• GIMP (with photogimp patch)
• Steam
• Librewolf (I could also opt for a chromium based browser)
• Tor Browser (to browse onion links/throwaway browser)
• Heroic Games Launcher
• Prism Launcher
• latest Java lts (either from adoptium or openjdk i dont care about flashy new features)
• Libreoffice Still (similar to the second reason above and onlyoffice in appimage due to Libreoffice weird handling with ppsx files and powerpoints)
• QEMU/KVM with virt manager
• Gnome evolution (if it’s gtk desktop I could opt for other email clients)
• Proton-GE
• WINE
• Ghostty(Kinda sucks it’s based on libadwaita and gnome forces this theme on you no matter your desktop)
• Fish/ZSH(fish not having posix compatibility is kinda annoying)
• MPV (I could still use vlc but I prefer mpv because it can stream youtube links)
• Ytp-dl(I can opt for a gui for convenience sake)
• BTOP
• Fastfetch

I’m going to try to mention things I haven’t seen already written, though I may repeat some of the more important ones to me.

(In no particular order)

Terminal:

• Kitty (Main Terminal)
• Fish (Terminal Prompt)
• Neovim (Code/Text editing)
• Zoxide (a directory changer; once you go to a directory, you can type z and a partial name to go back to it)
• Atuin (a command history lister, can get a key and bring over commands from other systems)
• Midnight Commander (CLI file manager)
• Btop (CLI system monitor)
• Palette (I do a lot of theming in different configs as well as HTML/CSS, so its nice to have something to quick convert hex to RGB).

GUI:

• Timeshift (backup/restore)
• Eddie (for AirVPN)
• novelWriter (my FAVORITE writing tool for my books)
• Floorp (Firefox fork browser)
• Conky Manager 2 (desktop monitoring widgets)
• Rofi (keyboard launcher)
• firewalld (tried this out recently, good firewall)
• Flameshot (ALWAYS; its my favorite screenshot tool)
• MPV (I still get VLC, but opt for MPV most of the time for videos/streaming)
• Speedcrunch (A+ calculator)
• Steam
• Lutris
• Protonup-QT (to inject GE Proton into Steam/Lutris)
• Stremio (a great little streaming tool)

I would like to add that I do use Arch, but I’m fairly sure 99% of these packages, if not all of them, are available for most other distros.

For CLI lovers: Check out Terminal Trove

Edit: I did see that someone mentioned no explanations on the apps, so I tried to put a little blurb on each.

There’s a lot of letters here, but nobody is explaining what they mean. How do I know what I need? I’m not gonna install everything, or look up every single program to see.

I’m a former Windows user, so I install activate-linux for similar experience.

• Anki
• Beyond Compare
• Discord
• GIMP (Not sure if it’s installed by default on Linux Mint) with PhotoGIMP patch.
• GnuCash
• GParted
• KeePassXC
• KWrite + Kate
• Pinta
• qbittorrent
• Steam
• Telegram
• Thunderbird
• virt-manager
• VLC
• Wine

neovim, basic development utilities (gcc, make…), zsh, ssh, btop, nvtop, kitty, river, git, cargo, nix, flatpak, ytdlp, ffmpeg, firefox, chromium, python

• Shell: Fish
• Resource monitoring: Btop
• Browser: Librewolf
• Text editor: Vim (unless you do heavy programming then neovim)
• Basic tools: git and wget
• Themeing: GTK customizer
• Terminal: Foot

• Kate
• Yakuake
• Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium
• LibreOffice (I use Calc a lot)
• Kate
• Ocular
• DoH-client
• htop
• ncdu
• Windscribe
• virt-manager

… and more I can’t remember right now, because it’s too early in the morning.

EDIT:

• nano
• mc (midnight commander)

guix and/or nix

Both are functional package managers and manage dependency trees better than flatpak IMO (also the package description languages mean you can manipulate the package definitions at install time much easier)

If you can’t find a package in guix/nix then it behooves you to use flatpak

kitty, nvim, fish, zed, mpv, btop, borg. Weird how all the gone ones have short names. Depending on the system, I would add tlp as well.

mpv
pdftk
yt-dlp

Probably would run into these things needed in this order:

• The text editor kakoune
• Add uBlock Origin to Firefox
• KeepassXC
• tmux

Then nodejs if it’s a laptop, or Steam if it’s a desktop.

For me personally I install kitty terminal and integrate it with fish asap. Then I waste a bunch of time customizing it to my liking. My preferred text editor is Kate regardless of what DE I’m using and I usually get bleachbit for basic cleanup.

Fortune. Cowsay.