Great "must have" programs ?

[Jedinovice]

Kdenlive - fast, powerful, easy to use multitrack video editor.

Blows "Windows movie maker" and the like out the water and great to demo stuff to shock Windows users out of their "Yeah, but you can;t do any real world work in Linux..."

See my youtube page (in sig) to see what I mean!

[GreyGeek]

Stellarium
TeamViewer
GoogleEarth
Sage (math engine), which includes Maxima, otherwise wxMaxima
Audacity
QtCreator (and Qt4 and/or Qt5 API)
PostgreSQL & Admin3
Ocular
Hexedit
Btrfs

[Jedinovice]

Kdendrive - the fast, intuitive KDE utility that turns your laptop into a time machine.

OK, it hasn't been written yet but I am hoping the community will get on the case and make the future happen.

Sorry… I'll be going now.

[BigEasy]

Btrfs

Hmm... Really great program?

[GreyGeek]

Btrfs

Hmm... Really great program?

It most certainly is! I installed it two years ago when I updated from Kubuntu 12.04 to 14.04, just to try it out. One caveat: copy on write requires that you avoid using dynamic HD's when you install an OS under VirtualBox. Other than that I had no complaints, and I had enough disk space that going static on the guest OS HD space was a non-issue.

I found it to be just as fast as EXT4 in my use. Kubuntu uses the "@" for root and "@home" for /home, which worked out very well. I tried openSUSE's version and they made subvolumes out of just about every major directory. I had my entire drive devoted to btrfs. While I was running Kubuntu I could mount /dev/sda to /mnt and then move to it and do btrfs activities all while still running the system. I wrote a script to use snapper for singletons, because that is all I needed snapper for. Before any update I'd create a snapshot of / and /home, do the update, then create another snapshot. If things didn't work out well I could undo the changes:

snapper_pre_post.sh

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
# created by Jerry L Kreps and released under the GPL 2.0.
# This script merely creates a snapshot in both root and home with the designation of PRE or POST as the type, 
# which indicates that the user created it before an action or afterwards.
# This script is run with PRE as the TYPE before an action which you may want to reverse
# AND this script run again with POST as the TYPE after that action has been completed.  Both snapshots are singletons because
# no timeline is used.  Only the "PRE" or"POST" in the description, along with a timestamp, links the pre to the post snapshot.
# To reverse the action run the following two snapper commands:
#
# snapper -c home udochange n..m   where n or o is the number of the PRE and m or p is the number of the POST snapshot
# sudo snapper -c root undochange o..p
#
# After running those two commands both of the empty snapshots folders can be deleted using
#
# snapper -c home delete n-m
# sudo snapper -c root delete o-p
#
#
#
NOW=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M)
echo Enter snapshot type PRE or POST:
read TYPE
echo Enter description
read DESC
STR=$TYPE" "$DESC" "$NOW
echo $STR
HCMD='snapper -c home create -d "'${STR}'"'
RCMD='sudo snapper -c root create -d "'${STR}'"'
eval "$HCMD"
eval "$RCMD"

Snapper is in the repository and works for EXT4 as well, but I've never used snapper on EXT4 so I can't speak to how it works on that fs. On btrfs snapper is great, but that is because btrfs is great. Send & receive, scrub, balance, check, snapshots, subvolumes, etc. The tool is wonderful:

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Manpage/btrfs

Need some more space? Use add. Too much space? Use remove. It's about as easy as plugging USB sticks into a port.

You have to be careful with snapper in its default configuration, it will create snapshots when you sneeze. That's why I reconfigured to shut down the auto snapshots every time one fired up the package manager. Open muon and it created a PRE snapshot. Do nothing and close muon and it added POST snapshot. That is in addition to the five it made every day for both / and /home. BTW, creating a snapshot of a subvolume is nearly instantaneous. Create a snapshot of /home. On a destination backup computer start the btrfs receive command. On your box start the send command. Continue working on other stuff.

Over at the Kubuntuforums.net a user going by the handle "oshunluver" is a master of btrfs. He keeps five different distros on his HD, all running btrfs, and chooses which one he wants to work on when he boots up. Search for the threads he and I created on btrfs. They contain a lot of experience reports and info.

Oh, BTW, btrfs never hiccupped even once in the two years I used it on Kubuntu.

EDIT: I had read that snapper worked on EXT4 as well, so I decided to test it out on my new LinuxMint 17.3 KDE install. Sadly, it DOES NOT work on ext4 without a special kernel (I never found what that kernel was) and with an additional library, but the sources were divided on that library. Some said net4 and other said e2fsprog. As it is, installed from the repository with all flagged dependencies, when one tries to create the necessary config files the operation abends with "chsnap not found". I installed backintime to create backups of my data.

[BigEasy]

I know what is btrfs. I just wondered you call it "program". It's filesystem.

[GreyGeek]

I know what is btrfs. I just wondered you call it "program". It's filesystem.

It is made by compiling source code, as is the kernel and all other "apps" in the repository. That the program is used to create and service a filesystem does not mean it is not a program.

[Fred Barclay]

Second vote for Atom.
If you programme Python (or Python 3) with an IDE then spyder is very good.

VirtualBox, audacity (for editing music files), palemoon (an excellent browser), gufw (for firewall config), gnome-chess, google earth, mat (for removing metadata from photos/videos), and veracrypt round out my list.

[austin.texas]

Seamonkey HTML Composer - the first thing I install on a new OS. That is because 99.9% of my documents are html, so I need it.
Filezilla - awesome! I can upload a web page to a website with just a couple of clicks.
grsync - takes care of my routine backups quickly.
gnome-search-tool - Must have. Great for searching for text in files.

[killer de bug]

I am not sure if someone mentioned clonezilla already. But this is a great tool for system backup.