List of recommended GNU/Linux software

This page is for good quality software on GNU/Linux platforms based on the contributions of wiki users. If you saw something that looked really nice on /g/ or /tech/, and were interested, take a look at what anons generally use.

Most Windows software should work just fine with Wine or Proton. If you're looking for alternatives to specifically incompatible Windows or macOS software, take a look at switching.software.

It should be noted that a lot of this software is portable to BSD, and should be included in the ports tree of your preferred operating system. It should also be noted that most, if not all of this software runs very acceptably on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux

What does /g/ use?

• Distro: See Babbies First Linux
• Web Browser: See Web browsers
• VoIP: Vesktop or Element.
• Media Player: mpv.
• Music player: mpv or cmus.
• Image Viewer: feh or swayimg
• Terminal Emulator: urxvt or st.
• File Manager: none or Ranger or Vifm.
• Document Reader: zathura.
• Text Editor: Neovim, Emacs or Visual Studio Code.

Also check out the "What does /g/ use?" category of this wiki.

Communications

Web browsers

For more detailed information, see Web browsers.

Chromium

Chromium is the developer version of Google Chrome. While nearly identical to Google's browser, they lack proprietary components like automatic updates and Widevine DRM. Although it is open source software, its code is not as well audited as Firefox because its source tree is an unreadable 4GiB+ clusterfuck of mental illness.However, non-Ungoogled Chromium still phones home to Google.

Firefox

Firefox is free software developed by Mozilla. It is highly extensible via addons and included as the default browser in many GNU/Linux distributions. It is often criticized on /g/ and /tech/ as "SJWfox" because of some Mozilla developers outspoken campaigns on social and political issues.

Tor Browser

Tor Browser (formerly known as Tor Browser Bundle) is a package of a modified Firefox extended support release, NoScript, Tor, TorButton and TorLauncher. It automatically routes traffic through the Tor network and deletes history and cookies when closed.

Pale Moon

Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox that maintains support for the older XUL addon/theming standard. It retains the "Australis" UI, and uses its own "Goanna" rendering engine, forked from Gecko, which performs poorly with some CSS/JS-heavy sites. Does not support current Firefox addons, and has its own addons (see also: JustOff addons).

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is a continuation of the Mozilla suite. Unlike most modern web browsers, it is an Internet suite, complete with bundled programs for email, IRC, and web design. It is compatible with most XUL add-ons.

Parabola Iceweasel

Parabola Iceweasel is an FSF approved rebrand of Firefox maintained by Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. It removes all nonfree features such as DRM and trademarked artwork. Iceweasel is basically GNU IceCat, but actually maintained, and without pre-installed extensions that break 90% of all websites.

Surf

Surf is a lightweight browser created by the Suckless project. It uses the glib webkit. Most settings can not be changed after you compile, and the majority of setting change from default requires you to implement them into your Makefile.

Email clients

Claws Mail

Claws Mail is an email client (and news reader), based on GTK+. The appearance and interface are designed to be familiar to new users coming from other popular email clients, as well as experienced users. Almost all commands are accessible with the keyboard.

Sylpheed

Sylpheed is a lightweight e-mail client based on GTK+2. Claws Mail was forked from Sylpheed; however, Sylpheed still retains an extremely simple and minimalist appearance and configuration.

Betterbird

Betterbird is a fork of the more well known Thunderbird. After Mozilla followed in the inglorious footsteps of GNOME where features are removed and bugs closed as wontfix, Betterbird stepped up and delivers fixes and features. It is compatible with most Thunderbird addons.

Geary

Geary is a personal information management application that provides integrated mail, calendaring and address book functionality.

KMail

KMail is the email component of Kontact, the integrated personal information manager from KDE.

Terminal

• Mutt's initial interface was based largely on the ELM mail client. To a large extent, Mutt is still very ELM-like in presentation of information in menus (and in fact, ELM users will find it quite painless to switch as the default key bindings are identical). As development progressed, features found in other popular clients such as PINE and MUSH have been added, the result being a hybrid, or "mutt." There is a fork called Neomutt that has combined many community patches to traditional mutt as well as added some features for the modern user. Try out both and decide which one you want yourself.

IM (Instant Messaging) clients

Element

Element is a free and open source cross-platform instant messaging client and the flagship implementation for the Matrix protocol. It's a solid Discord alternative, with support for voice and video calling. DMs are end-to-end encrypted by default. Bridges to other messaging services, such as Discord, Jabber, iMessage and more are available with third party bridges. Unfortunately, however, it is an Electron app.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a free and open source instant messaging client developed in C. It is based upon Libpurple and offers support for Jabber (XMPP), Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, GroupWise, Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE and Zephyr out of the box. Support for additional protocols like Matrix and Signal is offered through third-party plugins. Plugins are available for OTR, OMEMO and many other features. Beware it stores passwords in plain text by default.

File:Discord.png Discord

Discord is a non-free VoIP and instant messaging client, widely used for gaming. It is absolutely chock-full of spyware but it is the main platform that normies use. The Linux client is absolutely terrible and doesn't support many of Discord's "features". Consider using Vesktop or Equibop if you have to use the Discord app.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients

HexChat

HexChat is a continuation of XChat and makes both its source code and binaries available to users of all platforms it's created for. Like its parent software, HexChat is licensed under the GNU GPL. It includes all the basic features one would need, and can be ideal both for new users and IRC veterans. Has built-in plugins for Lua, Perl and Python scripting.

ChatZilla is an IRC client addon for XUL clients such as SeaMonkey and Pale Moon. Great for people who want basic IRC features without having to install an additional application.

Terminal

• Irssi is the father of rice clients and easily accessible for all systems. The author of the Metacity window manager for GNU/Linux describes his software as follows: "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios." Irssi is the terminal IRC client equivalent of that sentiment. Irssi is extensible through plugins.

• Weechat is Irssi with more rice, scripting languages, ideal defaults and development. It is rising in popularity as a preferred client on /g/. Weechat also includes plugin functionality.

VoIP (Voice-over-IP) clients

Mumble

Mumble is free and open source audio chat software. It is superior in audio quality and latency by always being the first client to use latest technologies, such as the Opus audio codec.

Jitsi Meet

Jitsi Meet is a Discord/Skype alternative using standards compliant FLOSS. It supports text encryption with OTR and audio/video encryption with ZRTP. The downside is it is a web app.

Google Voice

Google Voice runs in a web browser and requires a plugin for full functionality. There does not appear to be official desktop software for this. The botnet never felt so good. Free phone numbers, calling, texting, and integration into Gmail.

DNS

DNSCrypt

DNSCrypt adds security to the otherwise plaintext DNS lookups. Everything is encrypted, which means no more eavesdropping, and no more spoofing.

Unbound

Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS server that can enforce DNSSEC, harden your DNS queries and ultimately lower your 3rd-party exposure by caching DNS queries. Can and should be used with DNSCrypt.

OpenNIC is a secure DNS resolving service.

File compression utilities

File compression software is widely used by various software distributors and archives to mitigate bandwidth and storage space requirements.

PeaZip

PeaZip is a free and open source archiver developed in free Pascal by Giorgio Tani. It is notable for its native PEA format and its support of cutting-edge compression technologies like PAQ and LPAQ that are not supported by other popular archivers. Like 7zip, it is capable of retrieving files from virtually any archive that one might encounter.

The PAQ and LPAQ methods are capable of an impressive degree of lossless compression, but the time and system resources required are equally impressive.

Ark

Ark is the default compression tool for KDE. It supports a few formats and has an easy-to-understand GUI

Terminal

• p7zip is a port of 7za.exe for POSIX systems. 7za.exe is the command line version of 7-zip.

• bzip2 is a high-quality data compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques (the PPM family of statistical compressors), whilst being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression.

• xz works in a way similar to gzip and utilizes a compression format similar to 7zip (LZMA2). In fact, .tar.xz files are compatible with 7zip.

File sharing

BitTorrent clients

qBittorrent

qBittorrent is a libtorrent-based free and open source BitTorrent client written in C++. According to its developers, the aim of the client is to provide a free software alternative to µTorrent.

Deluge

Deluge is a libtorrent-based free and open source BitTorrent client written in Python. It is highly extensible via its plug-ins system. Deluge is notable for having originated the particular method of protocol encryption that is currently in use by every major BitTorrent client. It can be a bit of a resource hog on Windows compared to other clients.

Transmission

Transmission is a popular free and open source client that is easy to use and lightweight. For years it has been the preferred BitTorrent client on macOS and GNU/Linux, and it finally has received an official release on Windows.

FTP clients

Tip: Most modern file managers (as well as web browsers) support the FTP protocol. Linux also comes with ftp or sftp commands available in the terminal

TermSCP

TermSCP is a cross-platform free, open source TUI file transfer utility written in Rust.

Direct Connect

FlyingCarpet

FlyingCarpet is an open-source AirDrop clone, Written with Rust.

Sharedrop

ShareDrop uses WebRTC to share files between two devices. Can be used in any web browser.

EiskaltDC++

EiskaltDC++ is a cross-platform program that uses the Direct Connect and ADC protocols. It is compatible with DC++, FlylinkDC++, LinuxDC++ and other DC clients.

Nicotine+

Nicotine+ Is a free software equivalent to the official proprietary client for the Soulseek P2P filesharing network. It is great for music sharing and getting rare lossless files. Check it out on the /mu/ wiki.

Performance

System Monitors

• Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python.
• gotop is a very pretty terminal based graphical activity monitor inspired by gtop and vtop written in Go.
• htop is an interactive text-mode process viewer for Unix systems. It aims to be a better 'top'
• top (table of processes) is a task manager program found in many Unix-like operating systems that displays information about CPU and memory utilization.

CPU

• irqbalance is a daemon to help balance the cpu load generated by interrupts across all of a system's CPUs, as opposed to merely the first one (which creates bottlenecks).
• numad is a daemon that provides placement advice and process management for efficient use of CPUs and memory on NUMA systems. If you have a NUMA system you should use both.

GPU

• LACT is a GTK system utility designed to provide information, control the fans and overclock your AMD or Nvidia video card and graphics processor.

tmpfs-based RAM disks

• Anything-sync-daemon is a pseudo-daemon that relocates your files of choice to tmpfs and uses rsync periodically specifically to sync them back from the RAM mounted tmpfs partition to disk.
• Profile-sync-daemon is like Anything-sync-daemon, but is used specifically to sync browser profiles.

Maintenance

Backup and sync

Rsync

Rsync is a fast file transfer and synchronization tool. It is included in most GNU/Linux distributions by default and can be run from the terminal.

Timeshift

Timeshift is a graphical rsync utility that makes periodic backups of your system and /home folder by default. Easy to customise and very similar to the macOS 'Time Machine' feature.

Btrfs

Not a backup utility in and of itself, but the Btrfs filesystem ships by default on some Linux distros and includes data recovery functionalities built-in.

Unison

Unison is a mature, cross-platform and free software file synchronizer. It can sync files and directories locally (between drives) or across the network via SSH or plain TCP. It works by comparing checksums, modified dates and other properties to efficiently propagate only the changes between replicas. The GUI provides a summary of all differences and allows modification of default behavior before any action is taken. It is resilient to failures and can handle power loss, dropped network connection, etc. It is available in both GUI and terminal only versions. Both the server and client must be running the same version if using to synchronize remote storage. It has a bit of a learning curve, but everything is well documented.

Borg is a deduplicating backup program. Optionally, it supports compression and authenticated encryption.

File recovery tools

Main article: Data recovery

TestDisk

TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table).

PhotoRec

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

System information tools

CPU-G

CPU-G is an application that shows useful information about your hardware. It collects and displays information about your CPU, RAM, Motherboard, some general information about your system and more. It is almost exactly the same as the Windows application CPU-Z in appearance.

Multimedia

Media players

mpv

Tip: The majority of configuration for this application is done manually by editing its configuration file.

mpv is an incredibly powerful and widely-used fork of mplayer2 and MPlayer. It features FFMPEG playback, high quality scaling algorithms, OpenGL output, proper color management, and is completely free and open-source. With yt-dlp, it can also play video and audio streams, and even .gif files!

If you'd prefer a more user-friendly experience, consider Haruna (KDE, LXQt) or Celluloid (GNOME, XFCE).

VLC

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.

Media center and HTPC

Kodi

Kodi (former XBMC) is a free and open source GPL software media center featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It is highly customizable via skins and addons. There are even addons available for streaming from internet services like YouTube and Twitch.tv. It plays nearly every video and music format out of the box. The built in scrapers can pull data from sites like IMDB and thetvdb to allow sorting media by actor, genre, rating, etc. It can export this data to local files for offline use.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a free and open source media server based on the last FOSS version of Emby. It does not require any online accounts or come bundled with any free IPTV garbage unlike Plex, whilst retaining excellent performance.

Media converters and rippers

HandBrake

Handbrake is a free and open source video transcoder with an easy to use GUI. It can rip and convert a variety of video formats, but can not break DVD or Blu-ray copyright protection.

MakeMKV

MakeMKV can convert video from proprietary (and usually encrypted) discs into a set of MKV files, preserving most information but not changing it in any way. It can instantly stream decrypt video without intermediate conversion and decrypt Blu-rays and protected DVDs.

MKVToolNix

MKVToolNix is a set of FOSS tools by Moritz Bunkus for working with Matroska files. It can mux, split and merge mkv files with no transcoding or loss of quality. It can also add or remove audio and subtitle tracks, change track order and edit metadata.

yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a command line program for downloading videos from YouTube and similar sites.

Sound Juicer

Sound Juicer is a simple program by the GNOME devs for ripping audio CDs to FLAC, Vorbis or MP3. It can automatically tag files via MusicBrainz.

Music players

Strawberry

Strawberry is an actively maintained fork of Clementine, with more advanced configuration options (including support for alternative backends), and a variety of changes meant to make life easier for users with very large music libraries.

GNOME Music

Music is a GStreamer based music player for the GNOME desktop.

Qmmp

Qmmp (Qt-based MultiMedia Player) is a rock-solid audio player written in C++, using Qt for its GUI. It sports a clean and configurable Qt interface, in addition to a skin-based one, which can utilize themes from both Winamp and XMMS. Qmmp also supports plugins, and there are a wide variety available. It handles the wide gamut of audio formats, along with video playback through the bundled ffmpeg plugin. It also includes Winamp-like media library functionality.

DeadBeeF

DeaDBeeF (as in 0xDEADBEEF) is a simple audio player with minimal dependencies and a clean layout.

gmusicbrowser

gmusicbrowser is a jukebox for large collections of MP3, OGG, FLAC, MPC and APE files, written in Perl.

Terminal

• cmus is a standalone command line music player. It is simple and easy to use.

Music Player Daemon

MPD

MPD is a flexible, powerful daemon for playing music. While mpd doesn't directly play music to you, it provides a stream of it (locally or over the internet) to which you connect to with a client (as it's a server, not a music player). It is the mpd client that provides you with all the functionality you expect from a music player. The advantage here is that you can have multiple clients connected and listening to one instance of mpd, or you can stream over the internet. Some music players listed below will be mpd clients, which means that you may need to install mpd as well (if it doesn't come included) for them to work.

• mpc is a minimalistic terminal MPD client. Very handy for creating keyboard shortcuts for MPD.
• ncmpcpp is a feature-rich MPD client with an intuitive curses-based interface

Art/Creation

Image editors

Raster art

Krita

Krita is a user friendly program for sketching and painting, offering an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch.

Darktable

Darktable is a free (libre) powerful photography workflow application and raw post-production developer.

Photopea

Photopea is a free clone of Adobe Photoshop CS6 that works in-browser. All photo processing is done on device. The software is closed-source and ad-supported. The app can be "installed" from Chromium-based browsers to provide an Electron-app like experience. Ads can be disabled with userscripts

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is a paid, proprietary, non-destructive photo editor that provides excellent Photoshop compatibility and a similar workflow. Works quite well using Wine - $35

Vector art

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphic editor.

Vectorpea

Vectorpea Adobe Illustrator CS6 clone. Same developer and caveats as Photopea.

3D graphics

Autodesk Maya

Maya offers a comprehensive creative feature set for 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, rendering, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. Maya now has next-generation display technology, accelerated modeling workflows, and new tools for handling complex data.

Blender

Blender is a free and open source 3D graphics suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline; modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Video editors

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a free and open source multi-track video editor made by the KDE Team. it's based on FFMPEG and is compatible with a variety of video and audio formats.

Olive

Olive is a free, open source video editor currently in beta seeking to provide a more modern editor workflow. it's one of the most promising free (as in freedom) video editors currently.

FFMPEG

FFMPEG is the gold standard for video encoding and editing. Olive and Kdenlive are pretty much just wrappers around FFMPEG and you can do everything they can do, without bloat, using just the terminal.

Pikimov

Pikimov is a freeware video and motion graphics editor web app with a very similar workflow to Adobe After Effects. Everything is processed on-device. It currently does not support Firefox

Davinci Resolve

Davinci Resolve is a proprietary, professional colour grading tool and video editor. It is free, with a paid version available.

Audio workstations

Tip: You can use Windows VST2 and VST3 plugins with Linux DAWs using yabridge

Tenacity

Tenacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder made as a replacement to Audacity which now includes telemetry. It has support for LADSPA, Nyquist, VST, Audio Unit effect and VAMP analysis plug-ins.

LMMS

LMMS allows you to create melodies and beats, synthesize and mix sounds, and arrange samples. You can have fun with your MIDI keyboard and much more – all in a user-friendly and modern interface. Furthermore LMMS comes with many ready-to-use instrument and effect plugins, presets and samples. Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and MIDI.

Ardour

Ardour is for people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. It supports AudioUnit, LV2, LinuxVST and LADSPA formats as well as FX plugins. Automate any parameters. Physically manipulate them via control surfaces. Distribute processing across as many (or as few) cores as you want. Best-in-industry sync to MIDI timecode and LTC. Send and receive MIDI Machine Control. Sync with JACK transport and MIDI clock. Use OSC to drive almost any operation.

FL Studio

No native Linux version exists, but if you have a copy, you can run it on Linux using Bottles. To reduce the audio latency of Windows code translation, consider also installing WineASIO

FFMPEG

FFMPEG is also the gold standard for audio encoding and editing, command line based.

Image viewer

feh

feh is an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users. Unlike most other viewers, it does not have a fancy GUI, but simply displays images. It is controlled via commandline arguments and configurable key and mouse actions. It can be used as a wallpaper setter. See this project for a Wayland alternative.

Gwenview

Gwenview is the default KDE image viewer. It features simple image manipulations: rotation, mirroring, cropping, resizing and red eye reduction. When working with JPEG files, Gwenview performs lossless manipulations. It can also browse inside FTP, Windows shares, tar balls and zip files. It also supports plugins. For a GTK4 equivalent, try GNOME Image Viewer.

XnViewMP

XnViewMP is the enhanced version to XnView. It is a powerful media browser, viewer and converter. It is compatible with more than 500 formats. XnViewMP also comes with an easy to use yet powerful batch conversion module.

Framebuffer

• fim
• jfbview

Terminal emulators

Tip: The default terminal emulator that your desktop environment comes with is likely good enough for whatever you're doing.

Ptyxis

Ptyxis is a user-friendly GTK4 terminal that faciliates quick switching between virtualised containers. It supports every major containerisation platform (Toolbx, Podman & Distrobox) and is the default terminal emulator in Fedora Atomic.

Guake & Yakuake

Guake (for GTK) and Yakuake (for Qt) are drop down terminal emulators whose design was inspired from consoles in computer games such as Quake which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again.

xterm

xterm is a terminal emulator for the X Window System. It provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that can't use the window system directly. This version implements ISO/ANSI colors using the "new" color model (i.e., background color erase). It also implements most of the control sequences for VT220, as well as selected features from other DEC terminals such as VT320, VT420 and VT520.

For a Wayland alternative, see foot.

st

st is a minimalist terminal emulator with the aim of having as little code as possible, the idea of this terminal emulator is to patch in the features you want keeping the file size as low as possible, it is much favoured among ricers as it is very easy to edit anything as the config file is written in C and is easily changeable.

urxvt

rxvt-unicode (also known as urxvt) is a fast and lightweight terminal emulator with Xft and Unicode support, seen often together in i3, dwm, and Sway window manager builds.

Multiplexers

• tmux

File managers

Tip: The default file manager that your desktop environment comes with is likely good enough for whatever you're doing.

Krusader

Krusader is an Orthodox file manager, similar to Midnight Commander. It supports all of the features of your desktop environment's default file manager, and then some.

Terminal

• Midnight Commander
• Ranger
• Vifm
• noice

Document readers

GNOME Document Viewer

GNOME Document Viewer is a PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS and DVI reader. It also handles editable PDFs.

Okular

Okular combines the excellent functionalities of KPDF with the versatility of supporting different kind of documents, like PDF, Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub and others. It does not handle editable PDFs.

• apvlv is a minimalistic PDF/DJVU/UMD/TXT viewer that uses Vim-like key bindings.
• Page is Plan 9's PDF viewer which is available in plan9port.
• zathura is a highly customizable and functional document viewer. It provides a minimalistic and space saving interface as well as an easy usage that mainly focuses on keyboard interaction.
• FBReader is a multi-platform ebook reader. Supports popular ebook formats: ePub, fb2, mobi, rtf, html, plain text, and a lot of other formats. Can support.pdf files via additional plugin -- but is primarily designed for reading ePub eBook files.
• Sigil is a multi-platform EPUB ebook Editor, for when you might need to edit an .ePub file for reading.

IDEs

IntelliJ IDEs

IntelliJ IDEA (for Java), PyCharm (for Python) and Rider (for .NET) are available for free for non-commercial usage.

IntelliJ IDEs all share the same standard IDE features, official and community plugins, and a keyboard-centric workflow with powerful global search. They are the closest analogue to Visual Studio on Linux.

Eclipse

Eclipse is a feature-rich IDE with a major focus on its plugin system. Plugins are used for everything from language support (Java, C++, Python, C#, etc.) to adding additional features or aesthetics (Git integration, Vim keybindings, relative line numbers, CMake support, color schemes, etc.). It also has a reasonable set of built-in features. Some of the more notable of these include the plugin install/update tool, a highly configurable code formatter, and a customizable UI.

Geany

Geany is a text editor using the GTK3 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.

KDevelop

KDevelop is a feature-full FOSS IDE for C/C++, from the KDE environment (although it can still run on other environments that aren't KDE). It has an optional dark colour scheme, built-in gdb and makefile support, optional vim keybindings, autocomplete, and a sublime text-like code minimap scroll, among many other features.

Text editors

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Codeis a free and open source, cross-platform text editor. It is developed by Microsoft. Despite being based on Electron, its performance is acceptable for all but the most plugin-heavy workloads.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a paid, proprietary text editor for code, markup and prose.

gedit

gedit aims at simplicity and ease of use. Gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kate

Kate is an extremely extensible text editor for programmers which features split-pane view, embedded terminal emulator, bookmarking, code folding, code completion, vi input mode, regex support, batch find & replace, and swap files for recovering data on system crash. It also supports a wide array of plugins.

Emacs

Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Spacemacs

Spacemacs is a community developed configuration for Emacs, making it more accessible especially to those who are used to using Vim.

Terminal

• Emacs can be used from the terminal by passing it the -nw option.

• Neovim is a Vim fork designed to reduce attack surface and improve editor speed. An extremely feature-rich programmer's text editor with extensive plugin support.

• GNU nano is a very easy to use text editor that comes installed on most GNU/Linux systems. It has a low degree of customizability, but because of this, it's learning curve is effectively nil.

• nvi is a bug for bug compatible version of vi.

• Traditional vi is a port of the real BSD vi to newer Unix platforms.

Word processors

LibreOffice Writer

LibreOffice Writer is the word processor in the LibreOffice suite. After Oracle acquired OpenOffice, it asked community members to GTFO [1]. Since everyone despises Oracle, the developers all jumped ship as well [2] and started LibreOffice.

OnlyOffice

OnlyOffice is a free and open source document processing suite focused on Microsoft Office compatibility. It can either be hosted as a web service or run locally.

WordTsar

WordTsar is an open-source clone of the extremely popular DOS word processor, WordStar. Comes with an optional GUI and the ability to save in some slightly less antiquated file formats (like .docx)

Obsidian

Obsidian is a free and open source Markdown editor designed for note-taking. It is highly extensible with plugins. A multi-device sync service is offered as a subscription.

Zim Zim is a word processor used to maintain a collection of wiki-like note pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

• Ted is a simple and easy to use word processor that saves to .rtf.

• Troff is the traditional Unix typesetting language.

• LaTeX is the typesetting language designed by Donald Knuth, extended with the use of macros.

Security

Main article: Security

Sandboxes

Firejail

Firejail is a sandbox that uses Linux namespaces, seccomp-bpf and all the latest Linux security features to create a new, fully secure filesystem. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table. It comes with a myriad of profiles by default, which are then used on a per-software basis.

Software firewalls

Note: Software firewalls should not be viewed as replacements for hardware firewalls. The proper configuration of modem and router firewalls remains vital to securing one's network no matter what software solutions are employed.

• iptables/netfilter is Linux's built-in firewall solution.

• nftables is a new packet filtering framework that is part of Linux, whose sole objective is to replace the {ip,ip6,arp,eb}tables framework.

• Packet Filter (pf) is OpenBSD's firewall which has been ported to many other operating systems.

Firewall utils

• Ufw stands for Uncomplicated Firewall, and is program for managing a netfilter firewall. It provides a command line interface and aims to be uncomplicated and easy to use. Also comes with a graphical interface, Gufw.

• Arno's iptables firewall script is a highly secure front-end for iptables that extends the firewall and comes preconfigured to block all incoming connections by default. For a complete list of features, check this.

Penetration testing

• Aircrack-ng is an 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured. It implements the standard FMS attack along with some optimizations like KoreK attacks, as well as the PTW attack, thus making the attack much faster compared to other WEP cracking tools.

• Reaver implements a brute force attack against Wifi Protected Setup (WPS) registrar PINs in order to recover WPA/WPA2 passphrases. On average Reaver will recover the target AP's plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase in four to ten hours, depending on the AP. In practice, it will generally take half this time to guess the correct WPS pin and recover the passphrase.

Password managers

KeePassXC

KeePassXC is a fork from the cross platform password manager KeePassX. Since KeePassX suffers from slow development and rarely gets updated, KeePassXC should be preferred. It is published under the GNU GPL.

Bitwarden

Bitwarden is a free and open source, self-hostable cloud password manager with cross-device sync.

Terminal

• pass is a CLI password manager. It encrypts all of your passwords with GnuPG in the ~/.password_store file. One disadvantage is that it doesn't encrypt the folders it's in, meaning that if you store a password in privatewebsite.com/username, an attacker will know you have an account on privatewebsite.com - this shouldn't be an issue if your /home is encrypted and the computer is turned off. Overall it's very convienent, easy to use, safe, and utilizes the UNIX Philosophy. Their website provides scripts for the migration from other password managers.

• pwsafe is another UNIX password manager that manages encrypted password databases. It is compatible with the Win32 program PasswordSafe.

Emulation and compatibility

Virtualization

GNOME Boxes

Boxes is an easy-to-use virtualisation platform using QEMU. You can install a variety of popular Linux distros with one click, and you can also bring your own ""legally obtained"" Windows installation media for Windows VMs. Be warned that more advanced features like are not available through the Flatpak version and user data isn't transferrable.

virt-manager

virt-manager is a more complex graphical QEMU frontend, exposes more of the inner workings of the software to you so that you can customise your virtual machines.

Distrobox

Distrobox is essentially, the Linux Subsystem for Linux. Run lightweight, hardware-accelerated containers with practically any Linux distro. Effectively one-command setup. Great for making development environments and keeping your workspaces separate. Comes at the cost of storage space, though.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is free and open source virtualisation software. Be aware that it is currently owned by Oracle.

Minimalist

Tip: The majority of configuration for this application is done manually by editing its configuration file.

Qemu

QEMU (short for Quick EMUlator) is a FOSS emulator with multiple operating modes, and multiple supported architectures. Supports KVM, Xen and more for near native performance. Libvirt can be used to manage virtual machines easily, with the terminal front-end virsh, or a GUI frontend like virt-manager. QEMU is also the backend behind gnome-boxes.

DOS emulators

• DOSBox
• DOSEMU

Compatibility layers

Windows

Wine

(See also: ReactOS)

Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications. 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.

• You can manage multiple separate installations of Wine with rum

Proton

Proton is a fork of Wine designed explicitly for playing video games, but it works with plenty of non-game software, too.

• You can manage multiple separate installations of Proton with ProtonUp-Qt

Bottles

Bottles is a graphical compatibility layer manager that allows you to install specific custom forked versions of Wine and Proton for use with specific Windows apps. Not everything works right out of the box but a large quantity of popular apps like FL Studio and Ableton Live have active community configurations.

Darling

Darling is a translation layer that allows you to run unmodified macOS binaries on GNU/Linux platforms. In its nature, it is similar to the well-known Wine project. At this point, it is unlikely that Darling will run your favorite OS X application.

Game console emulators

Main article: Gaming on GNU/Linux Platforms Emulation General wiki

Miscellaneous

Accounting

• GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL.

Spreadsheets

• Gnumeric is an open-source spreadsheet program.
• sc is a free command-line spreadsheet calculator software that runs in the Unix operating system and its derivatives.
• OnlyOffice is free and open source software that supports Microsoft Excel files and formulae.
• For edge cases, Microsoft also publishes a full-fat web version of Office.

Stenography

• Plover

Steganography

• Steghide

SSH

Main article: SSH

Screensavers

Main article: Screensavers

Navigation software

Launchy helps you navigate your start menu, programs, folders and more, amazingly fast, simply by typing in the name of your program and folder. Loads instantly by simply pressing a hotkey (default is alt+space). Customizable and allows you to add other things like website bookmarks and commands.

See also

• List of recommended macOS software
• List of recommended Windows software
• List of recommended Android software

External links

• Prism Break - Lists software for different platforms that respect your freedom (and points out those which do not). Maintained by the EFF.
• Usesthis-interviews - all about what hardware and what software literally whos use for their disgusting normie professions. Search "site:usesthis.com vim" to pwn people you disagree with.