Desktop apps

I’m not a developer or in IT, so the apps I use on my desktop generally aren’t related to work. I spend most of my time digging holes as a landscape contractor and then use a small group of apps for managing my business. In the evenings and on weekends I love to manage my homelab for fun (and privacy).

These are in addition to Command Line Applications.

There is a separate page for everything on my homelab.

One thing you will notice right away is there are no apps on here for listening to music or playing video games. I am extremely hard-of-hearing and generally don’t listen to music. So, why even have them installed?

I do not have time to deal with PC gaming, either. All my hardware is old and PC gaming is for people who like to spend all their time troubleshooting why apps, games, and drivers aren’t working. I play on my Xbox or the Nintendo Switch because it just works.

Packaging

I generally don’t care about packing and I don’t understand the flame wars around them. I prefer the package format the developer prefers and considers the best way to deliver their app.

Operating system

Debian 12 w/XFCE

I’ve been daily driving Linux since Ubuntu 9.04 and, like most Linux desktop enthusiasts, I distro-hop a fair amount. At the moment I am steering away from any distro that labels itself as “opinionated”. I have many opinions about how my desktop should work and trying to work on a desktop that is based on someone else’s “opinion” means I’m fighting my desktop.

So, at the moment I am all in on Debian 12. Yes, every distro is opinionated because they are made by humans. However, Debian has a much smaller list of opinions.

I also prefer my desktop to be slow moving, stable, and uses apt. Generally, I’m not interested in the growing trend of declarative desktops, but I am keeping an eye on immutable distros. I like the idea, but not a fan of rpm-ostree.

Theme

• Sweet Dark XFCE
• Candy icons

Files

• SyncThingy - A recent change for me. I am switching away from Nextcloud, see why here.
• Libreoffice Writer + Calc
• Geany - As I mentioned, I’m not a developer so I don’t generally care about text editors. I’m not interested in learning vim or emacs. I mostly use micro and pop into Geany when I need some extra features.
• Obsidian - I am a heavy note-taker and I am all-in on Obsidian. I prefer to write in Markdown and I love that Obsidian is just flat Markdown files. I sync to all my devices with Syncthing.
• Bitwarden - Another new addition. I’ve used KeePass for more than a decade, but I needed something with easier cloud syncing and sharing.
• Flameshot
• Grsync
• Veracrypt - For protecting my offsite backups and files in my prepper kit.

Terminal

• Tilda - My preferred terminal emulator as I like to have my terminal on every workspace and a button press away, with the ability to hide it while also being extremely lightweight.
• Terminator - Some days I spend almost all my time in the terminal, so I have this fullscreen on a workspace.

Media

• VLC
• MPV
• Handbrake
• MakeMKV
• Freetube

Create

• Audacity
• kdenlive
• GIMP
• OBS

Browsers

• Firefox - I really, really want to use Firefox and I like the features. However, I am a heavy Samsung DeX user and mobile Firefox (and derivatives) is awful.
• Vivaldi - My preferred browser at the moment because it has a ton of productivity tooling and the mobile version is great for DeX mode on my mobile.
• Tor

Comms

• Thunderbird
• Webcord
• Mumble
• Tuba

Misc

• Gnome Disks
• Disk Usage Analyzer
• RPI Imager
• Flatseal
• Warehouse

Virt

• QEMU + KVM + virt-manager
• Remmina
• x2Go server - For accessing my desktop from other low powered Linux devices I have laying around.
• Sunshine server - For mirroring my desktop from my phone in DeX mode connected to a lapdock.

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