What are some Linux desktop application you cannot live without?
I am really amazed at how Linux has come over the past few years as a desktop operating system! No more than 5 years ago I had to run OSX to get the best of both worlds: a decent core computing platform with good productivity tools. However, in the last few years it is now a reality: Linux easily can match MacOS as a productive desktop platform.
So apps making this possible for me:
Productivity:
- LibreOffice or OpenOffice
- Google Keep (Chrome App)
- Simple Note
- Makagiga (todo manager a little more robust than what Google Keep can offer)
- Draw.io (chrome app) pretty polished, robust and free diagramming app
- Journey (Chrome App) Journal app that is pretty polished
- Caret polished cross-platform markup editor (simplenote just too many features for professional use)
- Dropbox is cross-platform and the free storage plan is good enough to sync important files across systems
Development:
- JetBrains IDE's PHPStorm, WebStorm, and Pycharm (community)
- Komodo Edit - offers a code runner, RegEx Toolkit and HTTP Debugger. Pricey but every few years it will go on sale for about 99 us
- SublimeText - worth 75 bones for me. Atom just takes too long to load.
- RazorSQL - about $99 for a cross-platform SQL swiss-army knife.
- MySQL WorkBench
- Virtual Box
- VMWare Workstation (this supports level-1 nested hypervisors better for learning Hyper-V and vSphere)
- CMD tools of course is where Linux is a powerhouse: phpbrew, Python, GIT (dropbox works well for small repositories :-) ), Vagrant, PHP, MySQL, etc...
- Leptop code snippet manager
Web / Internet / Networking
- Chrome
- Firefox for its dev extensions
- HexChat
- FileZilla
- WireShark (duh)
- nLoad
- nTop
Media:
- VideoStream (Chrome Plugin for streaming to Chromecast)
- Gimp
- VLC
- Pix image viewer