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Ask Slashdot: What Software Can You Not Live Without?
An anonymous reader writes "Whenever I install a fresh operating system on my computer, I immediately grab a handful of programs that I simply must have. After that, I generally wait and install other pieces of software as I need them. My list of known, useful programs has dwindled over the past few years as projects died, ownership transferred, and functionality changed. At the same time, I've begun to have use for certain types of software that I've never needed before. It can be time-consuming and risky to install and evaluate every single option. So, I'm curious: what pieces of software do you find the most useful and reliable? Don't feel the need to limit yourself by operating system, platform, or hardware. If you're so inclined, a brief description about what makes the software great would be helpful, too."
Pacemaker firmware.
Always the first thing I install. It even works on all major OS. Keeps beta version at bay ;)
Decode your health
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
And also:
sudo apt-get -y install vim
sudo apt-get -y install git-core
sudo apt-get -y install tcsh
sudo apt-get -y install python
sudo apt-get -y install python-setuptools
sudo apt-get -y install libboost-all-dev
sudo apt-get -y install gdb
sudo apt-get -y install valgrind
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Solitaire
Unable to use an computer without it, runs fine under wine ..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Pick your programs, install them all silently, with good defaults, and check(and install) updates for all with very effort.
The fat client lives...
fat?
Office 2003 was fat.
Office 2013 ate the OS and shit out Windows 8. Yeah, it's that morbidly obese. Should have named the release "Fat Bastard", but I heard that's being reserved for IE12.
Feedback: VLC is my first install regardless of OS. Damn thing just runs anything I throw at it. Used it for years now.
Firefox and Opera are on my list of good ones so far.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That would be Thunderbird, followed by Calibre and Skype. I don't care for Evolution, so Thunderbird which is nice and simple to use! Calibre since I have a Sony Reader which uses epub format, since Calibre can convert just about any eBook format to just about any other one, as long as they are not DRMed, it also keeps my eBook library nicely organized. Skype is because one son lives 800 miles away and another 6,157 miles away right now, and Skype works with MS, Apple and Linux OSes so we can keep in touch and see each others faces once in a while!
The first thing I install is a system monitor.
I like to keep a close eye on CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, and network usage. Without that information it feels like I'm flying blind. It is often important on a new system when I don't know what is running and consuming resources.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
There are two kinds of editors; emacs, and lesser.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Adobe Lightroom - does 95% of what I would do with photoshop, works on raw images and simplifies my workflow tremendously. I almost never use photoshop anymore.
Ubuntu, Windows 8.1, Libreoffice, Adobe Reader, - self explanatory.
Firefox with Adblock plus and Better Privacy and HTPS Everywhere installed.
KeepassX - Password manager. Multiplatform, much less buggy than Keepass2 (note to develepers: please take it out of alpha status!)
F.Lux - warms up the color of your monitor in the evenings so that it doesn't interfere with your circadian rhythm, hopefully improves sleep. (hey - it's free!)
Videolan (VLC) - excellent video player (despite the crappy name)
Sandboxie (paid $$) - Sandbox your browser and various other programs
FastOne Image Viewer - excellent, free sildeshow software
Secunia PSI - makes sure your programs are kept up-to-date
If your editor doesn't have its own church, how can it be a serious piece of code?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.
* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/
* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...
* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...
* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/
Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/
* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/
* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/
* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/
* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...
* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...
* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/
There is some nice stuff to have, sometimes trivial and sometimes quite useful.
sshfs
openssh-server
GNU screen (some people will like tmux)
irssi (preferably it runs on an always-on box with screen and ssh server)
dtrx : perfect to extract archives from the command line. It solves the problem of tar -xzvf random_shit.tar.gz : the archive's content may or may not be in a directory, such as random_shit/. So if you extract the archive right away, you run the risk of polluting your current directory with loads of crap (like 10 directories + 105 files at the root of the archive). If you do mkdir random_shit, cd random_shit and tar -xzvf ../random_shit.tar.gz, you run the risk of having wasted your time : if files were at the archive's root, all is fine. If they were in a random_shit directory, now your data has been extracted to a random_shit/random_shit directory and you have to do mv random_shit/* . then rmdir random_shit. .zip, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and all others.
I used to do the mkdir random_shit method, or to open the archive in a graphical archive manager before deciding what to do. But dtrx automates this! and works equally for
When I used Windows I liked some command line stuff too : set the DIRCMD environment variable to /O, have the console default to 80x43 and right-click to paste (I think, not sure that worked), and have Windows versions of wget and less.
Gedit
Scratch
Synapse
Xpad
Geany
Qt 4 Designer
Python
Gimp
Inkscape
Shotwell
Filezilla
Chrome
Thunderbird
Brasero
Clementine
VLC
LibreOffice
gnome-system-monitor
I'm running Bohdi Linux (E17), a few favorite built apps and functionality:
Terminology
Enlightenment File Manager
eDeb
Configure secondary monitor workspaces as tiling (awesome - could not live without - and one of the primary reasons I run Enlightenment) primary tiling workspace dedicated to Chrome, Terminology, and Gedit
Of course it's Enlightenment so I spend the next two-days configuring all of the fine details.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
If I'm stuck using a Windows box, first thing I install is MKS Toolkit. That gives me a decent shell, vi, and grep - which will find anything in any file. No need for special search tools.
(And yes, I know about Cygwin; MKS is vastly superior to Cygwin, since everything just works in a standard DOS shell, it doesn't require it's own special environment).
Windows:
- microsoft security essentials
- windows firewall control (commercial)
- cygwin
- notepad++
- sysutils (procmon etc.)
- ultramon (commercial)
- launchy
- sharpkeys
- autohotkey
- visual c++ express
- 7-zip
Mac:
- little snitch (commercial)
- macports
- better touch tool
- keyremap4macbook
- iterm2
- alfred
- geektool
- menumeters
- caffeine
- xcode
Linux: ...)
- whatever distro-specific set of packages gets me all the dev stuff
- (if needed) whatever distro-specific repository gets me extra packages (say, epel)
- kde
- xfce
- various personal customizations done over the years (xmodmap,
Everywhere: ...
- firefox (noscript, requestpolicy, adblock, flashblock)
- emacs
- python / virtualenvwrapper / git
- bash customizations (powerline, bash completions, personal scripts)
- libreoffice and latex
- truecrypt
- virtualbox
- dropbox
- gimp
these are the baseline, beyond that it depends from what I am using the actual computer for
-- the cake is a lie
I find WinDirStat a much superior file/directory size analyzer - it offers a tree view with details that is continuously updated as the directories are scanned in a breadth-first order, with indicators for which directory trees haven't yet been fully scanned, allowing for useful analysis to be performed almost immediately instead of waiting for the scan to complete. Then, when the scan is finally finished, you also get a graphical "pillow view" overview of the entire file system, color-coded by file type.
Everything is another great search tool - it only works on NTFS drives, but typically takes only a minute or so to scan a large drive for the first time, seconds to update it's database on subsequent launches, and lists all files whose name contains your specified word fragments literally as fast as you can type. Hit "a" and you will be faced with a list of hundreds of thousands of files before you can type a second letter. It also supports regex if word-fragments are insufficiently powerful for your needs.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
-Virtuawin - mature, stable virtual desktops for Windows. There's prettier alternatives, but this is the I've tried that has never caused any crashing or other issues.
-WinCompose - Gives Windows users a Compose key for entering unicode characters (plus-or-minus, subscripts, extended math symbols, etc) using the same mnemonics as are standard on *nixes, rather than having to remember their code point or use a character map.
-Everything - File search by name, winnows down a list of every file on your hard drive just as fast as you can type the word-fragments that should be in the file name (NTFS only)
-WinDirstat - Directory size information - interactive tree-view is available instantly and updated as the breadth-first scan proceeds, pillow-view is added once the scan is complete.
-BabelMap - far more powerful alternative to Character Map, including the ability to search by character name or browse by code page
-SpeedCrunch - good calculator that keeps a long calculation history
-GraphCalc - excellent 2D/3D programmable graphing calculator. Open source, but apparently pretty much abandoned.
I won't bother much with heavyweight apps, since others have listed them many times. Except for
Code::Blocks - cross-platform IDE. Not the best I've used, but it's available on all the major OSes.
EasyMercurial - super-simplified, "grandma suitable" GUI interface for the handful of most commonly used version control functions, including graphical visualization of the branch/merge graph. Whether you don't use version control as not worth the hassle, or want to introduce budding developers to the wonders of source control without getting them bogged down in the details, you need this. And if/when you outgrow it your archives are all standard Mercurial, so you can seamlessly upgrade to the command line or a more powerful GUI.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First things first:
aptitude so dependencies automatically get installed and uninstalled. Edit the configuration to not install recommended packages by default. Keep it lean!
Then:
openntpd (or some other ntpd) so the computer will know what time it is.
sudo so that I can log in as a regular user and still do system maintenance.
openssh-server (or some other SSH server) so I can log in remotely. I usually change the port number. Make sure root logins are disabled.
tmux so that I can have multiple shells in a single ssh session. screen works for this, too, but I recently switched to tmux.
rsync so that I can copy files around efficiently.
After that, it depends on what I want to do with the system. Usually, there will be at least some software development, so build-essential (libc-dev, gcc, make), irb, git. Usually ssh and some network debugging tools like ping and traceroute6.
I like zsh, so if I'm going to be using the system extensively, I'll install that. If this is my primary system, irssi and mutt. If the system has enough memory to run it, emacs24-nox.
If I want a GUI, xserver-xorg, xterm, whatever window manager I happen to like at the moment (wmii), some web browser (iceweasel).
It's been a while since I've last done this, so I may have missed some things, but this seems to be about it. The package names are for Debian-like systems and will likely be a bit different for other systems, but I don't generally maintain those.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
(And yes, I know about Cygwin; MKS is vastly superior to Cygwin, since everything just works in a standard DOS shell, it doesn't require it's own special environment).
I don't know what tool you are using, but nothing I run in Cygwin requires a "special environment". All the standard utilities (grep, awk, sed, perl, ssh, git, etc.) work just as you'd expect. The X server also "just works". The tools also interface nicely with 4NT/Take Command, so I can sort the Windows clipboard with:
Now, I'm sure if I tried to use things like cron or the SysV init scripts, then I'd have to do some tinkering, but the whole point of those is to run a complete Unix environment.
in the modern GUI realm, Omni Outliner. I have it under OSX and on the iPad. I use it *constantly* for all manner of information.
In the shell, midnight commander. first thing I do when I open a shell is "mc" or "sudo mc" and off I go.
Aside from those, the components of c and c++ application creation (can be compiler and linker only, mc has a nice editor and I don't require a debugging environment though I'm happy to use 'em when they are available), and Python. Without these, there would be little point in me even owning a desktop or laptop computer.
Coming in dead last, a web browser.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.