Recommended software

Curated list of Libre software by VTLUUG members

Contents

Distributions

See Mirrors for VT Mirrors containing several of these

• Gentoo - Compile everything yourself
• Debian - Popular for servers & desktop use
• Ubuntu - Beginner friendly, based on Debian
• ArchLinux - Easier than Gentoo, Harder than Debian; very popular with club members
• Artoo - Uses btrfs
• Fedora - Bleeding edge, based on EL
• OpenBSD - Free, BSD OS
• CentOS - Community EL
• SUSE_Linux_Enterprise_Desktop - More popular overseas
  • License available via VT Network Software

Shell

• zsh
• Detailed LS_COLORS

Desktop environments

• feh - image viewer + background management

Window managers

• i3
• Herbstluftwm
• Xmonad

Status monitoring (in X)

• i3bar-icons
• Conky
• An ugly mess of Dzen2 and bash scripts

Xorg modifications

• Xrandr - cmd line tool to interact with RandR X extensions
• Arandr - "Another RandR GUI"
• .xinitrc - Tool to start X

Other system utilties

• htop - Monitor your system easily
• ncdu - NCurses Disk Usage

Internet

Web browsing

• Firefox

Mail clients

• mutt
• Thunderbird with Mutterator and Enigmail

Contact management systems

• lbdb

File sharing

• Transmission
• Dtella

Chat

XMPP client

• xmpp-client
• Gibberbot on Android
• BitlBee for IRC integration

IRC clients

• weechat
• Irssi

Relays

• Socat - "Multipurpose relay"

News

• canto - Atom/RSS feed

Productivity

Programming

• Eclipse
• Clang Complete

Text editors

• vim
• Emacs (evil mode)
• nano
  • Cov's nanorc

Terminal stuff

• Screen
  • Jagged's .screenrc - Creates "status bar" on bottom"
• zsh
• tmux

Word processing

• LaTeX

Note-taking

• Keepnote
• BasKet
• vimwiki
• emacs org-mode

To-do list

• taskwarrior

Document viewing

• evince (older versions; newest has gnome-specific optimizations and design features)
• atril

Ebooks

• Calibre

File managers

• ranger

Text Parsing tools

• Sed
• Awk

Group Management

• Zarafa - groupware server
• Z-Push - ActiveSync implementation

Audio

Music players

• mpd
• pianobar (pandora client)
• cmus

MPD clients

• ncmpcpp

Music libraries

Audio recording

• arecord

Audio Routing

• JACK

Gaming on Linux

• Warzone 2100
• Frozen Bubble

Virtualization

• qemu (with KVM)
• virt-manager
• SPICE

Hardware

• Arduino (microcontroller)
• BeagleBoard (single board computer)
• Raspberry Pi (system on chip)
• Odroid (better raspberry pi)

See also

• Harmful