10 Must Have Linux Software
Linux is a great operating system not doubt, but what would make Linux even more powerful and lovable is having great Linux software right at your fingertips so that u can use them to carry out your day to day work efficiently.
In this blog, I will provide you the top 10 must have Linux Software that every linux user will find very useful.
I have chosen 1 software from every category. I personally use these software on a regular basis and would highly recommend these to “new-to-linux” users.
All these software are tested to be safe and are backed by great open source communities/projects and companies. So you don’t have to worry about the security implications of using them. Now since that’s out of the way, lets get started!
Web Browser
Web Browser is one of the most important software that we spend hours of our daily time on. There are many browsers out there and they have their pros and cons, but the browser i recommend is Brave Browser. It is undoubtedly one of the best browsers out there. It has a huge community which helps new users and also takes user suggestions to provide required features.
Brave is based on Chromium and hence has access to all the chrome extensions just like google chrome. It works similar to chrome but is superior to chrome in many ways. It consumes less memory and works faster than all other browsers.
Brave browser offers a built in Ad blocker which provides a great user experience by blocking ads on most websites including YouTube. It also blocks browser fingerprinting by default. This makes this browser secure and faster.
Brave even provides a cryptocurrency called as BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) for using brave and getting private personalized ads(popups). This can be opt in or out depending on your liking. This in my opinion is a killer feature.
Show me another browser which blocks ads and pays you cryptocurrency for using it. Nope. It’s just Brave so go grab it!
Image Editor
One of the important software that we might need while using linux is an image editor. One of the famous image editor we know of is Photoshop from Adobe, but since Adobe hasn’t released their Photoshop to Linux, we must search for alternatives.
And in the quest of Photoshop alternative, i found a linux software that outperforms photoshop. Which software could that be you ask? it’s GIMP which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.
GIMP is a very powerful free and open source software for image manipulation(editing). It is similar to photoshop and has all the tools like photoshop like softening tool, color correction tool, paint brushes, gradients, rectangle select tool, free select too, fill tool, crop tool and a lot more.
We can create projects with different layers and play around with each layer adding effects and then merging all the layers to get the end edited image.
GIMP is available in all linux distribution’s software repositories and can be easily downloaded.
For advanced users it also offers plugins which help add additional modules which offers advanced features.
Screen Recorder
In today’s world, screen recording things has become a necessity. Screen recording can be used to record a part of the screen to create tutorials, for streaming, or for just recording some software/desktop to showcase their customization.
There are many software for this purpose, but the most famous and the most used software by both normal users and streamers is OBS Studio (Open Broadcaster software).
It is one of the best open-source and free software I have come across. With such a wide range of features and broad range of plugin supports to expand on those, OBS is truly one of a kind software.
You can create virtual desktops called as scenes, which can display an image, your webcam or a video which loops. This feature is most used by youtubers and streamers.
The thing that I love the most about OBS is that it records quality videos in less/medium size when compared to other similar software, it has a really good encoder. Definitely worth checking out!
Screenshot Tool
In any operating system, one of the most handy tools to have is a screenshot tool. There are not many options in linux to take screenshots out of the box. But we do not need anything else other than this spotlight software called as Flameshot.
Flameshot is a great tool which uses very little resources, which can be auto-started with the OS and can be used to take beautiful screenshots.
Screenshots can be taken by clicking on the taskbar icon or by using shortcut keys. There are 3 main types of screenshots you can take, first is window screenshot which takes screenshot of an active window, next is full screenshot which takes the screenshot of the entire desktop and the last is selection screenshot as shown in the pic above.
Using this selection screenshot feature, we can take screenshot of required part of our screen and arranged it’s dimensions as needed.
It is truly one of the most underrated tools in Linux. And i believe it deserves more love. Try it out and you’ll love it too.
Office Suite
Everyone who works with spreadsheets, powerpoints and also documents will agree that having a good office tool to work with is an absolute necessity. Since Microsoft doesn’t support linux (for obvious reasons xD), we need an alternative for ms office.
There are none which comes close to Libreoffice.
Libreoffice is an open source software that is available in linux and has all the features offered by ms office and that too without a subscription unlike ms office and other paid ones out there.
LibreOffice includes a word-processor called Writer, a spreadsheet editor called Calc, a presentation app called Impress, a vector-drawing program called Draw, a database program called Base, and a math-formula editor called Math. That’s a great set of tools for free.
With a little bit of tweaking Libreoffice can be made to look and work like ms office. Be sure to install it along with ttf-mscorefonts fonts to get the microsoft fonts inside libreoffice. Thats it! you now have another powerful tool in your Linux
2 Factor Authenticator
One of the tools that not many linux users or any user in general use but absolutely need is a 2FA authenticator tool.
Authy is one of the famous ones and it is not available on linux as it’s closed source. From my knowledge there are no real alternatives for it which works on linux other than this rare piece of software i have for you. What is it? Authenticator!
It is developed as an open source alternative for authy. And in my opinion is far superior than authy. It is also more secure than authy as all your 2FA codes stays inside your pc instead of backing it up to some random cloud to worry about data leaks.
It has all the features to edit code, account name, generating qr code etc. It also supports backup and restore feature. Which is a huge life saver. One more amazing thing is that we can add icons to each account added as shown above.
It is a fully offline and secure application which is trusted and used by many linux advocates including me. I use it everyday as my 2FA tool on my linux desktop. Bonus Tip!: if you want an android app which is also open source and has all the same features, its worth checking out Aegis Authenticator!
Always use 2FA with all the supported online websites/services you use to add an extra layer of security to your accounts.
Backup Tool
The most crucial Linux tools, is a backup tool. It is very essential to take a backup of your linux just to be safe when it breaks due to a bad update or if you mess up somewhere. There are no better tool than the most trusted Timeshift.
Timeshift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored at a later date to undo all changes to the system.
Timeshift requires very little setup. Just install it, run it for the first time and take the first snapshot then later at anytime, hit on the backed up image from the menu and click on restore and wait till your linux desktop rolls back to the previous stable state.
You can also Timeshift across distributions, which means if you break your kde neon, you can boot into any distro’s live environment and open timeshift and restore your kde neon to its previous working state and then reboot back to your kde neon.
It is always best to take timeshift backups into a different dedicated partition in a different disk.
Timeshift is not noticed on a daily basis but it is an absolute life saver when it’s needed. Go get those backups!
Disk Utility
Disk utility is an important piece of software that is used to create new partitions inside a hard disk or to wipe a hard disk clean or to change the sizes of partitions. The best linux tool available for this purpose is GParted.
GParted is a free disk partitioning tool that runs both within and outside the operating system, meaning that you don’t need an OS installed to use it, nor will you ever have to reboot to apply any changes.
You can delete, format, resize, copy, and hide any partition available in your hard disks.
You can add flags, rename disks and partitions at any time. It is a very user friendly application.
Supports all filesystem types like NTFS, EXT, BTRFS and many more. It also provides GPT or MBR as an option for partition table.
Do check out this tool for a gui based partition manager, it will save you a lot of headache.
Video Editor
Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are amazing video editors from adobe, but they are not supported on Linux. So is there no way for advanced video editing on linux? That’s where Kdenlive comes in!
Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor which is a great open source video editor built by the KDE team. It can be used for simple as well as highly demanding video editing.
Kdenlive allows users to write and format the title using the basic tools. Also add a blur effect on the title for an aesthetic appearance to the title etc. Kdenlive runs faster compared to other editors due to its efficient usage of RAM.
Rendering the video can be faster by using a powerful graphics card. It is highly recommended by most professional editors.
It has a steep learning curve but check it out, try to get a hang of it and i’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
Virtual Machines
Virtualization is a process of running a computer inside another computer to run a server or just to try out new operating systems without installing it on your real hardware, or just to test out viruses & malicious code in an isolated environment. This can be done by creating virtual machines.
Virtual Machines are amazing at what they do, it is done by using CPU Virtualization. We can install an OS inside an isolated VM. Later we can delete it without having to worry about our own OS.
VMs can be created by using various software, one of the best and my top pick is KVM which stands for Kernel Based Virtual Machines. To know more, check out my other blog “Linux Virtualization using KVM“