 What are the best applications available on Linux? Today I'm gonna go over my top 12 Linux apps that I think everyone should know about. Now this top 12 list that I'm gonna go over today, this will include applications that are mainly for the casual Linux desktop user, but I will throw in one or two apps that are built with the power user in mind. One other thing to note is that my top 12 Linux app list will include only free and open source software. After all, whether many of us realize it or not, the big reason that we left the proprietary closed source operating systems like Windows and macOS to come over to Linux is primarily because Linux is free and open source software. Now I know some of you are gonna be confused by that statement and you may say, hey, DT, I left Windows because of privacy concerns or security concerns. Well, those are the effects, but they're not the cause. The reason Windows has such big privacy concerns and security concerns is because it's not free and open source software. That's the reason that it has all of that stuff going on. And I could say the same thing about 90% of the reasons that people switch away from things like Windows and Mac. The reason is actually because it's not free and open source software, whether many of you realize that or not. So my list will only include free and open source applications. So the first of my top 12 Linux apps in no particular order, by the way, is Firefox. Only the most important desktop application for any desktop computer user is the web browser. The web browser is what you're gonna spend 90% plus of your time in. And I think it's very important that that web browser be free and open source software. And the class of free and open source software browsers is Mozilla Firefox. It's been around for like two decades now. Therefore, while Mozilla Firefox was actually one of the most popular web browsers on the planet, its popularity has waned in recent years due to the extreme popularity of proprietary web browsers such as Google Chrome, which now has like more than 80% of the market share. Also, those of you that are running proprietary operating systems like Windows or macOS, they have their own proprietary web browsers built in. Windows has Microsoft Edge and of course, it still has Microsoft Internet Explorer around too. And Mac, of course, has Safari. But again, all of those are closed source proprietary pieces of software, kind of like the operating system itself. I told you that all of your problems with Windows and Mac is because it's not free and open source software. The same thing with the web browser. If you're worried about spyware and just people tracking every move you make and things like that, if you're really concerned about privacy, especially, you should not ever use a proprietary web browser. You just shouldn't use them. So the great thing about web browsers is there are a ton of free and open source web browsers. I strongly suggest take a look at Mozilla Firefox first because that one's been around for ever. It is a large corporation Mozilla and they are heavily invested in the free and open source software movement for those of you looking for maybe a Chromium based web browser that's not Google Chrome. One that I like and it's very concerned about privacy and security is the Brave web browser. The Brave web browser is based on the Chromium engine. So it's basically Google Chrome, but it's not built by Google and it's had a lot of the Google stuff ripped out of it. It's not tracking every move you make. A matter of fact, it blocks a lot of tracking stuff you can see here in the start screen. 108 trackers and ads blocked. So it actually tells you how many of the evil tracking stuff it has blocked in web pages that you have visited using the Brave browser. Brave is free and open source software and it is available on desktop. It is also available on mobile, although Brave is not part of my top 12 list. I wanted to throw that out there for those of you that would prefer something that is not Firefox, but I think it's very important. Whatever web browser you use, whether it be on Linux, Windows or Mac, you need to use a free and open source web browser. The next application on my top 12 Linux application list is VLC. VLC is a media player. It is a multimedia player, so it will play all of your audio. It will especially play all of your video. It's mainly designed to be a video player. It will handle all kinds of video formats. You can play DVD, Blu-ray, it comes with all that stuff. And the fact that it supports so many different audio and video formats kind of has made it the de facto multimedia player on Linux for two decades now. VLC is one of the most popular free and open source applications on the planet. It's cross-platform. Cross-platform means it's available on Linux. It's also available on Windows and Mac. By the way, Firefox is also cross-platform. That's another thing. Most of the top 12 Linux apps that I'm going to discuss today are actually also available on Windows and Mac. So it's not strictly for the Linux user. And I think those of you on Windows should also explore some of these free and open source applications as well. Because if you start using these applications on Windows, when you decide to leave Windows to come over to Linux, it makes it so much easier because you've already been using a lot of these free and open source applications that so many Linux users use anyway. Next up on the top 12 Linux app list is LibreOffice. Now LibreOffice is one of the most popular free and open source applications on the planet. It's actually multiple applications. It's actually an entire office suite. This is our free and open source alternative to something like Microsoft Office. Now Microsoft Office is once again proprietary closed source software. LibreOffice is free and open source software that makes it much more secure and much more privacy respecting. What I launched here was LibreOffice Rider. This is the same thing as Microsoft Word. You know, it's a word processor, but if I exit out of LibreOffice Rider here, and there are other LibreOffice programs, including LibreOffice Impress, which I often use sometimes to make presentations. It's a really nice presentation software. There's also LibreOffice Calc, which is a spreadsheet program. It's your free and open source alternative to Microsoft Excel. The next application on my top 12 Linux app list is a free and open source alternative to things like Zoom and Teams and Skype. Right now, especially because of the lockdown period, so many of us have to do video conferencing, video chat, and all of those popular programs that you guys are being forced to use at your school and at your work are proprietary closed source software. But we do have a great free and open source alternative, and that program is called JITSEE. JITSEE functions very similar. There's things like Zoom and Skype, and all I need to do is enter a name for my conference and hit go, and it would take over my camera, and I say, I can't actually show you guys this while recording this right now. But you can see some of the rooms I've created in the past included this room here that I titled, DT is Not Bald, and this one here where I titled it DT is Not My Password. So JITSEE is a great video conference software. It is available on Linux on pretty much every Linux distribution. It's available as an app image. Next up on the top 12 list is a graphics program called GIMP. Now GIMP stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is our free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop. So GIMP is designed for creating raster based images rather than scalable vector graphics images. If you wanted to do SVG, there is another free and open source program that I'm not going to put on the list, but it's a fantastic program to Inkscape. It's the one you want to install for SVG for raster. Go with the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is actually just called GIMP. And yeah, I can show you some of the stuff that I have made in this recently. This was a thumbnail for one of my recent videos that I created here in GIMP. I actually do all of the artwork for my YouTube channel in GIMP. I do the channel header and the thumbnails and everything, or everything I do art related, I do in GIMP. Next up on the top 12 list is a really cool system monitoring application. That's really a system cleanup application. And it is called Stacer. Stacer is an electron application, but don't let that, you know, fool you into thinking it's some kind of bad application. It has actually got some fantastic functionality. It allows you to clean up your system, clean up orphan packages, clean up the cache, and things like that. It really helps you keep your system tidy. It's got several different categories here in the left-hand column. If I click the rocket icon here, you can see this is my startup applications. These are the applications that are being launched on startup, or I could toggle them on and off if I wanted to. We have the little broom here. And the broom, this is where most of the magic happens. This is where you clean up your package caches, your cache reports, your app logs, your app cache, and your trash bin. Stacer is free and open source software, of course, and it is available on every Linux distro. Once again, Stacer, I believe, is available as an app image. Sticking with system monitoring, now one of the things that I install on every single Linux system, no matter what distribution I run, I install a terminal application called Htop. So you just launch a terminal, you type the word Htop, and you get a interactive process viewer here. It tells me all the processes, you know, every single program that's running on the system right now. It also gives me system resource information as far as how much RAM and CPU I'm using. I'm using quite a bit of system resources right now because I'm recording. That's why this is a little high, and you know, I've got a beefy machine here. Now because this is a terminal application, I know some users, especially casual Linux desktop users, is gonna be put off by Htop. You know, it's a terminal application, it has to be hard, it has to be scary, it's not. Matter of fact, just install Htop and launch it and just look at it, right? Many times, that's all you need to do. You just wanna know how much RAM you're using, how much CPU you're using, or you know, what processes are running. Sometimes you don't even wanna do anything interactively in it, but if you wanted to, you know, I could pick a process here inside the list and say this process here, Pycom, which is my compositor, is completely out of control. At the bottom, it tells me the hotkeys, you know, that I will actually do something, and it tells me to kill a process, do F9, the function key F9. So if I did F9 while that was highlighted, I would get another menu come up about killing that particular process, which means, you know, forcing it to stop. If you ever have a process that's out of control, right, something that you just can't kill, you know, load up Htop, and then find that process, F9 it, and sigterm it, and it should go away for you. The next program that I wanna talk about is a text editor, because most of your Linux desktop environments are gonna come with a plain text editor, but most of them are not very good. And I wanna show you guys one that I think is much better than the ones that come with your standard Linux desktop environments, and I'm talking about Notepad QQ. Notepad QQ is a free and open-source alternative to Notepad++, which is only available on Microsoft Windows, unfortunately, but Notepad QQ is kind of a clone of Notepad++, and it's really neat because I just opened it up and it remembered everything that I've been working on. Like, this year, you know, I created that document, I don't know, several days ago, and it's still here, exactly where I left off because I didn't close the tab. Even if I had not actually saved this document, it will still be here. You know, even if you don't save, you close out Notepad QQ when you come back, what you were working on will still be in it, and that aspect alone is worth the price of admission, right? That makes Notepad QQ so much better than so many of the plain text editors that actually ship with most desktop environments on Linux. Next up on the top 12 Linux application list is the App Outlet. Now, the App Outlet is one of the coolest Linux programs that I didn't know existed until about two months ago. I came across this fantastic App Store, and the reason the App Outlet, I think, is one of the pieces of software every Linux user should know about is because this App Store includes App Images, Snaps, and Flatpacks. That's all it includes. It includes App Images, Snaps, and Flatpacks. So this is not applications that are in your Linux distributions core repository. These are third-party extra applications, and this is typically how you have to get proprietary programs installed because by default, Linux distributions typically only have free and open-source software in their repositories, and they will only ship with free and open-source software already installed on the system. So if you need proprietary stuff like Discord, for example, or Skype, or Teams, or Spotify, things like that, you're not going to find those in your Linux distributions core repositories. But all of those proprietary programs are available as these third-party packages, typically they're packaged as either App Images, Flatpacks, or Snaps. And the Outlet lets you find all of that stuff. If I go to the search box here, let's just search for Discord because that is a proprietary closed-source program, and it is actually available. It's actually available as all three formats. So you could pick which format you want to install. Do you want to install the Flatpacks, Snap, or App Image? For the end user, it really doesn't matter which one you pick. These days, I prefer App Images. I find them a little easier to work with than Snaps and especially Flatpacks. But pick whichever one you want to use and I think the App Outlet is a vastly underrated application. As a matter of fact, I don't think most people even know the App Outlet exists and I'm hoping to spread a little more love for App Outlet than it currently gets. And the next app on my list is going to be the Dead Beef Music Player. Now some of you are going to wonder why Dead Beef is here when we already talked about VLC. I thought VLC was a multimedia player. It is. You could actually play your music in VLC, but VLC really is a video player. For those of you that want a really simple audio player, Dead Beef is a very lightweight, minimal audio player, but it has really all the functionality you could possibly want. It comes with a ton of plugins, not installed by default, but you can go find them on the web, such as this Visualizer plugin. I don't want to get a copyright strike, so I can't actually listen to any of this music. It looks like the last thing I was listening to was some Beethoven symphonies, the 5th and the 7th, and some Bach, Holts, The Planets. This actually here, the last track, is a piece of Creative Commons music, so I could play this. This is actually the theme song I use. That's the song from Unfettered Freedom, and those of you that are subscribed to the Unfettered Freedom podcast. Now let me pause that. The name of that song, by the way, is Key to Your Heart. And you can find that in the YouTube Audio Library. But Dead Beef is just a fantastic music player. I have done videos about Dead Beef as well. Now the final two applications on my list are going to be geared toward more of the power user, or the person that is a little more curious about Linux. They want to explore some of the possibilities with Linux and maybe other operating systems as well. The first program I want to talk about is Oracle VirtualBox. So VirtualBox is a way to spin up virtual machines. What is a virtual machine? Well, it's not your physical machine. It's a virtual machine. So you can install an operating system in this virtual machine, and it's not really affecting your physical hard drive or anything, right? Yeah, it's not really there. And that's a great way to test out other operating systems. Save those of you that are on Windows and you're thinking about switching to Linux, but you're not ready to format the drive and make that commitment. Well, you know what you could do? You could test out Linux inside a virtual machine inside VirtualBox. For example, I have this VM here of Linux Mint 20. And you could just install Linux Mint 20 inside a VirtualBox inside Windows and you can test it out. And if I made this full screen right now, it would actually look and function exactly like Linux Mint running on physical hardware. Matter of fact, you couldn't tell the difference if I didn't tell you that I was running a VM. So this is a great way for Windows users to try out Linux. This is also a great way for Linux users to try out other distributions because you don't want to constantly be reinstalling. Linux distributions on your main machine, right? Just spin up a quick VM and take a look at them. And the final application on my top 12 Linux app list is really geared toward the power user, but I think you guys really should investigate this program because it will change the way you work. And that program is VIM. What is VIM? Well, let me open up a terminal because VIM is a terminal application. And just type the word VIM and then the path to some text file on your system. Say I want to edit my bash RC file, for example. You know, do you spend a lot of time in a text editor? Now, if you are somebody that can barely type and you don't spend any time editing config files or doing any kind of creative writing or anything like that, then obviously spending a lot of time learning the VIM text editor may not be worth it. But if you're one of those people that are going to spend a lot of time, especially if you're a Linux tinker, you're going to spend a lot of time digging through config files and editing config files. Maybe you want to investigate scripting or programming. You know, you want to start getting into that, especially you probably need to learn a little bit about VIM. Now, I have done several videos about VIM in the past and I've done some tutorial videos on getting started with VIM. But basically what you need to know is that H, J, K and L are the motion keys. So if I do J, you see the cursor goes down. If I go K, it goes up. L will move to the right and H will move to the left. All of this is done because by default, you are in normal mode. You actually can't just start typing text. So H, J, K, L are the motion keys. If I want to delete something, D, D, delete the line, U to undo. If I wanted to copy and paste something, I could Y, Y for copy or yank. And then P to paste. And I don't really need that line. So let me D, D. And then if I wanted to type something, I could type I on the keyboard to get into insert mode and I could start typing. This is a line of text. Exclamation point. I could escape to get back into normal mode and maybe I don't want that line there. I'm going to D, D to delete that line. But you know what? I want to just paste that line somewhere else. Well, it's copied since I did the D, D. And it's delete, but it's also, I could paste it somewhere. So if I wanted to, I could go 50, capital G to go to line 50. And I could P to put that line right there on line 51. Now I don't want to do that either. Matter of fact, I just want to quit out of this. So I'm going to do a Q. Exclamation point to quit without writing. So that's a little bit about VIM. Check out my VIM tutorial videos that I've done in the past. I think those would get you guys up to speed. It really only takes about 30 minutes or so to really get up to speed on the basic VIM commands. Those of you that want to learn it in the terminal, run the command VIM tutor, all one word. And the VIM tutor is just a documentation page that teaches you all about the VIM commands. And all you do is go through this document and read and just practice on the text in the document. So that is the VIM tutor. And those are my top 12 Linux applications that everyone should know about. And really, I think all of you guys should probably have these installed. I know there's no application that's perfect for everybody. But I think that is a great list of 12 applications, especially for the new Delinix user, the person that's just coming to Linux. Maybe they haven't been exposed to all of this free and open source software yet. And that's really what we need to do. We need to start exposing more of these Linux users to free and open source software, the new Delinix user, but also those of you that are on Windows and Mac. Almost every program I showed you on today's list, at least nine or 10 of this top 12 here, are available on Windows and Mac as well. So try these out on those operating systems. And maybe one day, when you decide to try out Linux as your operating system, you know, now that you've been playing with all of these applications, it just makes the switch that much easier. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Devin Fran, Gabe Corbinian Mitchell, Akami, Arch 5530, Chris, Chuck, Donnie Dillon, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, PicVM, Scott, and Willie. They are the reducers of the show. They are my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, the show also would not have been possible. This very long list of names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by the community. I have no corporate sponsors, so I do ask for your help. Please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Oh, I forgot to add Emacs to the list.