Soundconverter - easy to use file converter
Restic - backups
Fdupes - duplicate file finder
Freetube - privacy respecting YouTube client
Paperless-ngx - very well built electronic document storage. Must be run as a server.

Emacs.

Emacs is an app platform in and of itself, and the vanilla installation comes with dozens of its own apps pre-installed. Like how web apps are all programmed in JavaScript, Emacs apps are all programmed in Lisp. All Emacs apps are scriptable and composable in Lisp. Unlike on the web, Emacs encourages you to script your apps to automate things yourself.

Emacs apps are all text based, so they all work equally well in both the GUI and the terminal.

Emacs comes with the following apps pre-installed:

• a text editor for both prose and computer code
• note taking and organizer called Org-mode (sort of like Obsidian, or Logseq)
• a file browser and batch file renamer called Dired
• a CLI console and terminal emulator
• a terminal multiplexer (sort-of like "Tmux")
• a process manager (sort-of like "Htop")
• a simple HTML-only web browser
• man-page and info page browser
• a wrapper around the Grep and Find CLI tools
• a wrapper around SSH called "Tramp"
• e-mail client
• IRC client
• revion control system, including a Git porcelain called "Magit"
• a "diff" tool
• ASCII art drawing program
• keystroke recorder and playback

Some apps that I install into Emacs include:

• "Mastodon.el" Mastodon client
• "Elfeed" RSS feed reader
• "consult" app launcher (sort-of like "Dmenu")

Analogous to the Krita post, I am surprised nobody seems to know KolourPaint. It's similar to MS paint. I use it, when I need to make a quick sketch, whiteboard style, e.g. when sharing my screen with a coworker.

Otherwise, I really must have Dolphin and Okular.

I love dolphin's split mode (quickly toggled with F3) and its ability to seamlessly navigate all kinds of protocols for my NAS, webdav for nextcloud storage, MTP for the phone...

Okular has annotations which have been super useful to me. And it's so easy to switch between viewing single page, two-page and multi-page. Which is great for skimming text documents and presentations. The auto reload ability is great when iterating on a document (e.g. latex doc or matplotlib chart).

Otherwise, of course firefox and thunderbird, not much to say here Please don't use chrome. It's market share makes Google the de-facto owner of www technology. But I guess I'd be preaching to the choir here.

I use CoreCtrl to fix my GPU's atrocious fan curve, which is a necessity since normally it overheats to high hell. With CoreCtrl, I have a nice fan curve that makes my GPU rarely, if ever, run hotter than 70°C.

OpenBSD user, in no particular order, definitely missing some stuff: pdksh (OpenBSD) or oksh (Linux/MacOS), su, unix/posix utils (man (most important), find (second most important), apropos, awk, grep, df, du, dd, ed, etc), mg, openssh, got, heirloom-doctools/troff, bc-gh (bc calculator with a bunch of extensions), xclip, xdotool, xeyes (very important), yt-dlp (youtube-dl seems dead these days), some C compiler (clang/gcc), httpd, opensmtp, ffmpeg, libressl/openssl, pf, tmux (I prefer to use my window manager, but if I'm in tty or need to retain a shell session, tmux is useful), ping, ifconfig, traceroute, netstat, nc/netcat, unwind (or other dns server like unbound)

My nixpkgs list is something like

• Firefox
• Vim
• WezTerm
• Fzf
• Zoxide
• Starship
• Copyq
• mpv
• Obsidian
• Chromium
• Xbindkeys
• Xte

Not exactly unheard of:

Terminal:

Vim or Neovim, Tmux or Zillij.

Web browser:

Firefox or a fork, but personally I’m fine with the standard Mozilla offering with a couple of extensions.

Photos:

Big fan of darktable as a lightroom replacement.

The first things I install on a fresh linux install are always htop (task manager) and micro (nano but better).

Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman

I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.

I use XSane and TheGimp to scan and edit my paintings, Firefox with privacy extensions to browse, VLC to play videos, Gnome Mahjongg to waste time playing. I used to use Resolve to edit videos, I'll soon start using Kdenlive. As a visual artist I have a thing for film emulation that Kdenlive can't do, but it's something I'll have to leave behind.

BleachBit is a must have and PhotoGIMP is pretty neat.

Profanity & Dino are nice chat clients

There's no doubt there are a great variety of Linux packages in use.

Recently I did a CD install of Debian 12 (Bookworm) desktop with Gnome, which loads a bunch of stuff over the Net. Here are extra packages that I installed manually. The first set is used by and with an automated configuration script that I wrote, so they have to come in to begin with.

Here are third-party packages I admire. These are not available in Debian repositories although some provide Debian-compatible repositories of their own.

Tor Browser Bundle: Anonymizing Network Browser

This is available from https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/ as a tarball. This should be unpacked and the whole tor-browser_en-US directory moved to the ~user folder. This is so that the browser can auto-update at user authority as the need arises.

RetroShare: Secure Communications with Friends

This has its own Debian-compatible repository.

metar: A Package to Parse METAR Coded Weather Reports

~/lab_pip/bin/activate
pip install metar --upgrade

weeWX: Open source software for backyard weather stations.

From http://weewx.com/docs/debian.htm. Although a Debian package exists, doing any development practically requires that all the code be in user-space, so don't install the package. Download it instead.

OpenHAB: Home Automation

This has its own Debian-compatible repository.

Ant: GTK3/4 Themes by eliverlara

From https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest.

This is for claws-mail. It provides better contrast.

Not necessarily unheard of but Floorp has been pretty great for work. I think all of the other applications I use are well known within their respective niche (e.g JOSM)