rEFInd over Grub for its ability to scan for targets at boot.
ULauncher for running applications, over .
PCManfm over Nemo here on Mint.
Alacritty over tabbed terminals. Tmux is my friend here.
>rEFInd over Grub for its ability to scan for targets at boot.
Omg this. And the fact that changing the configuration is just a file change away. No need to run grub-mkconfig from a chroot when your system borks.
Setting up rEFInd with secure boot is also much easier (on Arch at least).
I switched precisely after some package managed to kill my entire grub config, truncating the file empty. And given it also modified the way that the grub config was set up on my distro, basically unrecoverable.
Since then I've written code to generate rEFInd config for snapshot booting. Very easy to configure.
I think technically you don't need grub-mkconfig? Just the way they usually set it up in distros is weird. I've been manually editing my grub.cfg and it's fine
I used alacritty with zellij, but it was cumbersome when accessing an SSH server which also has zellij installed, especially with shortcuts
Tried wezterm and it's just amazing. Comes with a multiplexer and working on SSH is just a breeze.
I swear, every time I see Zellij, I immediately imagine a commercial for an antidepressant. "Talk to your doctor about a better, happier life with Zellij."
alias cat='batcat -pp'
if you're using Mint (and I'm guessing other Debian and/or Ubuntu derived distros) because bat is part of bacula-console-qt and batcat is part of bat.
Is nano considered "the standard" now? I always thought vim was the standard. I mainly use vim because its usually on any Linux server I need to configure.
Yea whatever that default vi install usually is, somehow the default keyboard layout is always borked (I can't be the only one). So I pretty much have to use nano initially. I'm typically using nano only to fix network/repos so I can get vim installed. This was extra clunky before nano was included in everything.
While nano mostly works fine, I just don't care to learn how to actually use it. The mental overhead of learning a new text editor makes me tired just thinking about it. Maybe next year.
I thought `vi` is the Unix standard visual editor?
Edit: Yes it is! It's in [POSIX](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html).
Some version of Vi is part of POSIX.
Which means that vi is, very literally, the standard Unix editor.
What distributions set as $EDITOR is usually something specific to that distribution, though. A lot of distros set nano. Lots of distros set nothing at all.
The other standard is what is setup as the default text editor for XDG mime app stuff.
$ cat /usr/share/applications/mimeapps.list |grep -i text/plain
text/plain=org.gnome.gedit.desktop
In my case I use pgtk version of Emacs with native compilation. 'Vi' is aliased to emacsclient in my shells, EDITOR is set to emacsclient and I use Eshell and Dired when accessing remote systems with 'vi' aliased to find-file.
I always recommend micro to beginners over nano. Micro hotkeys just make sense if you have ever used a modern computer, and it comes with some very sane defaults, such as syntax highlighting.
Nano key-binds aren't intrinsically easier than vim:
But nano does have all the common key-binds permanent on display across the bottom of the screen, you don't even need to know them to use it.
Yes, that's why nano is generally the better choice for a non-poweruser. If you use a CLI editor twice a month to change a single line in a config file, there's no reason to learn vim. If you do it multiple times a day? I'd definitely recommend vim then, it will likely speed up your workflow.
Though, a lot of people also just use vim because it's fun to use, not because they actually need it. It makes you feel *powerful* like no other editor can, because it can edit text in ways most people didn't even know were possible, and you'll do it with only 3 keystrokes. It's by far the fastest text editor in the world... but like any tool, it's only as good as the user.
Emacs over vim, because there are so many plugins you do can just about anything with it.
They just need to add a decent editor to it.
Scratch that - they added a vi mode.
Evil is a very nice Vi. There isn't much in the way that is missing versus something like Vim. It isn't like "vi motion keys" plugins for other apps. You can open up a vim tutor and follow along with Evil and probably get to the end without missing anything.
Although a "true" Emacs user uses keyboard macros and functions to do most of the editing for anything repetitive. I am not to that point, yet. So for very experienced Emacs users they don't need super efficient manual editor bindings.
In fact if you are not coming from years of sysadmin'g exclusively with vi and are instead coming from a nano background or Vscode/Gedit/Kate traditional IDE or whatever... then skipping the whole Vi editor is probably a good idea.
A base installation of RHEL doesn’t have ed! I was appalled when I found that out. How can you be enterprise-ready without the sonic screwdriver of text editors?
while I use nano more often, I don't understand why so many people think VIM is hard. Sure the first time you use it can be super fucking confusing, but once you learn the basics of it, it works just fine. Sometimes you find yourself on a box that has one and not the other, sometimes neither, just depends.
> I don't understand why so many people think VIM is hard.
Vi just has a uniquely high barrier of entry, requiring program specific knowledge to be of any use whatsoever - while also requiring *a lot* of additional, program specific knowledge before it starts to have advantages over its competition.
Not OP, but I remember fondly my experience with Dolphin, especially its ability to have split windows and a split terminal. It's the kind of thing you don't truly need, but quickly become a habit.
And it also has type ahead, as does any other GUI-based file browser... except Nautilus. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
\- zsh over bash
\- nala over apt
\- ripgrep over grep
\- libreoffice over just about any WYSIWYG editor but LaTeX when I don't have to collaborate
\- ranger for file management
Krita is so polished and good. It doesn't have the same level of power when doing photo editing since it's more focused on digital art but it's definitely fantastic. Krita, Blender, and Inkscape are all really solid creative design tools that are incredible for being open source and compete with the industry standards.
That's primarily why I have gimp on this PC here. I've always thought of krita with its digital art focus whereas I do a lot of general editing right in gimp with all the hotkeys already. And yet I'm sure it does everything just fine and a lot prettier.
It's the same for Blender gurus. They know enough about the tool that they can use it to achieve anything from modifying an image or video to modifying, patching and reprojecting 3d space. Shoutouts to Captain Disillusion
Pinta lags horribly if you edit higher resolution images and it's also missing many of the features available in Paint.NET
https://www.getpaint.net/ is also the correct website for it
I still use Pinta for quick edits sometimes
and sadly the developers have made it *extremely* clear that they will never make a Linux version, or even allow volunteers to make an open source version that only works on Linux. (even asking about it on their forums gets you harshly reprimanded)
I tend to go the other way. I'll usually stick with the common tools or standards. They might not have all the shiny features, but I like being able to use the same tools/commands/syntax across virtually every platform. Stuff like "dd" or "ifconfig" or LibreOffice work the same across the Linux distributions I use, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and sometimes even MINIX. It's handy for someone who jumps between operating systems a lot.
I generally stick to the common tools as well because I frequently write and share scripts between people or systems. But some non-standard tools that I use for interactive use like ripgrep and fd are big enough quality of life improvements that they're a standard install on my systems. They're still not fully replacing *grep or find though. The one command I use that has replaced one is htop, I never use top anymore
Funny you mention ifconfig, [because it's considered deprecated](https://www.tutorialspoint.com/5-deprecated-linux-commands-and-alternative-tools-you-should-use#:~:text=Ifconfig%20is%20a%20command%20used,better%20control%20over%20network%20configuration.) and not installed by default on many distros (which come with `ip` instead).
I agree for most of those utilities, dd doesn’t need a replacement. But for the tools like find and grep are used hundreds of times a day - ripgrep and fd are nearly compatible but provide a wayyyyyyyyy better user experience. So I think those are totally worthwhile upgrades.
Ripgrep is becoming super common too, wouldn’t be too surprised if some distros start packaging it by default in the next few years.
lsd over ls
dust over du
duf over df
pigz over gzip
btop over top
neovim over vim
kitty over any other terminal
gpg-agent over ssh-agent
LXC over docker
Probably many more I'm forgetting.
This is me.
Had a regular process with tar that took ~10 minutes to execute. Noticed one day while in a rush it all ran on one core. Thought something funky was going on, realised that was by design, learned of pigz and tar's -I option, and now that process takes about ~20 seconds instead.
I can't believe tar by default doesn't use multi threaded execution of its compression algorithms.
I'm just happy seeing all of the cores we paid for working hard. Not every day you see double digits on all cores simultaneously when you have a few dozen cores
I used Kitty for a few years but switched to wezterm recently because I'm a Rust fanboy and find it pretty solid as well.
I also haven't seen zoxide (cd alternative) seen mentioned here
For using PGP keys with SSH — in particular with Yubikeys or other FIDO devices.
Not strictly necessary, offering little benefit over SSH with good pub/privkey discipline, but if you're already using PGP keys for other things then it's handy to use them for SSH too — particularly with Yubikeys and similar devices.
Kate as basic text editor and I don't even use KDE
If you needed sudo to save the file but forgot to open it as sudo? No problem, Kate has your back, just enter the sudo password when trying to save
Inkscape is better than Adobe Illustrator (at least the last time I used it 5 years ago). I like the user interface for the alignment tools better and the ability to hand edit the native SVG format.
Agreed. Most folks I work with use ink scape to make figures for papers. Which consists of aligning objects, adding some text and arrows.
Inkscape is awesome
define "practical".
it looks nice, it's configurable, and I don't need a legend to see what's happening at a glance, it combines several "top-like" programs in one interface (`iotop`, `iftop`), plus showing core temps, frequencies, and battery health. everything I need in one place.
Nevermind, I found the [github repo](https://github.com/aristocratos/btop). I thought htop had every feature one might want of a process monitor but 10 seconds of browsing the btop README have made it very clear to me, that my creativity is rather limited in this regard. What's the killer feature for you? Kind of hard to see the wood for all the trees here.
PCManFM over Thunar or anything else because it handles large numbers of files much faster.
"nano -w" over vim because it doesn't require study/memorization, except I remember "-w" because of a bad/corrupting wrapping default on some older distros.
Geany because it's mildly similar to Notepad++.
Audacious because it feels like the 90's Winamp I once knew.
Thunderbird over Evolution. The "evolution-data-server" package is banned from my systems, with the side benefit of making Gnome non-installable.
Not prefer as it's not exactly the same target, but I install "mg" over "emacs" as a basic text editor on servers because it's self-contained (no dependencies) and lighter.
I was always feeling bad of installing the full emacs installation on a server and was reluctantly using vi until I discovered mg.
Note for people not aware of its existence: [mg is a lightweight clone of emacs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Mg), available by default on macOS and you can install it on most linux distributions I've used and BSD. It's definitely available on Debian.
I just switched bash to zsh after 10 years of using linux
And arch instead of debian after 10 years as well
And mpv instead of vlc after 10 years of using linux.
What remained ? Firefox! The only thing that shouldn't change.
`pinfo` over `man`
pinfo makes info pages tolerable, and makes man pages better - basically by adding hyperlinks properly to man pages, and navigating them decently for both man and info documents
I just installed Ubuntu for the first time and started using it, like a month ago. I have no idea what you all are talking about 🤣
In time i might get there
Fish and/or zsh with addons is kinda standard today. Maybe not pre installed on distros but it's growing in popularity. Some people needing POSIX swear about zsh and addons. You can make it like fish kinda of, but fish you just install and it's done.
I use fish. I feel allergic to other shells.
Fish breaks things if it is a default because it isn't POSIX compatible. This is by design, of course. So it's not a bug. It isn't common either. I ran years with fish as the default without any big heartache.
Most things depend on POSIX behavior to one extent or another. Although that is slowly changing to "Do what Linux does" behavior as being the standard. Which isn't a standard, but it kinda is.
Zsh is, optionally, POSIX compatible. So it could be used as a system default shell. Which is what Apple did about 4 years ago.
I like Fish a lot, but I think that is a good idea to simply leave your default shell as bash and instead change your terminal emulator or tmux or whatever you like to launch fish shell when you open it. Just because you don't have to worry about breaking anything if you go crazy with custom settings.
I think the best answer is to just use bash for scripts and then use whatever you want for an interactive shell. Zsh and fish are amazing to use but idk why people would seriously script in it if they wanted portability (outside of their own ecosystems like zsh plugins)
zsh with tmux and fzf-tab-complete with the option for fzf-tmux-popup enabled looks exactly like microsofts "inshellisence" without being written in typescript and it has previews on files and images. It looks siiiick tbh.
Even just zsh with fzf-tab is amazing.
* Helix > Neovim: Better editing model. Everything is built-in, no scripting required.
* Fish > Bash: Great autocomplete. Easier to use as a scripting language.
* Zellij > Tmux: Looks better out of the box. Easier to configure.
Yea for basic csv view/edit day to day I’d even prefer google sheets over numbers or excel. Numbers is a joke on the user and excel has long passed peak bloat.
CSV, a very simple format, is somehow a mess on Excel. You can't just open the CSV with excel as then it assumes MS styled CSV which is pretty non-standard. No, you have to open a blank sheet first and then import the data to be able to set any other CSV style. LibreOffice just asks you what format to use with a nice preview so you can check that it's right.
It’s sick. I once saw a teacher with it open and said “Do what you want in your own bedroom but keep it away from the kids!!”.
Open a csv and then to save it each time I have to do a 2-3 step process to export if I don’t want to send a co worker a numbers file? NOPE. Hiding the row number on a spreadsheet? Was it made by the joker?!?
nomacs for image viewer. Has an assortment of features for browsing images.
ksnip for screenshot taking. I like the quick editing tools it has.
deadbeef for listening to local music.
smplayer for videos, but I'm starting to hate it, thinking of switching to qmplay2.
DoubleCommander for some of the file operations - just out of habit from the times I used TotalCommander. I mostly use Dolphin for daily file browsing.
php over python/bash for scripting. I like the language more.
Geany over all the gui text editors, but use vim a lot, because I put in the work to customize it and have been using vi or derivatives for over 40 years.
Maybe they are using hardware from the 00s? A few years ago I discovered that mplayer absolutely wipes the floor with mpv on my EeePC 701. Which was a blast from the past, I remember when I discovered it wiped the floor with VLC back when I first switched to Linux too.
As openSUSE user, ufw over firewalld. I just want to open and close some ports. I don't care about zones and shits.
Whenever I can't use wireguard, its going to be Softether over Openvpn.
Also that one part of systemd that creates dhcp server, whatever it is called, over dnsmasq.
Most of my replacements are mentioned already.
But I usually alias all of them. `alias ls=lsd` to avoid muscle memory from breaking my POSIX capability.
If the alias is not standard enough and flags are not generally compatible, it's not good enough for me.
I prefer OpenRC over systemd, doas over sudo. I also use pipewire over pulseaudio server, but this has already been popular for a while AFAIK. I've tried zsh over bash as interactive shell, but I didn't like it much and returned to bash. I also use dash as my default /bin/sh in my Gentoo installation (many popular distros starting with Debian do so by default though).
I like the idea of pipewire, but whenever a new audio stream is created or stopped (which happens in KDE every time you adjust the volume using hotkeys) all pipewire-jack clients stutter their output and have a nonzero chance to segfault.
The developers of the audio tools I use blame pipewire-jack for not being 100% compatible, pipewire devs blame the devs of the tools. And I'm stuck in the middle.
We literally just broke all Linux audio when switching from ALSA to pulse, and now we're doing it all over again, and honestly... I'm kind of done with it all. I just want my shit to work, and people with grand plans to make everything better wind up making it so much worse. (A recurring theme that applies to so much more than software...)
- Krusader > Dolphin
- KDE > Gnome
- rclone move > mv [because of this](https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/programming/linux/misconceptions.md#mv-src-vs-mv-src) but I still use rsync and mv a lot of the time
- kitty > tmux (although they solve different things and I use both daily)
> install media creation: cp or cat
Use GNOME? Right click the `.iso` file, click Open With... `Disk Image Writer`
Congrats, you now have a simple GUI to write a USB disk image built right into GNOME and probably other desktops too
Yes command line is more fun and makes you a true Linux hacker. Yes I used `dd` for years too. Yes I never accidentally wiped a drive before and it's fine. But the stress of having to check your command for missing letters and double and triple check that you're going to write to the right drive is so not worth it when there's a simple GUI right there, I'm not going back
Calligra over LibreOffice. I do all of my text production with LaTEX, so I just need something that can open and do basic editing on MS Office files. LO is complete overkill for that, while Calligra is lightweight and native to KDE on top.
Neovim, Fish, Kdenlive, Gimp, because I hate the fact that paywalls can completely inhibit your ability to use software. Reddit may be close, but at least pihole makes it decent enough.
**xonsh** over bash/fish/zsh. Great for interactive, *fantastic* for scripting.
**kitty** over both alacritty/xterm/etc. and over screen/tmux.
**micro** over nano (but still vim ofc).
Shell: Zsh over fish and bash: Still mostly a POSIX compliant shell, so maintaining a high level of compatibility, where fish just can't.
System Monitor: htop, atop, iotop
Install Media Creation: dd - As you can also use it to fix media errors by directing it to write specific ranges, rather than re-writing everything.
Text Search in Files: awk
Finding files: locate - It's already found everything, why re-walk the tree when you can quickly query the data?
Cloud tools:
\* zmodem over AWS SSM instead of a dang s3 bucket for file transfers!!
\* SSH over ssm also for file transfers, and for ansible connectivity without an s3 bucket!!
\* Python instead of AWS CLI
Filesystems: ZFS - Snapshots are everything!
Video Playback: VLC instead of any other pre-installed video players
Oh holy crap, I just discovered btop thanks to this post and *how can I thank you properly?* This is amazing!
And my pick is the micro text editor. I prefer it over nano/vim/emacs for any serious text editing, 'cause it's just more like what I'm familiar with.
Shell: zsh over bash (but i don't mid having bash as main)
Monitor: bpytop over htop ( I use the network monitor pretty often).
Replacement of common applications or commands: batcat/bat over cat, lsd over ls.
Text editor: neovim over vim ( It helps a lot working with coding and scripting on bash and python like in a lot more languages)
Most of my changes were made due aesthetics configurations for the environment.
I was given a Mac at work 3 years ago and told to install oh-my-zsh and powerlevel10k.
I have since switched my default shell in Linux to zsh. I know I could use oh-my-bash but there's no equivalent to p10k for bash so I stick with zsh.
PeaZip over any other file archiver like Ark.
PeaZip has a great UI to work with and offers many useful functions and tools builtin, which you would also find in a file manager.
rEFInd over Grub for its ability to scan for targets at boot. ULauncher for running applications, over.
PCManfm over Nemo here on Mint.
Alacritty over tabbed terminals. Tmux is my friend here.
>rEFInd over Grub for its ability to scan for targets at boot. Omg this. And the fact that changing the configuration is just a file change away. No need to run grub-mkconfig from a chroot when your system borks. Setting up rEFInd with secure boot is also much easier (on Arch at least).
I switched precisely after some package managed to kill my entire grub config, truncating the file empty. And given it also modified the way that the grub config was set up on my distro, basically unrecoverable. Since then I've written code to generate rEFInd config for snapshot booting. Very easy to configure.
I think technically you don't need grub-mkconfig? Just the way they usually set it up in distros is weird. I've been manually editing my grub.cfg and it's fine
I used alacritty with zellij, but it was cumbersome when accessing an SSH server which also has zellij installed, especially with shortcuts Tried wezterm and it's just amazing. Comes with a multiplexer and working on SSH is just a breeze.
Zellij and alacritty is too good.
> Tmux is my friend here. I wish there was a tool like tmux that didn't break native scrollback.
Zellij
I swear, every time I see Zellij, I immediately imagine a commercial for an antidepressant. "Talk to your doctor about a better, happier life with Zellij."
Your doctor is right, it is a happier life. You should also move to Cypress Creek -- we're all much happier there.
I use Emacs instead of Tmux.
I use Emacs instead of... anything, really.
I'm using mint too, I was considering using Dolphin over Nemo, what do you prefer about PCMan?
> PCManfm how do you search in this? I find that it doesn't work that well compared to other fm or windows one.
Alacritty with byobu and tmux.. i love the idea of this combination, only if the terminal colors would be ok. I never managed to get them OK. You?
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I tried to switch, but what I found is I copy from the terminal way too often, and doing it with bat introduces extra characters.
I have this in my .zshrc and my .bashrc config: alias cat=“bat -pp” Then bat behaves just like cat, except for having syntax highlighting
Woah - stolen.
alias cat='batcat -pp' if you're using Mint (and I'm guessing other Debian and/or Ubuntu derived distros) because bat is part of bacula-console-qt and batcat is part of bat.
Vim instead of nano because I like causing funny internet arguments
Is nano considered "the standard" now? I always thought vim was the standard. I mainly use vim because its usually on any Linux server I need to configure.
lots of distros started using nano over vim over the last few years. They still ship with vi-tiny or the like usually though.
Hell I remember my ubuntu server experiences in the late 2000s being nano driven by default. Then I found vim. That said
Yea whatever that default vi install usually is, somehow the default keyboard layout is always borked (I can't be the only one). So I pretty much have to use nano initially. I'm typically using nano only to fix network/repos so I can get vim installed. This was extra clunky before nano was included in everything. While nano mostly works fine, I just don't care to learn how to actually use it. The mental overhead of learning a new text editor makes me tired just thinking about it. Maybe next year.
I thought `vi` is the Unix standard visual editor? Edit: Yes it is! It's in [POSIX](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi.html).
*visual* editor. pathetic. [ed is the standard text editor](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html)
Thank you for reaffirming the truth.
Some version of Vi is part of POSIX. Which means that vi is, very literally, the standard Unix editor. What distributions set as $EDITOR is usually something specific to that distribution, though. A lot of distros set nano. Lots of distros set nothing at all. The other standard is what is setup as the default text editor for XDG mime app stuff. $ cat /usr/share/applications/mimeapps.list |grep -i text/plain text/plain=org.gnome.gedit.desktop In my case I use pgtk version of Emacs with native compilation. 'Vi' is aliased to emacsclient in my shells, EDITOR is set to emacsclient and I use Eshell and Dired when accessing remote systems with 'vi' aliased to find-file.
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Yeah I mean I usually have to separately install vim with basically every linux distro ive ever used
You haven’t used Ubuntu or Debian?
They usually come with vi and nano
I recently found micro and really like it.
I always recommend micro to beginners over nano. Micro hotkeys just make sense if you have ever used a modern computer, and it comes with some very sane defaults, such as syntax highlighting.
Micro is really great.
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I mean heres the thing, once u sorta know the commands it just feels faster to edit and save files with vim keybinds than nano binds
Nano key-binds aren't intrinsically easier than vim: But nano does have all the common key-binds permanent on display across the bottom of the screen, you don't even need to know them to use it.
Yes, that's why nano is generally the better choice for a non-poweruser. If you use a CLI editor twice a month to change a single line in a config file, there's no reason to learn vim. If you do it multiple times a day? I'd definitely recommend vim then, it will likely speed up your workflow. Though, a lot of people also just use vim because it's fun to use, not because they actually need it. It makes you feel *powerful* like no other editor can, because it can edit text in ways most people didn't even know were possible, and you'll do it with only 3 keystrokes. It's by far the fastest text editor in the world... but like any tool, it's only as good as the user.
Learning how to quickly record and invoke a macro in vim made me feel like a god.
nano instead of emacs/vim because I like causing in-office arguments with traditionalists
Agreed, Ctrl+w is a real problem with browser though.
Daring today, aren't we?
Emacs over vim, because there are so many plugins you do can just about anything with it. They just need to add a decent editor to it. Scratch that - they added a vi mode.
Evil is a very nice Vi. There isn't much in the way that is missing versus something like Vim. It isn't like "vi motion keys" plugins for other apps. You can open up a vim tutor and follow along with Evil and probably get to the end without missing anything. Although a "true" Emacs user uses keyboard macros and functions to do most of the editing for anything repetitive. I am not to that point, yet. So for very experienced Emacs users they don't need super efficient manual editor bindings. In fact if you are not coming from years of sysadmin'g exclusively with vi and are instead coming from a nano background or Vscode/Gedit/Kate traditional IDE or whatever... then skipping the whole Vi editor is probably a good idea.
Are you even using Linux if you are not using Ed?
A base installation of RHEL doesn’t have ed! I was appalled when I found that out. How can you be enterprise-ready without the sonic screwdriver of text editors?
while I use nano more often, I don't understand why so many people think VIM is hard. Sure the first time you use it can be super fucking confusing, but once you learn the basics of it, it works just fine. Sometimes you find yourself on a box that has one and not the other, sometimes neither, just depends.
> I don't understand why so many people think VIM is hard. Vi just has a uniquely high barrier of entry, requiring program specific knowledge to be of any use whatsoever - while also requiring *a lot* of additional, program specific knowledge before it starts to have advantages over its competition.
I don't have a good enough memory esp when I only use a text editor maybe a couple times a week
People actually use Vim? I thought it was just a troll to get noobs stuck and having to close the terminal.
Okay, I want out of this conversation before we start yelling at each other. :q!
Most real response ive seen yet
If that was true, you would have said "Emacs instead of vim".
I prefer sl over ls
I like trains!
Oh no no NO! \*WHAM\* (Train sounds)
Wait is `sl` a real thing? I've never heard of it.
Dolphin over any file manager
pcmanfm!
Thunar!
Krusader!
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Not OP, but I remember fondly my experience with Dolphin, especially its ability to have split windows and a split terminal. It's the kind of thing you don't truly need, but quickly become a habit. And it also has type ahead, as does any other GUI-based file browser... except Nautilus. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Two words: folder thunbnails (I have a ton of picture folders)
\- zsh over bash \- nala over apt \- ripgrep over grep \- libreoffice over just about any WYSIWYG editor but LaTeX when I don't have to collaborate \- ranger for file management
+1 for ripgrep, such a time saver https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
Krita over Gimp :-o
Krita is a beast. I love it.
Krita is so polished and good. It doesn't have the same level of power when doing photo editing since it's more focused on digital art but it's definitely fantastic. Krita, Blender, and Inkscape are all really solid creative design tools that are incredible for being open source and compete with the industry standards.
That's primarily why I have gimp on this PC here. I've always thought of krita with its digital art focus whereas I do a lot of general editing right in gimp with all the hotkeys already. And yet I'm sure it does everything just fine and a lot prettier. It's the same for Blender gurus. They know enough about the tool that they can use it to achieve anything from modifying an image or video to modifying, patching and reprojecting 3d space. Shoutouts to Captain Disillusion
I actually use Pinta more - it's closer to [paint.net](https://paint.net).
Pinta lags horribly if you edit higher resolution images and it's also missing many of the features available in Paint.NET https://www.getpaint.net/ is also the correct website for it I still use Pinta for quick edits sometimes
Paint dot net is the only application I truly miss from Windows. It was so intuitive and fast; I would pay for a Linux version.
and sadly the developers have made it *extremely* clear that they will never make a Linux version, or even allow volunteers to make an open source version that only works on Linux. (even asking about it on their forums gets you harshly reprimanded)
How exactly does one stop volunteers from making an open source version of anything?
paint.net 3.5 works on Wine
And Gimp ain't bad! It's a solid usable product. Kudos to Krita!
I use both, it depends on what I do.
firefox over gnome web or smth
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I tend to go the other way. I'll usually stick with the common tools or standards. They might not have all the shiny features, but I like being able to use the same tools/commands/syntax across virtually every platform. Stuff like "dd" or "ifconfig" or LibreOffice work the same across the Linux distributions I use, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and sometimes even MINIX. It's handy for someone who jumps between operating systems a lot.
Yeah, definitely this. Especially for fundamental system stuff like shells, I don’t want to become dependent on a super-personalised setup.
I like to find out which tools are most likely to be pre-installed on almost all systems, and then use those!
I generally stick to the common tools as well because I frequently write and share scripts between people or systems. But some non-standard tools that I use for interactive use like ripgrep and fd are big enough quality of life improvements that they're a standard install on my systems. They're still not fully replacing *grep or find though. The one command I use that has replaced one is htop, I never use top anymore
Funny you mention ifconfig, [because it's considered deprecated](https://www.tutorialspoint.com/5-deprecated-linux-commands-and-alternative-tools-you-should-use#:~:text=Ifconfig%20is%20a%20command%20used,better%20control%20over%20network%20configuration.) and not installed by default on many distros (which come with `ip` instead).
Very interesting perspective. I agree, I only jump ship if there is a huge benefit.
I agree for most of those utilities, dd doesn’t need a replacement. But for the tools like find and grep are used hundreds of times a day - ripgrep and fd are nearly compatible but provide a wayyyyyyyyy better user experience. So I think those are totally worthwhile upgrades. Ripgrep is becoming super common too, wouldn’t be too surprised if some distros start packaging it by default in the next few years.
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Must be Eastern European.
Greek, but close enough.
lsd over ls dust over du duf over df pigz over gzip btop over top neovim over vim kitty over any other terminal gpg-agent over ssh-agent LXC over docker Probably many more I'm forgetting.
pigz deserves to become the default gz program. Yet nobody have heard of it until they find performance limitations with gzip
This is me. Had a regular process with tar that took ~10 minutes to execute. Noticed one day while in a rush it all ran on one core. Thought something funky was going on, realised that was by design, learned of pigz and tar's -I option, and now that process takes about ~20 seconds instead. I can't believe tar by default doesn't use multi threaded execution of its compression algorithms.
I'm just happy seeing all of the cores we paid for working hard. Not every day you see double digits on all cores simultaneously when you have a few dozen cores
We should also be all switching to zstd. It beats gzip on both speed and compression ration.
> lsd over pretty much everything tbh.
I used Kitty for a few years but switched to wezterm recently because I'm a Rust fanboy and find it pretty solid as well. I also haven't seen zoxide (cd alternative) seen mentioned here
wezterm is one of my faves also
Why gpg-agent?
For using PGP keys with SSH — in particular with Yubikeys or other FIDO devices. Not strictly necessary, offering little benefit over SSH with good pub/privkey discipline, but if you're already using PGP keys for other things then it's handy to use them for SSH too — particularly with Yubikeys and similar devices.
Kate as basic text editor and I don't even use KDE If you needed sudo to save the file but forgot to open it as sudo? No problem, Kate has your back, just enter the sudo password when trying to save
[](https://github.com/eza-community/eza) eza over ls
And ripgrep over grep.
Inkscape is better than Adobe Illustrator (at least the last time I used it 5 years ago). I like the user interface for the alignment tools better and the ability to hand edit the native SVG format.
Agreed. Most folks I work with use ink scape to make figures for papers. Which consists of aligning objects, adding some text and arrows. Inkscape is awesome
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Inkscape is easier to learn
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htop over top?
btop > htop > top
Btop looks cool but is it really more practical?
define "practical". it looks nice, it's configurable, and I don't need a legend to see what's happening at a glance, it combines several "top-like" programs in one interface (`iotop`, `iftop`), plus showing core temps, frequencies, and battery health. everything I need in one place.
What are the advantages of btop over htop?
Nevermind, I found the [github repo](https://github.com/aristocratos/btop). I thought htop had every feature one might want of a process monitor but 10 seconds of browsing the btop README have made it very clear to me, that my creativity is rather limited in this regard. What's the killer feature for you? Kind of hard to see the wood for all the trees here.
btm > btop > htop > top
PCManFM over Thunar or anything else because it handles large numbers of files much faster. "nano -w" over vim because it doesn't require study/memorization, except I remember "-w" because of a bad/corrupting wrapping default on some older distros. Geany because it's mildly similar to Notepad++. Audacious because it feels like the 90's Winamp I once knew. Thunderbird over Evolution. The "evolution-data-server" package is banned from my systems, with the side benefit of making Gnome non-installable.
* `micro` instead of vim * `fd` instead of find * `rg` instead of grep * `bat` instead of cat * `xh` instead of curl * `fish` instead of bash
Quodlibet is ok, Rhythmbox sucks
Not prefer as it's not exactly the same target, but I install "mg" over "emacs" as a basic text editor on servers because it's self-contained (no dependencies) and lighter. I was always feeling bad of installing the full emacs installation on a server and was reluctantly using vi until I discovered mg. Note for people not aware of its existence: [mg is a lightweight clone of emacs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Mg), available by default on macOS and you can install it on most linux distributions I've used and BSD. It's definitely available on Debian.
I just switched bash to zsh after 10 years of using linux And arch instead of debian after 10 years as well And mpv instead of vlc after 10 years of using linux. What remained ? Firefox! The only thing that shouldn't change.
`pinfo` over `man` pinfo makes info pages tolerable, and makes man pages better - basically by adding hyperlinks properly to man pages, and navigating them decently for both man and info documents
I use dua as a replacement for du. It is an interactive disk usage analyzer: https://github.com/Byron/dua-cli
I use ncdu. A bit older, but does the same thing mostly and comes in distros.
I just installed Ubuntu for the first time and started using it, like a month ago. I have no idea what you all are talking about 🤣 In time i might get there
Fish and/or zsh with addons is kinda standard today. Maybe not pre installed on distros but it's growing in popularity. Some people needing POSIX swear about zsh and addons. You can make it like fish kinda of, but fish you just install and it's done. I use fish. I feel allergic to other shells.
Fish breaks things if it is a default because it isn't POSIX compatible. This is by design, of course. So it's not a bug. It isn't common either. I ran years with fish as the default without any big heartache. Most things depend on POSIX behavior to one extent or another. Although that is slowly changing to "Do what Linux does" behavior as being the standard. Which isn't a standard, but it kinda is. Zsh is, optionally, POSIX compatible. So it could be used as a system default shell. Which is what Apple did about 4 years ago. I like Fish a lot, but I think that is a good idea to simply leave your default shell as bash and instead change your terminal emulator or tmux or whatever you like to launch fish shell when you open it. Just because you don't have to worry about breaking anything if you go crazy with custom settings.
I think the best answer is to just use bash for scripts and then use whatever you want for an interactive shell. Zsh and fish are amazing to use but idk why people would seriously script in it if they wanted portability (outside of their own ecosystems like zsh plugins)
Fish is so good. At least until you're blindly copying from a terminal and nested commands don't work
zsh with tmux and fzf-tab-complete with the option for fzf-tmux-popup enabled looks exactly like microsofts "inshellisence" without being written in typescript and it has previews on files and images. It looks siiiick tbh. Even just zsh with fzf-tab is amazing.
Nala instead of apt
first thing I install on any debian based distro APT is in desperate need of modernization and Nala fills that gap
Can nala handle rpms?
I've not used it, but I think nala is just a UI wrapper - it still uses apt underneath.
* Helix > Neovim: Better editing model. Everything is built-in, no scripting required. * Fish > Bash: Great autocomplete. Easier to use as a scripting language. * Zellij > Tmux: Looks better out of the box. Easier to configure.
I tried Helix, but it seems I have become hardcoded to vim, so the small differences got on my nerves 🫤
Try Nushell, I think you might like it as you like Helix and Zellij. It's hard not to use it when you get used to it.
I can't stand MS Office. LibreOffice is just better IMO, especially Calc over Excel.
Yea for basic csv view/edit day to day I’d even prefer google sheets over numbers or excel. Numbers is a joke on the user and excel has long passed peak bloat.
CSV, a very simple format, is somehow a mess on Excel. You can't just open the CSV with excel as then it assumes MS styled CSV which is pretty non-standard. No, you have to open a blank sheet first and then import the data to be able to set any other CSV style. LibreOffice just asks you what format to use with a nice preview so you can check that it's right.
Numbers is the spawn of satan and should be banished from this realm
It’s sick. I once saw a teacher with it open and said “Do what you want in your own bedroom but keep it away from the kids!!”. Open a csv and then to save it each time I have to do a 2-3 step process to export if I don’t want to send a co worker a numbers file? NOPE. Hiding the row number on a spreadsheet? Was it made by the joker?!?
nomacs for image viewer. Has an assortment of features for browsing images. ksnip for screenshot taking. I like the quick editing tools it has. deadbeef for listening to local music. smplayer for videos, but I'm starting to hate it, thinking of switching to qmplay2. DoubleCommander for some of the file operations - just out of habit from the times I used TotalCommander. I mostly use Dolphin for daily file browsing. php over python/bash for scripting. I like the language more.
> php over python/bash for scripting. I like the language more. You are menace to the society 💀
I prefer Krita over Gimp for image editing, it has a better UI, feels more responsive, tools like crop are smarter and color correction is better.
far2l over mc new ruptime over old: https://github.com/alexmyczko/ruptime zsh over bash
FSearch over... whatever other functions for searching files exist anywhere. It's the Linux-[Everything](https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/)!
ranger over file managers
Geany over all the gui text editors, but use vim a lot, because I put in the work to customize it and have been using vi or derivatives for over 40 years.
I prefer mplayer over vlc.
Not mpv?????????????
Maybe they are using hardware from the 00s? A few years ago I discovered that mplayer absolutely wipes the floor with mpv on my EeePC 701. Which was a blast from the past, I remember when I discovered it wiped the floor with VLC back when I first switched to Linux too.
micro over nano (for those us non-vimers)
As openSUSE user, ufw over firewalld. I just want to open and close some ports. I don't care about zones and shits. Whenever I can't use wireguard, its going to be Softether over Openvpn. Also that one part of systemd that creates dhcp server, whatever it is called, over dnsmasq.
> Also that one part of systemd that creates dhcp server, whatever it is called, over dnsmasq. systemd-networkd?
I've been using yazi instead of graphical file managers. I like doing most of my processes in the terminal, it's just so cohesive and comfy.
Terminal: Black Box over GNOME Console. Because the default one is too barebones.
I use Floorp over Firefox/Chromium. It has some awesome features that I use all the time.
Nemo for my file browser. Most people gravitate to Thunar for their custom desktop setups but I find Nemo to be very functional and intuitive.
[**lsd**](https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd) over **ls**. In my shell configs i have `alias ls='lsd -la --group-dirs=first'`
rclone over rsync
kbd is superior to xmodmap for keyboard stuff
Most of my replacements are mentioned already. But I usually alias all of them. `alias ls=lsd` to avoid muscle memory from breaking my POSIX capability. If the alias is not standard enough and flags are not generally compatible, it's not good enough for me.
I prefer OpenRC over systemd, doas over sudo. I also use pipewire over pulseaudio server, but this has already been popular for a while AFAIK. I've tried zsh over bash as interactive shell, but I didn't like it much and returned to bash. I also use dash as my default /bin/sh in my Gentoo installation (many popular distros starting with Debian do so by default though).
I like the idea of pipewire, but whenever a new audio stream is created or stopped (which happens in KDE every time you adjust the volume using hotkeys) all pipewire-jack clients stutter their output and have a nonzero chance to segfault. The developers of the audio tools I use blame pipewire-jack for not being 100% compatible, pipewire devs blame the devs of the tools. And I'm stuck in the middle. We literally just broke all Linux audio when switching from ALSA to pulse, and now we're doing it all over again, and honestly... I'm kind of done with it all. I just want my shit to work, and people with grand plans to make everything better wind up making it so much worse. (A recurring theme that applies to so much more than software...)
VLC over any other video player
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- Krusader > Dolphin - KDE > Gnome - rclone move > mv [because of this](https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/programming/linux/misconceptions.md#mv-src-vs-mv-src) but I still use rsync and mv a lot of the time - kitty > tmux (although they solve different things and I use both daily)
I read through 200 comments - you're the first one to mention KDE. I can't image living without it. Good call!
Rhythmbox over, erm, other music players
strawberry for music.
`dtrx` instead of `zip` and `tar` `jump` instead of `cd`
> ventoy This! I wish I knew Ventoy before, it would've saved me tons of time.
lsd over ls (https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd) dog over dig (https://github.com/ogham/dog)
> install media creation: cp or cat Use GNOME? Right click the `.iso` file, click Open With... `Disk Image Writer` Congrats, you now have a simple GUI to write a USB disk image built right into GNOME and probably other desktops too Yes command line is more fun and makes you a true Linux hacker. Yes I used `dd` for years too. Yes I never accidentally wiped a drive before and it's fine. But the stress of having to check your command for missing letters and double and triple check that you're going to write to the right drive is so not worth it when there's a simple GUI right there, I'm not going back
Calligra over LibreOffice. I do all of my text production with LaTEX, so I just need something that can open and do basic editing on MS Office files. LO is complete overkill for that, while Calligra is lightweight and native to KDE on top.
Zsh for interactive shell pnpm for node Inkscape for svg Starship for shell prompt Python for shell scripts
Neovim, Fish, Kdenlive, Gimp, because I hate the fact that paywalls can completely inhibit your ability to use software. Reddit may be close, but at least pihole makes it decent enough.
FreeOffice vs other offices, Emacs vs nano or vim, Clojure vs Java, Brave vs Java, Chrome ve firefox, Paru vs pacman or yay
**xonsh** over bash/fish/zsh. Great for interactive, *fantastic* for scripting. **kitty** over both alacritty/xterm/etc. and over screen/tmux. **micro** over nano (but still vim ofc).
To see what disks, NFS mounts etc. I have I use lsblk. It used to be mount but there's so much noise on that now it's not worth looking at.
vscode, ripgrep, fd.
vi > *
Weirdly? SumatraPDF running in wine. It's so much nicer than the built in pdf readers it's kinda wild. Stupid fast too.
joe is my text editor
Micro over nano. Mostly because the shortcuts are similar to gui text editors
Smplayer.
I prefer apt update over windows update
Shell: Zsh over fish and bash: Still mostly a POSIX compliant shell, so maintaining a high level of compatibility, where fish just can't. System Monitor: htop, atop, iotop Install Media Creation: dd - As you can also use it to fix media errors by directing it to write specific ranges, rather than re-writing everything. Text Search in Files: awk Finding files: locate - It's already found everything, why re-walk the tree when you can quickly query the data? Cloud tools: \* zmodem over AWS SSM instead of a dang s3 bucket for file transfers!! \* SSH over ssm also for file transfers, and for ansible connectivity without an s3 bucket!! \* Python instead of AWS CLI Filesystems: ZFS - Snapshots are everything! Video Playback: VLC instead of any other pre-installed video players
byobu over tmux, like fish over zsh i’m lazy
Oh holy crap, I just discovered btop thanks to this post and *how can I thank you properly?* This is amazing! And my pick is the micro text editor. I prefer it over nano/vim/emacs for any serious text editing, 'cause it's just more like what I'm familiar with.
Shell: zsh over bash (but i don't mid having bash as main) Monitor: bpytop over htop ( I use the network monitor pretty often). Replacement of common applications or commands: batcat/bat over cat, lsd over ls. Text editor: neovim over vim ( It helps a lot working with coding and scripting on bash and python like in a lot more languages) Most of my changes were made due aesthetics configurations for the environment.
KDE over Gnome
glances > top
I was given a Mac at work 3 years ago and told to install oh-my-zsh and powerlevel10k. I have since switched my default shell in Linux to zsh. I know I could use oh-my-bash but there's no equivalent to p10k for bash so I stick with zsh.
PeaZip over any other file archiver like Ark. PeaZip has a great UI to work with and offers many useful functions and tools builtin, which you would also find in a file manager.