• 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/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss

Cant go without kdeconnect anymore

• 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

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.

If you enjoy KWrite & KolourPaint, give Spectacle a go for screenshots. Works amazing on my end and it’s built into most KDE OS spins along with KWrite and Kolour. While I know the name Flameshot, I’ve never actually needed it as Spectacle is solid!

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

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. :)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

ShotCut

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