A good kit IMO, in order of priority:

• Cherrytree; nominally for making hierarchical lists but you can basically use it as a wiki for your entire life. You can theme it yourself too, if you think it looks too retro out of the box.
• Syncthing, for keeping files synced between devices without having to use a server.
• Qbittorrent, for getting files you need. Remember to install search plugins.
• KeepassXC. Password manager (local, not on a server, use in combination with Syncthing).
• Convertall, for unit conversions.
• Calibre, for managing an ebook library, converting formats, removing DRM, transferring to ereader etc.
• Rhythmbox, for music library, podcasts, internet radio.
• Shotwell, for photo and video library. Easy to use, supports tags (metadata written to image files).
• GIMP, for image manipulation. It’s extremely versatile, comprehensive and versatile. 3.0 is due out soon and will include non-destructive layer effects. Heavyweight piece of software, so expect a learning curve.
• Ardour, for music production. Heavyweight, steep learning curve.
• Flowblade for video production. Lightweight, easy to learn.
• Libreoffice, desktop publishing.
• Librewolf; privacy-focussed web browser.
• Thunderbird; highly organisable email client.
• Freetube, for watching youtube videos without all the ads and tracking. Local subscriptions and playlists, which you can export to use with Newpipe on Android. Also lets you download video and audio.

If you like the terminal also add:

• ranger; file manager
• newsboat; RSS feed reader
• yt-dl; download videos from youtube and many other sites ;)
• w3m; command line web browser. I like to use this in combination with newsboat.

Enjoy!

Someone already mentioned Logseq, but I’m really enjoying Obsidian for my note taking needs. It’s similar, but I have found Obsidian to be very nice. Not FOSS, but I really like what the devs are doing.

• sshfs. I use it for everything.
• autossh
• git. It always annoys me how Debian doesn’t come with it out of the box. Gets me every time I set up a new server.
• Signal desktop app.

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.

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)

• Nvim with lazy-nvim
• Emacs (org mode)
• Krita
• Strawberry Music (can organize and transcode music)
• Easy Effects (for poorly balanced YouTube videos or voice chat)
• Calibre
• YARG (I like plastic guitar)

QuodLibet: I’m waiting for Amarok 3 to be ported but right now this is the best music collector/player in my experience.

My nixpkgs list is something like

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

Thunderbird

Any flavor of vi, Gnu Screen, lrzsz, bash with the usual cli tools (awk, sed, grep, tail, head, rev, cat, tac, and recently jq and yq). Also openssh client. Some flavor of netcat is also crazy useful too. This is a good home for me to do my thing.

Edir: oh, and git. How did I forget git?!

• Obsidian - great markdown-based note app
• NewsFlash - fast and elegant RSS news reader
• Bottles - program to run Windows apps and managing them easily
• BreakTimer - a life-saver for me; it allows you to set a break after given amount of time
• LibreWolf - privacy-focused fork of Firefox

There are a lot of awesome programs on Linux, I recommend browsing Flathub to find them

A lot of good stuff here. The three things that are most notable for me are:

Notepadqq

Fsearch

Librewolf

Apparently people still believe that floorp is proprietary. That’s not true, some of it’s components went closed-source for a while to switch licenses. Now it’s back to being open-source

https://www.byobu.org/ can eschew both screen and tmux Mosh (the mobile SSH client, not linking here) if installing it on the remote server is an option

Haven’t seen anyone mention Alacritty yet, that’s my favorite terminal emulator.