 Recently, I've had some viewers of the channel ask me, what are the programs that I use on a regular basis? What are my most frequently used programs? What applications does DT use all the time? And I thought this would make a pretty cool video because most of these applications, you guys have seen me use on camera, some of these not so much. So today I'm going to share with you 10 programs that I actually use on a daily basis or almost daily basis. And all of these programs are going to be graphical applications, GUI apps. With one exception, I'm going to make one exception, I have a reason for that when I get to it. But today I'm going to share with you my 10 most frequently used applications. So let me switch over to my desktop, the first application people want to know about of course is the browser that I use. And for those of you who've been following the channel for a while, you guys know I love the Brave browser for a variety of reasons, partly due to the built-in ad block because I make YouTube videos and I'm often recording my desktop. I need built-in ad block because I don't need, especially multimedia ads playing when I'm recording my desktop because there can be copyright issues and things like that. So I like having a browser that has that ad block built in. I also really like just some of the privacy features that are already baked into Brave. I also like the fact that it's quite minimal. There's not a lot going on as far as a whole bunch of toolbars and menus and things. It's quite basic and I'm a basic guy. People often ask me about the start page here in my Brave browser. Why do I have this weird looking start page that's, you know, not the standard Brave homepage? Well, that's because I'm using an extension. This extension is called Tabless. I actually made a video about Tabless. It is available as both a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension. So you can pretty much use it on every web browser. But if I go to the Tabless extension in the Chrome store, you're going to say this is that customized Tabless homepage here. It's got a variety of settings. So that is why my Brave homepage looks a little differently. By the way, when I did that search here in the URL bar for Tabless, you guys noticed it defaults to the Brave search engine. That's another thing I really love about Brave, the company. This privacy-respecting search engine they've built, the Brave search engine, is actually quite good. I actually prefer Brave search over DuckDuckGo, especially DuckDuckGo because it uses Bing search results. I've found that DuckDuckGo is really pretty bad at search results. So by far the most used application on my Linux desktop is the Brave browser. Actually the second most common program that I pull up on a regular basis is Emacs. You guys see me use Emacs all the time on camera. So Emacs is, many people will say it's a text editor, but Emacs is more than a text editor. It is its own environment, its own framework. You can really think of Emacs as a way of setting custom key bindings that should work universally across multiple applications as long as they're Emacs applications. It's almost its own operating system. It can be a file manager. As a matter of fact, I can go to the Emacs file manager. There's the DearEd file manager inside Emacs. It can be a web browser if I wanted to do a MetaX and go to EWW for the browser and go to distro.tube, which is my website, you know, I've got a web browser inside Emacs. If you want to read some RSS news feeds inside Emacs, I can launch Elfied inside Emacs and I can, you know, just start reading, you know, various news items here inside Elfied. I could listen to music inside Emacs. I could do all kinds of things. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer, you can get done inside Emacs. But by far the most common thing I do on Emacs is actually edit text. So even though it's not strictly a text editor, that's probably what most people use it for. 99% of the time, that's what I use Emacs mainly for as a text editor. So probably the third most frequently used application on my computer would be the terminal. So after the browser and after Emacs, probably the most common program that I enter is a terminal. Now a terminal is a GUI application, but I do want to also stress that it's not just the terminal that's running, it is also the shell that is running in the terminal. And of course, this is the fish shell. The fish shell is really nice because I can start typing something. For example, maybe I want to type some random said command. I guess this was a said command that is in my history. I don't know when I ran that thing, but I could up arrow, I get a lot of history. If I start typing something here in the shell, maybe it's a command that is not really a command. For example, maybe I want to launch the brave browser, I could type B, R, A, and it will auto complete if I want it to. But if I start typing something that doesn't make sense, like B, R, V, A, you can see that command is red because that's not a real command. If it was a real command, the fish shell will turn it blue. So these are, I end up in a terminal all the time. So alacrity along with the fish shell, those are probably my third and fourth most frequently used applications. Now the next group of applications because I typically use these in conjunction are the applications that I use any time I'm recording and making a video. So number five on the list is OBS. OBS is the program that I use to record all my videos right now. You guys are looking at the desktop on one of my computer monitors. If I went ahead and opened the brave browser on this monitor, this is my far left monitor, and OBS is on the middle monitor, and you can record, you know, if I wanted to record what I was doing, which is exactly what I'm doing right now, I'm recording this video in OBS. So OBS is really cool, has a lot of transition effects, which this would normally be my camera, but my camera is being taken up on a different instance of OBS right now. But you guys have seen my transition, such as these Patreon cards and the end screens and various things. So OBS is probably one of the most popular pieces of free and open source software on the planet, and it is the standard, it is the de facto standard when it comes to recording video and streaming video OBS fantastic. So OBS is number five on the list of my most frequently used applications. Number six has to be Kaden Live, because after I use OBS to record a video, the next step is to use Kaden Live to edit a video. I've already opened up one of my most recent projects that I've done something in here, and if I scrub through the video, you can see this effect that I had here as the DistroTube logo slides onto the screen, and you get some fading effects with the wipes here. So these are compositions and effects. You got a lot of different compositions and a lot of different effects here in Kaden Live for a piece of free and open source software. Kaden Live is actually, I think, one of the best video editors on the planet. I know a lot of professionals are going to say, you know, especially these days, DaVinci Resolve is kind of the standard in that field. And of course, a lot of people still use Adobe Premiere Pro, but honestly, you know, as far as freedom respecting software and also software that I don't have to pay a ridiculous yearly subscription to, you know, like Adobe. I want no part of Adobe subscriptions. I want no part of Adobe as a company. And you know what? It's Kaden Live as good as Premiere Pro. I don't know. I'll never know because I'll never use Premiere Pro. But honestly, Kaden Live is more than enough for what I do to create these fantastic videos on YouTube and Odyssey. And then number seven on the list has to be GIMP. GIMP kind of goes along with Kaden Live and with OBS because I record the videos in OBS. I edit the videos in Kaden Live, and then I create the thumbnails here in GIMP. If I go to open recent, here is a thumbnail for that video that I had just opened up in Kaden Live. This was the thumbnail I created here in GIMP. If I go to some other recent thumbnails, here was the one for the brave Leo chat assistant that I did a video on a few days ago. GIMP is one of the most popular pieces of free and open source software on the planet that's also available on Windows as well. I was actually a GIMP user, you know, 20 years ago before I switched to Linux because GIMP is also available on Windows. GIMP is essentially a free and open source alternative to proprietary solutions like Adobe Photoshop. And again, I don't want to subscribe to, I don't want to be held hostage by an evil corporation like Adobe. I use GIMP for all the thumbnails, channel headers, all the artwork for the channel, everything you guys have ever seen on my channel as far as any kind of images and artwork was created with the GIMP. Number eight on the list, I'm going to share with you my favorite multimedia player and that is VLC. Now, I have several different multimedia players installed on my system as far as various audio players, various video players. But the thing I love about VLC, it's free and open source software. It's available on Windows, Mac and Linux, so it's cross-platform. Like most of the programs I've shared today, most of these are also available on Windows and Mac as well. But the thing I love about VLC is it handles pretty much everything you throw at it as far as various multimedia codecs and formats, audio formats, video formats, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming audio and video. And one of the things I love about VLC from some of the work I do, sometimes I record these videos using something like OBS, for example, and maybe I'm interviewing a guest. You know, maybe it's a collaborative video, me and one other person. And a lot of times I record my audio on one audio stream and their audio on a second audio stream. That way I can adjust the levels easily. And sometimes I want to, I want to be able to just play one audio stream in a multimedia player. And VLC has this ability. If I go to audio, and it's not highlighted right now, but there is this menu called Audio Track. And if you go to Audio Track on a audio track that has multiple tracks, you'll see track one, track two, track three, however many tracks. And you can just select that track and only hear that track of audio. And that is really nice. I also use this sometimes in my music playing as far as, you know, playing the trombone, playing the recorder and things like that. You guys know I am essentially a classical musician. I was classically trained. I actually have two music degrees. I have a bachelor's and a master's in music performance. And sometimes I play along with DVD accompaniment, you know, when I'm playing some of these instruments. And sometimes these DVDs or CDs, they will have an example of a soloist playing the actual solo part that I would of course be playing. And then the accompaniment on a second track. So you can actually have the CD play the entire piece. You know, that way you can listen to it and then go back and you can turn off one of the tracks that way it eliminates that soloist playing. And then I can play along with it and be the soloist. VLC, a pretty damn cool piece of open source software. I love it. Number nine on my list of most frequently used programs. Now this is much more of a specialty item for me because honestly, most people probably are not gonna be playing around with virtual machines as much as I do because of the nature of my YouTube channel. I'm constantly creating virtual machines, showing off virtual machines. For example, this Debian 12 virtual machine if I wanna go ahead and launch it. Let me go ahead and make it full screen. You know, I could boot into Debian. So VIRT manager has been my virtual machine environment of choice here in the last few years because VIRT manager uses KVM and QEMU. So what this does is it leverages the power of the Linux kernel, meaning there are kernel modules built in virtual machine modules actually built into the Linux kernel to make your virtual machines a little bit more performant, if you will. And VIRT manager can leverage that power where other virtual machine technologies, something like VirtualBox, which I have VirtualBox installed if I can type it correctly, they are not KVM, right? So it does not leverage the kernel modules for VMs the way VIRT manager does. But VirtualBox is a really neat program too. VirtualBox is cross-platform. So you can actually use VirtualBox on Windows Mac and Linux. So that is the advantage of VirtualBox where VIRT manager is Linux only. But honestly, if you're on Linux, you probably want to be using VIRT manager because those virtual machines, they just run better in VIRT manager on Linux. So number 10 on my list of most frequently used applications is Tasty Trade. Now Tasty Trade is proprietary software, of course, because all software in this category of brokerage software, all of it's proprietary, the entire financial industry's proprietary software. But I have a brokerage account with Tasty Trade. I use their desktop client here that we're looking at, Tasty Trade. I use it to trade stocks, options, and futures, and things like that. So I am a regular day trader. I get up in the morning and every day, Monday through Friday, every day that the stock market is open, which is typically Monday through Friday and not counting federal holidays that are special days where the market is closed about 220 days out of the year. I spend about an hour or so using this program, typically when the stock market opens, which is 8.30 central time here in the US until about 9.30 central time. That first hour that the market's open is typically the busiest hour. And I typically spend that hour every day managing my positions. I probably put on about 2,500 different trades every year. So I'm a very active trader. I have three monitors for trading. So typically this is what is seen on the middle monitor, which is the main tasty trade window. But I have some pop out windows that I'll have on a separate monitor where I have, for example, this grid of charts where I'm monitoring what's happening with the S&P 500, the NASDAQ 100, the Russell 2000, as well as the VIX futures. I also have a watch list, several watch lists that I can switch between here. Or I could just view the minute chart that's going on with a particular stock or ETL for future, whatever it happens to be that I'm monitoring. So tasty trade, fantastic brokerage. They also put out fantastic educational content about how to actually trade options. That's really what they're designed for is trading options, which is mostly what I do by go to my history here and actually do year to date. Let's see how many trades I've actually made on the year. Let's see, I have made 2,263 trades because of that many rows of information. So about 2,200 trades and the year is not quite over with. We've still got about what, five or six weeks. I'll make my usual amount of trades, that 2,500 trades on the year, which is about how many I made last year. So again, I make a lot of options trades. And tasty trade is, in my opinion, the best platform for this. If you haven't checked out tasty trade or their content network, Tasty Live, which does have a channel on YouTube, check those guys out. So there you have it. My list of my 10 most frequently used applications. And again, these most frequently used applications, they didn't include command line applications because if I had included things like the GNU Core UTOs, commands like LS and CD and things like that, obviously, I'm gonna use them all the time, but we didn't need to discuss that. I also didn't discuss applications that I use all the time, but they're nothing special. Like, I open up my file manager every day, my graphical file manager, PCManFM is the one I have on this computer, but it's like any other file manager. It's no different than any other file manager. So why talk about it? It's nothing special. Same thing with my email client. I use Mail Spring as an email client, but is it really that much better than something like Geary or Thunderbird or any other email client on Linux? No, it's just an email client. So the list of applications I showed you, the 10 I focused on today were applications that I think are special. I think they stand out in their particular category. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Armor Dragon commander, Ingrid George, Lee Matthew, Methos, Nate Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Soulastry, ToolsDevil, Wardgent2, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick little episode about my 10 most frequently used applications wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, when I see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys.