My recommendations of programs for Linux

This is a list of my own recommendations of programs for Linux. I’ve used all of them, I was surprised by their quality and I wanted to list them here so I (and you) can easily find their names. I’m presenting them by categories. I will keep updating this page.

Screenshots tool

Use Flameshot. This is exactly how screenshot tool should look like! You should be able to install it on a Linux Mint or Ubuntu by this command:

sudo apt install flameshot

Web browser

Use The Brave Browser – no ads, no tracking, saving CPU, really nice! I even see much less ads (almost none?) on YouTube and other sites forcing to watch video ads before allowing them to see a video content.

This browser has built-in Torrent client:

Update (28.01.2021): this looks nice but I cannot recommend this feature any more as there is a drawback: a downloaded file is kept in browser’s memory. I was so dissappointed that Brave tab with Torrent client crashed exactly after downloading 2GB of Linux installation image and before having it written on a filesystem! After this I see this built-in client useless.

Installation instructions are here. The relevant part is:

curl -s https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc | sudo apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/brave-browser-release.gpg add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install brave-browser

Diff tool

Use Meld. On Linux Mint or Ubuntu you will find it in the package manager under the name “meld”.

Games

Strategy game

Choose The Battle for Wesnoth! I was shocked that an open source video game can look that good! On Linux Mint or Ubuntu you will find it in the package manager under the name “wesnoth”.

Games for kids

If you have kids these games are something for them. All are open-source and can be installed from packages from standard repositories (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.).

1. Frogatto
2. Frozen Bubble – has 2 players mode
3. OpenTTD
4. Extreme Tux Racer

Commercial games

I can recommend the Steam platform for Linux if you want to play some commercial video games. The nice thing is Linux-supporting games are marked (by the Steam icon…). I’ve successfully played on Linux following games from Steam:

1. Grid Autosport – great car racing video game supporting split screen mode. Sad thing is the game is no longer on sale… How to play it now? :-\
2. Another World (20th Anniversary Edition) – a remastered game from 1991!

CD/DVD burner

I recommend Brasero. Nowadays I burn DVDs very rarely. Thus I’m not good at this and I don’t remember extra hints when I need to burn a disk. Brasero is really simple and intuitive. At least when it comes to write ISO image on a DVD RW. On Linux Mint or Ubuntu you will find it in the package manager under the name “brasero”.

Astronomy

I definitely recommend Celestia – the real-time 3D visualization of space. It will really give you an impression how big the universe is!

Text editor for big files

My experience shows that the SciTE Text Editor is the best program to open and edit big text files. You can install it from the repostiory. The package name is “scite”.

Torrent

The Transmission is the Torrent client that is very simple and it never dissappointed me (as opposed to a Torrent client built in the Brave browser). This program is usually preinstalled on Linux Mint distributions. Anyway it should be available in Ubuntu repositories.