Development
- VirtualBox – Virtual environment for OS experimentation
Games
- Heroic Games Launcher – GOG and Epic Games Launcher
- Lutris – Game Launcher, also does GOG and Epic and a few others
- Steam – Play thousands of games on Linux!
Image Viewers and Editors
- GIMP – Very complex but great image editor
- IrfanView – Image viewer via WINE works great!
- Pinta – Looks like Paint.net, not as refined yet
Internet
- BetterBird – Email Client
- Brave Browser – Best browser for privacy
- Discord – Voice chat and more
- Video Downloader – Name says it all
Multimedia
- Audacity – Audio Editor
- Kdenlive – Better Video Editor for more complex work
- Open Broadcaster Software – Streaming and Capture
- OpenRGB – Needed a way to control my RGB 😊
- Shotcut – Video Editing tool, very nice 🙂
- Spotify – Internet music player
- VLC – Best media player
Productivity
- LibreOffice – MS Office compatible
- NotepadNext – Sweet code / text editor
Security
You don’t really need an antivirus for Linux unless you’re downloading software outside of the package manager or software store inside your Linux desktop or running as admin all the time. More info here.
System Utilities
- CoreCtrl – Fan, CPU and GPU control
- CPU-X – CPU-Z for Linux
- Detwinner – Dupe photo and file finder
- FileZilla – FTP program
- GParted – Drive manager and clone tool
- K3B – CD / DVD Burner
- Nextcloud – Use this for backups/sharing across devices
- PeaZip – Handy zip/compression software
- PlayOnLinux – When you can’t make something work like it did on Windows…
- ProtonUp-Qt – Using advanced versions of Proton
- RustDesk – Remote Desktop that beats using TeamViewer!
- Stacer – An open source system optimizer and application monitor that helps users to manage entire system with different aspects, its an all in one system utility.
- Wine – Necessary to make Windows games and apps possible.
While open source software on this page is free to download from the internet, there are programmers who work very hard to make this software for you. Please consider donating to them if you plan to use their software.
If there is something you think I should try or have advice to give, please email me!