• Amberol is probably one of the biggest hidden gems in GNOME apps. It’s a simple easy music player whose background color changes based on the song’s artwork.

• Parabolic is another GNOME app for downloading videos from youtube using yt-dlp. It’s super easy to use and even allows for multiple concurrent downloads.

• mpv is one of those rare moments where using a proprietary implementation is objectively worse. Must install on any personal computer/mobile device.

Firefox with tree style tabs, with the user CSS that removes tabs and combines bookmarks bar into the title bar.

Away from computer right now but I’ll take a screenshot in an hour or so.

And Emacs. :)

Back at my computer now!

OK, here’s my screenshot:

So, you can see the tree style tabs (TST) in the sidebar area on the left. I’m using the “photon” theme for TST. with another extension for TST called TST Colored Tabs. If you middle-button-click a link, it’s opened in a new tab like usual, but TST also assigns it as a child tab of the page you were viewing. It’s incredibly useful for keeping track of where you are and what you’re doing. Especially in my DevOps job, I have dozens of tabs open and chaos would reign supreme if I used top-of-window tabs like standard. You can see the bookmarks toolbar has been dragged up into the title bar using the customize toolbar window accessed by right clicking on the title bar.

To accomplish this you need to enable a setting in about:config called toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets, set that to true. Then exit Firefox.

Then create a directory called chrome in your profile directory, which on Linux is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/PROFILENAME/, which you can get from the about:profiles page. Inside the chrome directory, you create a file called userChrome.css and add this stuff to it:

#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items {
  opacity: 0;
  pointer-events: none;
}
#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
}

#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
  display: none;
}

/*
    Display the status bar in Firefox Quantum (version 61+)
    permanently at the bottom of the browser window.
    Code below works best for the Dark Firefox theme and is based on:
    https://github.com/MatMoul/firefox-gui-chrome-css/blob/master/chrome/userChrome.css
    This userChrome.css file was last modified on: 28-Jun-2018.
    Tested to work with Firefox 61 on Windows.
    Related blog post: http://www.optimiced.com/en/?p=1727
*/

#browser-bottombox {
  height: 20px;
  border-top: solid 1px #505050;
}

.browserContainer>#statuspanel {
  left: 4px !important;
  bottom: 0px;
  transition-duration: 0s !important;
  transition-delay: 0s !important;
}

.browserContainer>#statuspanel>#statuspanel-inner>#statuspanel-label {
  margin-left: 0px !important;
  border: none !important;
  padding: 0px !important;
  color: #EEE !important;
  background: #333 !important;
}

window[inFullscreen="true"] #browser-bottombox {
  display: none !important;
}

window[inFullscreen="true"] .browserContainer>#statuspanel[type="overLink"] #statuspanel-label {
  display: none !important;
}

/*
  Begin section to move system UI buttons to the same UI bar/box
  as the addressbar
*/

/* Adding empty space for buttons */
#nav-bar {
	margin-right:100px;
}

/* For dragging whole window by mouse*/
#titlebar {
	appearance: none !important;
	height: 0px;
}

/*
  Fix for main menu calling by Alt button
  THIS BREAKS THE UI!!
  */
/* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar {
	margin-top: 10px;
} */

/* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */
#TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container {
	display: block;
	position: absolute;
	top: 5px;
	right: 1px;
}

And there you go! TST has more tips and configuration details in its Github project: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab and https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss

Wine/Proton. It’s a one-stop solution for gaming on Linux (for current games). Lutris is also worth mentioning as a frontend/launcher.

I’m a bit of a fan of Okular. It just does a good job displaying PDFs and is not annoying. The table of content works well if the document has one. There is text select and block select for when you need to get content out of the PDF. You can tell Okular to ignore DRM with a simple checkbox in the settings, for files that “don’t allow” selecting and copying text or “don’t allow” printing.

gparted because it’s the best partitioning manager with a gui that I’ve used

If based on the thing I used most then it has to be Firefox!

If you want something more trivial but personal, openttd - the best game ever. :)

Syncthing is one of the most useful pieces of software I’ve ever used. It just works, and it works well.

Graphical:

• Firefox
• Inkscape
• NewsFlash
• GNOME Podcasts
• Text Pieces

Non-graphical:

• Ansible
• Neovim
• Podman

I’m not gonna mention the basics like Kate. They’re great but nothing new.

My 2 hidden gems that I use on a daily basis are:

• QOwnNotes for markdown note taking. Only competent desktop app I found that comes without any electron bullshit.
• Nyrna to send a game to sleep when I want to take a break or get interrupted. Saves me from booting it up again when I want to pick up where I left off.

The kernel. I literally can’t use my computer without it!

Jokes aside, I’m a big fan of Kolourpaint too.

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Being a flutter dev (and shameless fanboy) I will suggest people try:

appflowy - a FOSS near-clone to Notion.

spotube - FOSS music streaming using the spotify API for metadata and youtube for music playing/downloading. Completely free of ads and works surprisingly well as long as the music you like is mirrored to YouTube.

honourable mentions:

Plex, Nextcloud, Radarr, Sonarr, qbittorrent. Not your usual apps for these kinds of threads but they’re absolutely top-tier for linux home servers.

I like KDE Connect quite a bit. Its a great tool to show of in front of my Windows friends and super usefull for media control.

KDE Connect, Spectacle

Bottles. Best non-steam gaming solution hands down.