• Amberol is probably one of the biggest hidden gems in GNOME apps. It's a simple easy music player whose background color changes based on the song's artwork.

• Parabolic is another GNOME app for downloading videos from youtube using yt-dlp. It's super easy to use and even allows for multiple concurrent downloads.

• mpv is one of those rare moments where using a proprietary implementation is objectively worse. Must install on any personal computer/mobile device.

Firefox with tree style tabs, with the user CSS that removes tabs and combines bookmarks bar into the title bar.

Away from computer right now but I'll take a screenshot in an hour or so.

And Emacs. :)

Back at my computer now!

OK, here's my screenshot:

So, you can see the tree style tabs (TST) in the sidebar area on the left. I'm using the "photon" theme for TST. with another extension for TST called TST Colored Tabs. If you middle-button-click a link, it's opened in a new tab like usual, but TST also assigns it as a child tab of the page you were viewing. It's incredibly useful for keeping track of where you are and what you're doing. Especially in my DevOps job, I have dozens of tabs open and chaos would reign supreme if I used top-of-window tabs like standard. You can see the bookmarks toolbar has been dragged up into the title bar using the customize toolbar window accessed by right clicking on the title bar.

To accomplish this you need to enable a setting in about:config called toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets, set that to true. Then exit Firefox.

Then create a directory called chrome in your profile directory, which on Linux is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/PROFILENAME/, which you can get from the about:profiles page. Inside the chrome directory, you create a file called userChrome.css and add this stuff to it:

#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items {
  opacity: 0;
  pointer-events: none;
}
#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
}

#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
  display: none;
}

/*
    Display the status bar in Firefox Quantum (version 61+)
    permanently at the bottom of the browser window.
    Code below works best for the Dark Firefox theme and is based on:
    https://github.com/MatMoul/firefox-gui-chrome-css/blob/master/chrome/userChrome.css
    This userChrome.css file was last modified on: 28-Jun-2018.
    Tested to work with Firefox 61 on Windows.
    Related blog post: http://www.optimiced.com/en/?p=1727
*/

#browser-bottombox {
  height: 20px;
  border-top: solid 1px #505050;
}

.browserContainer>#statuspanel {
  left: 4px !important;
  bottom: 0px;
  transition-duration: 0s !important;
  transition-delay: 0s !important;
}

.browserContainer>#statuspanel>#statuspanel-inner>#statuspanel-label {
  margin-left: 0px !important;
  border: none !important;
  padding: 0px !important;
  color: #EEE !important;
  background: #333 !important;
}

window[inFullscreen="true"] #browser-bottombox {
  display: none !important;
}

window[inFullscreen="true"] .browserContainer>#statuspanel[type="overLink"] #statuspanel-label {
  display: none !important;
}

/*
  Begin section to move system UI buttons to the same UI bar/box
  as the addressbar
*/

/* Adding empty space for buttons */
#nav-bar {
    margin-right:100px;
}

/* For dragging whole window by mouse*/
#titlebar {
    appearance: none !important;
    height: 0px;
}

/*
  Fix for main menu calling by Alt button
  THIS BREAKS THE UI!!
  */
/* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar {
    margin-top: 10px;
} */

/* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */
#TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container {
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    top: 5px;
    right: 1px;
}

And there you go! TST has more tips and configuration details in its Github project: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab and https://github.com/...

Wine/Proton. It's a one-stop solution for gaming on Linux (for current games). Lutris is also worth mentioning as a frontend/launcher.

I'm a bit of a fan of Okular. It just does a good job displaying PDFs and is not annoying. The table of content works well if the document has one. There is text select and block select for when you need to get content out of the PDF. You can tell Okular to ignore DRM with a simple checkbox in the settings, for files that "don't allow" selecting and copying text or "don't allow" printing.

gparted because it’s the best partitioning manager with a gui that I’ve used

Syncthing is one of the most useful pieces of software I've ever used. It just works, and it works well.

Cant go without kdeconnect anymore

Graphical:

• Firefox
• Inkscape
• NewsFlash
• GNOME Podcasts
• Text Pieces

Non-graphical:

• Ansible
• Neovim
• Podman

If based on the thing I used most then it has to be Firefox!

If you want something more trivial but personal, openttd - the best game ever. :)

I like KDE Connect quite a bit. Its a great tool to show of in front of my Windows friends and super usefull for media control.

I'm not gonna mention the basics like Kate. They're great but nothing new.

My 2 hidden gems that I use on a daily basis are:

• QOwnNotes for markdown note taking. Only competent desktop app I found that comes without any electron bullshit.
• Nyrna to send a game to sleep when I want to take a break or get interrupted. Saves me from booting it up again when I want to pick up where I left off.

KDE Connect, Spectacle

Being a flutter dev (and shameless fanboy) I will suggest people try:

appflowy - a FOSS near-clone to Notion.

spotube - FOSS music streaming using the spotify API for metadata and youtube for music playing/downloading. Completely free of ads and works surprisingly well as long as the music you like is mirrored to YouTube.

honourable mentions:

Plex, Nextcloud, Radarr, Sonarr, qbittorrent. Not your usual apps for these kinds of threads but they're absolutely top-tier for linux home servers.

The kernel. I literally can't use my computer without it!

Jokes aside, I'm a big fan of Kolourpaint too.

Bottles. Best non-steam gaming solution hands down.

It's probably Neovim. I spend most of time in a day while working on it. Its suitable for almost all code and text editing jobs.

Also I should have to add okular which is really nice for reading pdf's and mangas.

Krita. It is so good I cant believe it is free

In order of preference :

• Firefox
• Terminator
• VSCodium
• Meld
• Thunderbird
• LibreOffice
• GIMP
• GNUCash & KMyMoney

The most popular that I use are:

• • -Firefox
• • -Librewolf
• • -Jellyfin (i was astonished that this piece of software wasn't mentioned before)
• • -SMPlayer (imho the best front end for MPV)
• • -shutdown command (i use it daily)
• • -Lutris
• • -Wine
• • -Piper (to manage keybings on the mouse with a gui) (is also the only one that I found that works with my G502, if you have an alternative please tell me, i want to check it out)
• • -ckb-next (for managing leds and keybindings for my keyboard)
• • -openRGB

Honorable mention: Molly (the FOSS version, a privacy focused client for Signal)

Edit: Almost forgot about QEMU+kvm for virtualization

The question is weird to me, but I'll plug Strawberry Music Player. It's a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok from when Amarok was still good.

Konsole

• xmonad - tiling wm because I'm too lazy to place windows by hands
• firefox - since a lot of things I'm working with is web based and I like my adblock and don't want google spying on me
• urxvt - a terminal that is fast enough for most applications yet doesn't use as much memory as fancier ones
• tmux - a terminal multiplexer - terminal tabs are not as nice plus lets you leave stuff running remotely
• neovim - I need a text editor and it works great for that purposes covering all my needs

I dunno if it counts, but I use libreoffice more than anything else. It's a very well made piece of gear.

I've written multiple novels with it, short stories, essays, a home brew ttrpg system, etc. It doesn't just do "good enough", it is on par with anything else I've ever used.

I've replaced Flameshot with Spectacle on my system because it is preinstalled on Plasma, has almost the same set of features and, in my experience, work snappier. Also, Flameshot can have issues working on Wayland

xorg. I used its predecessor a lot in the past, and I still get PTSD when I see an XFree86 config file.

I use KeePassXC on the daily, so that's definitely going on the list. Spectacle does screenshots amazingly well. neovim is a great fork of vim, handles all my text editing and IDE work. GIMP is basically a given for image editing. And also a fan of LMMS for whenever I work with audio/music.

Docker, btop, grim, foot.

By far it's Kate, even though I'm now a neovim user. It's just a great IDE.

S rank: Firefox MPV KeepassXC

A rank: VLC Bitwarden KOreader

B rank: KDEnlive Gimp Libreoffice.

Firefox, emacs, grep, konsole

Based on time spent using them, Firefox, Steam, and Terraria. Wait, do games not count?

The real answer is actually probably Gnome itself. The DE, I mean. The workflow suits me perfectly, and I even like a lot of the basic Gnome apps, although their naming convention get on my nerves sometimes (your official web browser is called "Web" and your official music player is called "Music"? But the one that makes me actively angry is calling their official text editor... "Text Editor." C'mon, folks.)

This has been the case for me since Gnome 3 dropped. Which was quite a surprise for me since I thought of Gnome 2 as a less user friendly, uglier XFCE and kinda hated it. I still kinda feel that way about Mate, but Memo kicks ass and it's much better than Gnome 2 was overall.

Not sure if it counts, but obsidian for notes and my daily journal, and latte-dock to replace the stock KDE app bar.

Oh, and emacs with doom for general text editing and most coding tasks.

Mixxx is the only Linux-native DJ software that I know of, but it's still amazing. If it's missing featutes compared with Serato or Recordbox I'm not good enough to miss them yet, and the features it doea have are damn impressive.

Likewise, Inkscape and Gimp are both great. I know that Gimp takes a lot of heat for not being as "good" as Photoshop, but it's just different. The few times I've tried Photoshop were as painful to me as Gimp seems to be for others. And since I don't need the CMYK functionality that Gimp is missing, I'm happy with Gimp.

LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but using anything else for documents is like stone knives and bearskins in comparison.

Kate, Terminator, k4dirstat and the amazing clipboard history app in KDE.

Been really liking hyprland recently. Also I couldn't live without syncthing. Neovim has a special place in my heart also but not just for desktop.

Kasts for podcasts, since it sync with Gpoddersync on my nextcloud.

Spectacle always makes me smile with how easy and featureful it is for a screenshot app.

Okular is a better PDF viewer than any proprietary app I've used.

Reaper, OBS, and Davinci Resolve.

I really like the disk usage analyzer in gnome. The ui/visualization is really intuitive and useful, and I often wish for something similar on windows.

Emacs. Need I say more?

I'd say the terminal, although its not linux exclusive and kind of a cheat answer. Flameshot is also a staple for me, I use it everywhere.

MPV comes to mind, although its also available in windows.

Shortwave is by far my favorite radio app. Simple interface, auto records songs, access to thousands of radio stations from all over the world, and when scaled down, it turns into a little retro radio interface!

Perhaps a controversial opinion, but I quite like Mailspring as a desktop email client. It looks and feels much more modern than Thunderbird or Evolution.

Strawberry and 0AD are awesome

Does Hyprland count? It's so effortlessly slick

Micro. It's a terminal text/code editor that shares keybindings with modern text editors.

I really like Setzer. It does everything I need from a latex editor and looks much nicer than other editors I have used on windows imo

I literally live inside the combo of

• #Firefox
• #Evolution
• #Emacs
• #Alacritty
• #GIMP

And very rarely leave the comfort of my cozy habitat 😁

At work, I'm "forced" to use a Mac but thanks to #FOSS I've got the whole combo setup on my work laptop too except Evolution sadly.

Neovim.

• vim / neovim
• Signal desktop
• thunderbird & evolution
• firefox & vivaldi
• VL frickin C!
• qbittorrent
• docker
• axel
• zsh & bash
• vscode
• wireshark
• Konsole / Terminator
• Standard notes
• xed or geany

• Firefox
• Jellyfin
• (when I get it to work) KDE connect
• krita
• aMule
• riced xfce
• riced kde plasma

Cinnamon is hands down my favourite DE. I always see people talking about GNOME and KDE, to me Cinnamon is the best of both worlds. Strongly recommend it with the Orchis GTK theme, which is made for GNOME but works fine on Cinnamon.

My favourite graphical app in the more traditional sense is Firefox. If CLI apps are allowed, I'm a big fan of GNU Nano, a CLI-based minimalistic editor, basically Emacs Lite.

The Caja file manager. Hell the MATE desktop environment in general is just perfect for me. Xfce is acceptable too, though the inclusion of CSD in recent Xfce releases has made me a bit more wary of it when it comes to theming.

I also use Waterfox as my browser. A Firefox fork that has the option to put tabs below address bar (where they belong imo) out of the box without needing to muck around with the userChrome.css file.

ShotCut

Easy Effects is such a great program. Very good for doing all sorts of effects on audio. Great for filters and EQ.

Definitely the clipboard manager. On kde, it's klipper. This is actually such an underrated piece of software that I can't live without. Windows has one too, but they added their's a little after all the linux desktop environments got one by default.

Nothing Linux only but:

• Firefox
• OnlyOffice
• mpv
• DoubleCommander

Carla and QJackCTL for me. So much easier than having to haul around all my amps, pedals, etc.

urxtv

Zathura, Firefox, VS Code, Remmina, Virt-Manager, hexchat, drawing, Master PDF, PlayOnLinux+Wine, LibreOffice, GVIm, Pragha, XFCE Terminal (But font broken in Fedora)

• Blender for 3D modeling/sculpting + rendering.

• ArmorPaint for painting on 3D Models, but I learned recently about 3DCoat, and it has a Linux version…

• I like listening to Podcasts (while I work on my PC) with KDE's “Kasts”. Use my Nextcloud provider to sync my listening status on the Desktop with my Android Podcast App (AntennaPod) for a flawless continuation on mobile.

I guess it's probably also available for servers but the most innovative and interesting peace of software I used in years is Distrobox, I like the AUR and love Debian and Fedora so that's a bridge I have been waiting for!

Pinta. It's like paint.net but works on Linux. Quick and simple way to edit images on Linux.

Well, the permanently open applications on my system are: claws-mail, Pale Moon (browser forked from Firefox), konqueror (TDE file manager), konsole (TDE terminal), and Aqualung (music player). Other good friends include kate, Inkscape, and OpenSCAD (despite its flakiness). And I get a lot of mileage out of DOSBox.

If the OP hadn't specified desktop software, I'd also name Portage.

xpenguins

Whenever I use gnome I install the material-shell extension. I love the tiling.

• Newsboat Lightweight, custom rich, with very cool look on terminal.
• Doom Emacs Very hard to use. But once you got it, nothin can beat its multi-function note!
• Freeplane Must have software to mapping everything you want perfectly and very lightweight brain-mapping.

Kubernetes, Docker and mpv.

Apostrophe. The perfect, slick markdown editor.

Komikku

I can't decide which one is my favourite. But thanks for the tipp, flameshot seems really amazing!

Thanks for the recommendation, I installed Flameshot on Windows and it's quite a bit better than the built-in tool.

Off the top of my head, currently it's WezTerm. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

I just use the one built into gnome, it's the best one I've found yet having come from lightshot on windows, it just works exactly how I'd expect it to and doesn't get in my way

As for my favourite think it's gotta be either obsidian or Vscode/ium

I both installed kwrite and kate... whats the huge difference there? That one is more code focused and has git implementstion but still the same?

rofi/dmenu for scripts, mpv and Tauon Music Box

Telegram Desktop is pretty good.

Foliate <3

Either evolution nheko or console. Even though a terminal emulator is a cop out

Maybe not the most loved, but most used software: Steam.