Linux Apps
Useful apps for GNU/Linux systems
Additional resources: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications
Ubuntu is an open source software operating system that runs from the desktop, to the cloud, to all your internet connected things.
LUKS is the standard for Linux hard disk encryption. By providing a standard on-disk-format, it does not only facilitate compatibility among distributions, but also provides secure management of multiple user passwords. LUKS stores all necessary setup information in the partition header, enabling to transport or migrate data seamlessly.
systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system. ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg libinput: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/libinput
Alternatives: Wayland Wayland ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland
PulseAudio is a sound system for POSIX OSes, meaning that it is a proxy for your sound applications. It allows you to do advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware. Things like transferring the audio to a different machine, changing the sample format or channel count and mixing several sounds into one are easily achieved using a sound server. ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio Troubleshooting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting
GNOME is a free and open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. GNOME is part of the GNU Project and developed by The GNOME Project which is composed of both volunteers and paid contributors, the largest corporate contributor being Red Hat. Help: https://help.gnome.org/users/index.html.en ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME GNOME Shell Extensions: https://extensions.gnome.org/ Extension Manager: https://github.com/mjakeman/extension-manager
Déjà Dup is a simple backup tool for GNOME. It hides the complexity of backing up the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses Duplicity as the backend. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Synchronization_and_backup_programs
GNOME Software lets you install and update applications and system extensions. fwupd: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/docs/users
Snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud and IoT that update automatically, are easy to install, secure, cross-platform and dependency-free. They're being used on millions of Linux systems every day. Documentation: https://snapcraft.io/docs
Search thousands of snaps used by millions of people across 41 Linux distributions. Requires Snapcraft.
Flatpak is a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux. Documentation: https://docs.flatpak.org/
Flathub is the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. Browse the apps online, from your app center or the command line. Requires Flatpak.
Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.
Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop. Wine User's Guide: https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User%27s_Guide Wine FAQ: https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine
A terminal emulator for GNOME.
Alternatives: Terminator, Tilix
System Monitor is a tool to manage running processes and monitor system resources.
Tweaks allows the adjustment of several advanced GNOME options that can't be configured in GNOME Settings.
Dconf Editor is a viewer and editor of applications internal settings. It allows editing options not exposed in some applications interface. It’s a powerful tool, that could break some applications if misused, and you should only use it understanding that.
Simple file manager for GNOME. Also known as Nautilus. Provides the user with a simple way to navigate and manage files. Nautilus Wipe: https://wipetools.tuxfamily.org/nautilus-wipe.html
File Roller is an archive manager for the GNOME environment. This means that you can create and modify archives; view the content of an archive; view and modify a file contained in the archive; extract files from the archive.
Access everything with virtually zero effort. Run applications, open files or their paths, open bookmarks in your browser, search the web, calculate things and a lot more. Albert is a desktop agnostic launcher. Its goals are usability and beauty, performance and extensibility. It is written in C++ and based on the Qt framework.
KeePassXC can store your passwords safely and auto-type them into your everyday websites and applications. KeePassXC is a community fork of KeePassX, the cross-platform port of KeePass for Windows. Every feature works cross-platform and was thoroughly tested on multiple systems to provide users with the same look and feel on every supported operating system. This includes the beloved Auto-Type feature.
PWGen is a professional password generator capable of generating large amounts of cryptographically-secure passwords—“classical” passwords, pronounceable passwords, pattern-based passwords, and passphrases consisting of words from word lists.
Seriously private browsing. Firefox shows you how many data-collecting trackers are blocked with Enhanced Tracking Protection. Firefox Lockwise makes the passwords you save in Firefox secure and available on all your devices. Firefox Monitor alerts you if we know your information is a part of another company’s data breach. Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/ ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox
An efficient blocker add-on for various browsers. Fast, potent, and lean.
Alternatives: Adblock Plus, AdGuard
The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked. The Tor Browser lets you use Tor on Windows, macOS, or Linux. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.
Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features! Thunderbird Snap: https://snapcraft.io/thunderbird Add-ons: https://addons.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/ ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Thunderbird New Mail Indicator: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1505/ How to start Thunderbird minimized: https://askubuntu.com/a/1054822/440005
Alternatives: Evolution, Geary, Claws Mail, Mailnag Geary Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Geary
Organize your schedule and life’s important events in a calendar that’s fully integrated with your Thunderbird or SeaMonkey email client. Manage multiple calendars, create your daily to do list, invite friends to events, and subscribe to public calendars. From Thunderbird 74 onwards Lightning does not exist as a separate add-on but is integrated into Thunderbird.
Alternatives: Evolution, GNOME Calendar Evolution ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Evolution
Task manager with Todoist support.
Alternatives: Lightning Calendar, Evolution
Date Reminder reminds you of recurring or nonrecurring events, like birthdays, bills to pay, appointments etc... Requires Wine to run.
A simple clock application for GNOME. It includes world clocks, alarms, a stopwatch and a timer.
Calculator is an application that solves mathematical equations and is suitable as a default application in a GNOME Desktop environment.
Alternatives: SpeedCrunch, Qalculate!, NaSC
Skype makes it easy to stay in touch. Talk. Chat. Collaborate.
Alternatives: Zoom, Whereby, Jitsi Meet
gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.
Alternatives: Sublime Text Sublime Text package manager: https://packagecontrol.io/
Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers. Meld helps you compare files, directories, and version controlled projects. It provides two- and three-way comparison of both files and directories, and has support for many popular version control systems.
Alternatives: Beyond Compare, SmartSynchronize
regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.
Alternatives: FAR - Find And Replace, Rummage, Search Monkey, grep
A document viewer for the GNOME desktop. You can view, search or annotate documents in many different formats. Evince supports documents in: PDF, PS, EPS, XPS, DjVu, TIFF, DVI (with SyncTeX), and Comic Books archives (CBR, CBT, CBZ, CB7).
Alternatives: Okular Okular Snap: https://snapcraft.io/okular
A simple and modern eBook viewer for Linux desktops. Supports EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FictionBook, and comic book archive formats.
Alternatives: Bookworm Bookworm Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.babluboy.bookworm
LibreOffice is a free and powerful office suite, and a successor to Apache OpenOffice.
Alternatives: ONLYOFFICE
LanguageTool offers spell and grammar checking. https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server
DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. DocFetcher requires that you create so-called indexes for the folders you want to search in. The application runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License.
Alternatives: Recoll
FSearch is a fast file search utility, inspired by Everything Search Engine. It's written in C and based on GTK+3.
Alternatives: ANGRYsearch, DawnlightSearch
FreeFileSync is a folder comparison and synchronization software that creates and manages backup copies of all your important files. Instead of copying every file every time, FreeFileSync determines the differences between a source and a target folder and transfers only the minimum amount of data needed. FreeFileSync is Open Source software, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Alternatives: DirSync Pro
A simple and lightweight translator that allows to translate and speak text using Google, Yandex and Bing.
Alternative: Translate Shell + xsel + Yad
GoldenDict is a feature-rich dictionary lookup program. Lingvo dictionaries decompiler: https://github.com/nongeneric/lsd2dsl
Eye of GNOME is the GNOME image viewer. Supported formats: https://help.gnome.org/users/eog/stable/formats-view.html.en
Alternatives: gThumb
XnView MP is a versatile and powerful photo viewer, image management, image resizer. XnView is one of the most stable, easy-to-use, and comprehensive photo editors. All common picture and graphics formats are supported (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, WEBP, GIF, APNG, PSD, JPEG2000, OpenEXR, HEIC, camera RAW).
XnConvert is a fast, powerful and free cross-platform batch image converter, It allows to automate editing for your massive photo collections, you can rotate, convert and compress your different images, photos and pictures easily, and apply over 80 actions (like resize, crop, color adjustements, filter, ...). All common picture and graphics formats are supported. You can save and re-use your presets for another batch image convert.
Pinta is a free, open source drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. Its goal is to provide users with a simple yet powerful way to draw and manipulate images on Linux, macOS, Windows and *BSD.
Alternatives: KolourPaint, Drawing, Dibuja
Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software.
Alternatives: Ksnip
Audacious is an open source audio player. A descendant of XMMS, Audacious plays your music how you want it, without stealing away your computer’s resources from other tasks. Drag and drop folders and individual song files, search for artists and albums in your entire music library, or create and edit your own custom playlists. Audacious runs on Linux, on BSD derivatives, and on Microsoft Windows.
Alternatives: DeaDBeeF
An Internet radio player for Linux.
Alternatives: Radio Tray Lite, GNOME Shortwave, Goodvibes, odio
Mp3Splt-project is a utility to split mp3, ogg vorbis and native FLAC files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Supports also automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. Trimming using silence detection is also available.
Alternatives: mp3DirectCut (requires Wine)
SoundConverter is the leading audio file converter for the GNOME Desktop. It reads anything GStreamer can read (Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, AVI, MPEG, MOV, M4A, AC3, DTS, ALAC, MPC, Shorten, APE, SID, MOD, XM, S3M, etc...), and writes to Opus, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WAV, AAC, and MP3 files, or use any GNOME Audio Profile. SoundConverter aims to be simple to use, and very fast. Thanks to its multithreaded design, it will use as many cores as possible to speed up the conversion. It can also extract the audio from videos.
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
Alternatives: Videos, Celluloid, MPV Celluloid Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.celluloid_player.Celluloid
MediaInfo is a convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files.
HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.
Alternatives: LosslessCut, VidCutter
With this tool you can rename lots of files and/or folders at once using various methods such as replacing, rewriting, removing, truncating, numbering and many more.
Alternatives: KRename, Ant Renamer (requires Wine), ReNamer (requires Wine)
The qBittorrent project aims to provide an open-source software alternative to µTorrent. Additionally, qBittorrent runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows).
Alternatives: Transmission, Deluge
yt-dlp is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube and a few more sites.
aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink.
Alternatives: uGet
Serviio is a free media server. It allows you to stream your media files (music, video or images) to any DLNA-certified renderer device (e.g. a TV set, Bluray player, games console) on your home network.
Alternatives: Plex
LinSSID displays a table of all of the local wireless networks that your device can receive, and information about them. It also displays charts of the signal strength of each network by channel number and over time.
Alternatives: sparrow-wifi, wavemon
inxi is a Perl tool that lets you get all kinds of system information, either in your console/terminal/shell, or in your IRC client.
Alternatives: Hardinfo, Hardware Lister, hwinfo, CPU-X (by X0rg)
A GNOME utility for dealing with storage devices.
- Create and restore disk images. Perform low-level copies and attach disk images as virtual loop devices.
- Partitionize and format disks. Common filesystems and encryption (LUKS) are supported.
- Inspect drive speed and health status. GNOME notifies you if disks fail with critical SMART values. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/S.M.A.R.T
Alternatives: GSmartControl
Disk Usage Analyzer is a graphical application to analyse disk usage in any GNOME environment. Disk Usage Analyzer can easily scan device volumes or a specific user-requested directory branch (local or remote). Once the scan is complete Disk Usage Analyzer provides a graphical representation of each selected folder.
With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, and more.
GtkHash is a desktop utility for computing message digests or checksums. Most well-known hash functions are supported, including MD5, SHA1, SHA2 (SHA256/SHA512), SHA3 and BLAKE2.
Redshift adjusts the color temperature of your screen according to your surroundings. This may help your eyes hurt less if you are working in front of the screen at night. This program is inspired by f.lux.
A status bar application able to temporarily prevent the activation of both the screensaver and the "sleep" powersaving mode.
A Qt GUI (front-end) for python-qrtools that makes easy creating and decoding the codes.
Alternatives: Decoder, Zint Barcode Generator
NFO Viewer is a simple viewer for NFO files, which are “ASCII” art in the CP437 codepage. The advantages of using NFO Viewer instead of a text editor are preset font and encoding settings, automatic window size and clickable hyperlinks.
CDemu is a software suite designed to emulate an optical drive and disc (including CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs) on the Linux operating system.
TeamViewer is a comprehensive, remote access, remote control and remote support solution that works with almost every desktop and mobile platform, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use.
Alternatives: Boxes
UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. You can either let UNetbootin download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file.
Alternatives: balenaEtcher
A Linux program to create a Windows USB stick installer from a real Windows DVD or image.
Alternative: https://github.com/ValdikSS/windows2usb
SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the hard disk partitions. It comes with a lot of Linux system utilities such as GParted, fsarchiver, filesystem tools and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools).
Thanks for the effort, it's a usable list for me.